Richard Saville-Smith

I specialise in the intersection of madness, psychiatry and religious experience from a philosophical perspective. In Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies (published by Bloomsbury on March 9th 2023) I set out two discourses on extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness: the pathologizing discourse of psychiatry in the DSM series and the non-pathological discourse of 20th century humanities' scholars. By critically re-reading this fractured discourse (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) I identify the need for language with which to address non-pathological experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which are constructed as religious but sufficiently extreme to be of interest to psychiatry - I propose Acute Religious Experiences.

Ann Taves says: ‘This is a major, much needed intervention in the study of (religious) experiences. It offers a brilliant critique of the works of major 20th-century theorists, most of whom went to great lengths to distance religious and psychopathological experiences, and a fascinating new approach to visions, voices and possession from the perspective of mad studies.’ The first 35 pages are here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/63e26f6cee3588000179ff12

I foolishly or wisely operated a non-publication strategy, prior to receiving my PhD from the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, but many of my conference papers are on my Academia.edu page (see website). Thanks!