My Madness Saved Me: The Madness & Marriage of Virginia Woolf

thomas szasz

In this book Szasz argues that Virginia Woolf was a victim neither of mental illness, nor psychiatry, nor her husband -- three ways she is regularly portrayed. He finds her to be an intelligent and self-assertive person, a moral agent who used mental illness, psychiatry, and her husband to fashion for herself a life of her own choosing. This is not to impute to Virginia Woolf some sort of limitless freedom of the will, nor is it to deny that the cultural and social milieu in which she grew up and lived had a profound impact on her psyche and her sense of the life choices open to her. It is only to remind us of the primacy of Virginia Woolf as an active, goal-directed, moral agent, responsible equally for her madness-badness and her genius-creativity.

Genres psychologymental illness

170 pages, Hardcover

First published January 25,2006

This edition

Format: 170 pages, Hardcover
Published: January 30, 2006 by Routledge
ISBN: 9780765803214
ASIN: 0765803216
Language: English

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Virginia Woolf

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Blo...