That patients may become prophets: A study of madness in Anton Boisen, Sigmund Freud, and Deleuze/Guattari

Abstract

Anton Boisen has long been considered the founder of clinical chaplaincy, but his status as a patient in mental hospitals receives ambivalent reception by Boisen’s institutional heir in the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE). Yet Boisen considered his bouts with mental illness and hospitalization as crucial to his own life trajectory, integrating challenges in his life, and ultimately necessary for his work as a chaplain in 20th century asylums. Moreover, he saw his patients’ own experiences with mental illness as offering them unique insight and opportunity for problem-solving and creativity, even of the same cloth as visionary religious figures. This paper situates Boisen’s biography and research on schizophrenia alongside two other landmark perspectives on schizophrenic life and illness—Sigmund Freud, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s collaborative work. This tripartite conversation uncovers the radical potential of psychiatric chaplaincy, which seems more often aligned with the so-called “anti-psychiatry” movement, than with the conventions of psychoanalysis and its inheritors in contemporary psychiatric practice. By situating Boisen in the lineage of anti-psychiatry, his discipline of chaplaincy comes to offer an enduring critique of the treatment of psychosis via a unique sensitivity to the proximity of religious experience and madness.