Chapter 5 from Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness by Gail A. Hornstein After two terms of plunging back into teaching, department politics, and the myriad tensions of life as an academic, I return to Britain for the annual meeting of the Hearing Voices Network. My colleagues are busy planning trips to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention; they’d be astounded if I told them I was heading off to a conference of voice hearers. I haven’t yet figured out how to bring together the two worlds I’ve been living in. During the semester, I’m a psychology professor; as soon as school ends, I’m back in the world of HVN. They’re so radically different—in style, assumptions, and structure—that I feel as if I’m traveling a lot farther away than just to England.
Gail Hornstein: Who owns the mind?
Bio: Gail A. Hornstein is Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and author of many articles in professional journals as well as To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World, the biography of pioneering psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Unlike most scholars who study mental illness, she has always been as interested in... Continue Reading →
