Abstract
James Frame was a nineteenth century Scotsman, psychiatric patient, and author. He published two books during his lifetime, the Philosophy of Insanity and the Asylum Diaries, which detail his lived experience as a patient at the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum. This book review-essay engages with recent scholarship on Frame to argue that these recently re-published writings offer more than historical curiosity: they articulate a consistent philosophy of madness and a political theory of care that continues to be relevant for contemporary psychiatry. Frame’s testimony provides a rare first-hand account of the Scottish “no-restraint” movement, prefiguring both anti-psychiatry and patient-centered care, while foregrounding the therapeutic significance of environment, community, and the relational dynamics they foster. At the same time, Frame’s work develops a singular ethics, epistemology, and ontology of madness, insisting that reason and unreason are not opposed but entwined, thus demonstrating that the ontological impropriety of any singular life—what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls its “exemplarity”—is what makes it most common. By analyzing Frame’s synthesis of testimonial combined with practical, philosophical, and political insight, as well as recent historical and clinical scholarship on his works, the review-essay shows how his writings anticipate both psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, as well as ethical critiques of profit-driven health systems. The piece concludes that Frame’s work remains a conceptual resource for rethinking the intertwined epistemological, ethical, and political dimensions of psychiatry in the 21st century.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.