Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies

by Richard Saville-Smith
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹11,444.00
Original price ₹13,733.00
Original price ₹13,733.00
Original price ₹13,733.00
(-17%)
₹11,444.00
Current price ₹11,444.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9781350272910
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publisher Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 288
  • Original Price: GBP 90.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 454 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): General and Psychiatry / General

This book engages the problem of how, in the 21st century, we are to speak about experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which occur on a transhistorical and transcultural basis. Critical re-readings of seminal texts show how 20th-century theoreticians in the humanities sought to erase madness from their irrational subjects. This propensity to sanitize madness in the study of religions was mirrored by the instinct of psychiatrists to degrade religious experiences by reducing mad consciousness to psychosis or dissociation. Richard Saville-Smith introduces explanatory pluralism as a way of recognizing these disciplinary biases and mad studies as a way of negotiating this understanding. The disproportionate significance of madness in shaping the fabric of the human story can then be recovered from both erasure and dismissal to be given the recognition previously denied - as acute religious experiences.

Acute Religious Experiences divides into three sections, beginning with re-readings of William James's pathological programme, Rudolf Otto's numinous, T. K. Oesterreich's possession, Mircea Eliade's shamanism, Walter Stace's mysticism, Walter Pahnke's psychedelic experience, and Abraham Maslow's peak experiences. These ideas are shown to constitute the beginnings of a fractured discourse on the irrational. In part two, contemporary psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and Foucault's History of Madness are re-read to reposition madness as not necessarily pathological. This opens the way for the identification of acute religious experiences as a new holistic and post-colonial approach through which religious data can be organized and addressed on a comparative basis. In part three, The Gospel of Mark is re-read as a case study to demonstrate the novel insights which flow from the identification of acute religious experiences.

Richard Saville-Smith draws on his own experiences of madness and his PhD from the School of Divinity at The University of Edinburgh to elucidate his research.

Allocco, Amy: - Amy Allocco is a professor of religious studies at Elon University, USA.

Saville-Smith, Richard: - Richard Saville-Smith is an independent scholar based in the UK.

Schmidt, Bettina E.: - Bettina E. Schmidt is Professor in the Study of Religions and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Theology, Religious Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.

Sutcliffe, Steven J.: - Steven J. Sutcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the co-editor (with Carole Cusack) of The Problem of Invented Religions (2016) and (with Ingvild Gilhus) of New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2014) and is the author of Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003).

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us