The author, a professional psychiatrist who followed the course of traditional psychotherapy, becomes perhaps the most rebellious figure in modern English psychology. He not only calls for “learning from a schizophrenic,” who in his understanding becomes a “conductor” into other states of consciousness that are closed to the “everyday person,” but also organizes one of the world’s first “alternative clinics” for psychotic patients, where he achieves serious success in their cure. In “The Shattered Self” he makes an attempt not just to express his views on psychiatry, but to let the reader feel the inner world of a schizophrenic, paradoxical and logical at the same time. (abstract from the page )