First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein

Gail Hornstein is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College. Across a long and influential career, her work has moved between psychology, psychoanalysis, history, qualitative research, and the study of first-person accounts of madness.

She is the author of To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a biography of the pioneering psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for her intensive psychotherapeutic work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses. She is also the author of Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, which explores what first-person narratives, asylum artifacts, patient memoirs, and the Hearing Voices Movementcan teach us about the meanings of madness and the limits of conventional psychiatric explanation.

Dr. Hornstein is also the creator of the Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness in English, which lists more than 1,000 books by people who have written about madness from their own experience. More recently, she has conducted extensive research on Hearing Voices Groups in the United States, examining how these groups work, the different functions they serve, and what members find useful about them.

In 2019, Gail spoke with Mad in America about first-person accounts of madness and global mental health. In this conversation, we will begin with Gail's own intellectual formation and her early interest in psychological approaches that take subjective experience seriously. We will then turn to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and the question of whether first-person accounts should be treated as clinical illustrations or as knowledge in their own right. From there, we will move into Agnes's Jacket, the Hearing Voices Movement, and Gail's recent research on what Hearing Voices Groups make possible for people who hear voices, have visions, or experience other extreme states.