Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in political and cultural debates and explains today's culture of madness in the United States in the context of the Cold War. The Cold War gives birth to the paranoid style and pronounces itself mad. The book summarizes the evolution of cultural pathology throughout the Cold War, and then focuses on developments after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It discusses polemical attacks contributed to a self-help psychology that provided non-medical alternatives, and sometimes direct contestation. The book offers interpretations of Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil and Marmon Silko's Ceremony to situate multiple personality disorder (MPD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the historical account. It emphasizes the importance of postwar liberalism and the countercultural movements that extend from the 1950s to the 1970s.