Vieda Skultans – författare

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.

Originally published in 1974 Intimacy and Ritual is a sympathetic study of spiritualist activities and their relation to the practitioners’ secular lives. The book, in particular, looks at the therapeutic function of spiritualism. Based on the author’s fieldwork as a ‘participant observer’ among spiritualists in a South Wales town, the research covers spiritualists services and meetings as well as interviews with spiritualists in their own homes. The book gives an accurate account of spiritualist doctrines and beliefs about the spirit world. The book postulates that spirit possession always relates to illness and shows how this is often the physical counterpart of social malaise. Throughout the study, spiritualism is seen in terms of the coping techniques and the rewards which it offers its members. The book shows that spiritualism is more highly regarded as a problem-solving source than the formal care-giving organizations, such as psychiatrist hospitals and the social work agencies. Healing activities are interpreted as a symbolic enactment of male and female roles ideally conceived, and spiritualist messages offer symbols and explanations of illness and misfortune.

Originally published in 1974 Intimacy and Ritual is a sympathetic study of spiritualist activities and their relation to the practitioners’ secular lives. The book, in particular, looks at the therapeutic function of spiritualism. Based on the author’s fieldwork as a ‘participant observer’ among spiritualists in a South Wales town, the research covers spiritualists services and meetings as well as interviews with spiritualists in their own homes. The book gives an accurate account of spiritualist doctrines and beliefs about the spirit world. The book postulates that spirit possession always relates to illness and shows how this is often the physical counterpart of social malaise. Throughout the study, spiritualism is seen in terms of the coping techniques and the rewards which it offers its members. The book shows that spiritualism is more highly regarded as a problem-solving source than the formal care-giving organizations, such as psychiatrist hospitals and the social work agencies. Healing activities are interpreted as a symbolic enactment of male and female roles ideally conceived, and spiritualist messages offer symbols and explanations of illness and misfortune.

In this book, originally published in 1979 and a sequel to Madness and Morals https://www.routledge.com/Madness-and-Morals-Ideas-on-Insanity-in-the-Nineteenth-Century/Skultans/p/book/9781032254975, Vieda Skultans presents an analysis of psychiatric ideas and practices, based on an examination of original texts on insanity. Two contrasting themes are emphasized: first, the Aristotelian idea which links madness to genius and, second, the view, derived from abnormal pathology, which sees madness as a defect of balance or imperfect harmony.

The book investigates the relationship between social categories and diagnostic categories in psychiatry. It explores the view that the theory and practice of psychiatry are inevitably permeated with social values, pointing out that changes in psychiatric ideas and practices are related, at least partly, to changing values within society as a whole. Particular concepts of insanity are chosen for closer inspection, such as the Elizabethan idea of melancholy, eighteenth-century notions of the spleen and vapours, and the nineteenth-century diagnosis of masturbational insanity. The greater vulnerability of women to psychiatric disorder is explored, and the book concludes with an account of the growth of the asylum movement.

This book has been written to help health professionals and social scientists to use narrative more effectively in their everyday work and writing.

The book is split into three, comprehensive sections; Narratives, Counter-narratives and Meta-narratives.