ABSTRACT
Historians of madness such as Roy Porter, Andrew Scull, Petteri Pietikainen, and now Greg Eghigian are our 'resurrection men', snatching the corpse of an archaic term for new kinds of scholarly dissection. The mad lives of Jesus of Nazareth, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and Anton Boisen, the founder of the influential clinical pastoral education movement in the United States, are not easily problematized. These stories remind that both spontaneous and cultivated experiences of an extraordinary nature may or may not translate well into medical discourse, but as creatures of our historical era we reflexively reach for the medical dictionary to find analogues like psychosis or schizophrenia. Psychosis is our era's medical term that comes closest to the ancient sense of madness as spectacular involuntary affliction, madness as curse. First dementia praecox, then schizophrenia, served as synonyms for psychosis in the twentieth century.
