Richard Saville-Smith on Madness and Religiosity

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Richard Saville-Smith, Ph.D., is from the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, where he writes about the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. He lives on the island of Skye, Scotland. He wrote Acute Religious Experiences, published by Bloomsbury (2023).

Myers: Your work revolves around the idea that madness can serve a purpose that is nonclinical, but rather a way of getting deeper into life fulfillment in the form of mystical or brief religious experiences. How does this contrast with traditional notions in the field of psychiatry?

Saville-Smith: The psychiatric instinct is to pathologize extraordinary, anomalous, and extreme states of consciousness. But in the humanities, scholars have long recognized the positive contributions of such behaviors in shamanism and spirit possession and recognized them within the texts of the world's holy books, from Isaiah to Arjuna. Acute Religious Experiences identifies these two traditions of interpretation and addresses the challenges they provide in the 21st century.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the psychologist William James introduces his pathological program, which concedes the physiological issues to the medical materialists but emphasizes the remarkable contributions (the fruit) of the St Paul’s and St Theresa’s, arguing these cannot be reduced to pathological mental illnesses. James is followed by the theologian Rudolf Otto whose The Idea of the Holy (1917) advanced the idea of the numinous. This term has been diluted today, but for Otto, the numinous was awesome, overwhelming, dreadful.

T.K. Oesterrech’s contribution was the magisterial Possession: Demoniacal and Other (1921), which offered a psychological survey of possession in human experience across all time. His global survey emphasizes the role of cultural context and plasticity (not a term he uses) in the contextual construction and manifestation of possession practices.

Mircea Eliade’s contribution, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) opened the eyes of the West to the contribution of altered mental states in indigenous religions, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. By contrast, Walter Stace’s Philosophy of Mysticism (1960) constructs an essentialized Western mysticism by, ironically, drawing from his understanding of Hindu and Buddhist concepts of enlightenment. Stace’s work provided the theoretical basis for Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment, the guts of his Ph.D. thesis Drugs and Mysticism (1963) at Harvard.

Pahnke sought to experimentally replicate the (putative) psychedelic practice of archaic indigenous cultures, but with Protestant, seminarians to achieve mystical states of consciousness. In spite of the hype, I show why his experiment failed.

Finally, the idea of peak experiences was introduced by psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1964. I show how Maslow gradually backs down from the power of this idea as a motif of extraordinary-anomalous-extreme states of consciousness.

These 20th-century theorists provide the foundations for discourse because each of the authors (they are all professors apart from Pahnke) had read some or all of the others. They understand themselves as tackling and naming a human phenomenon. But their works are often constrained by cultural contexts, which obscure the universal capacity for some humans to experience such states of consciousness—possession and mysticism are rarely addressed in the same texts.

It is a matter of fascination that these authors resolutely defend their subjects from the pathologizing instinct of psychiatry. Indeed, in the case of Eliade and Stace, this extends to perversely discarding evidence in order to sanitize their subjects—to deny the specter of madness.

Myers: What is your background in academia and what drew your curiosity to this topic?

Saville-Smith: I come to this material from a mad studies perspective, which is tolerant of the idea that mad is not necessarily bad. As a mad person myself, currently detained in a psychiatric facility, I appreciate this is a marginal perspective, in the same way, that feminism, critical race theory, and LGBQT+ were once marginal positions.

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There is hope for change and this work contributes to that change. What I do by rereading the theorists of the 20th century is to identify the social pressure sanism brought to bear in a generation of rich white educated scholarship for which mental disorder was and remains a source of embarrassment and invalidation, except for William James.

This discourse could readily have been extended, but it seemed important to grasp some of the key concepts: numinous, possession, shamanism, mysticism, psychedelics, and peak experiences, which are contemporaneously deployed without a deep understanding of their origin and the way they have been shaped to sanitize them from experiences of culturally accommodated madness.

Myers: How do you think this new framework for viewing madness can help enrich the wide range of human experiences in and out of psychiatric care?

Saville-Smith: With the discourse of the humanities, their instinct to deny madness in place, and the possibility that psychiatry can accommodate alternative explanations established, I propose the novel concept of acute religious experiences.

These are states of consciousness that have the phenomenology of madness but can be culturally constructed as positive, rather than pathological, within the histories of religions: yes the numinous, yes the possessed, yes the shaman, perhaps the state of enlightenment, psychedelics and peak experiences, but certainly the main characters of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

From Abraham sacrificing Isaac to Moses in front of the burning bush, through many of the prophets, including Jesus and Mohammed, it is possible to identify acute religious experiences which were usually life-changing transformative events. I show this in a final chapter-length case study on Jesus, identifying the baptism and the transfiguration as two such instances.

The result of this work is a recovery of the role of madness in religious, and therefore human history. This is a celebration of madness that faces the shame of mental illness and challenges the scholarly willingness to sanitize madness. By proposing the language of acute religious experiences, I offer a new way to see and understand the positive contribution of madness in the history of our human story.