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Julian Rappaport argues that our role as social scientists is to use our tools to assist others in their efforts to “turn tales of terror to tales of joy.” He suggests that the application of a narrative approach to research is consistent with this goal, because it spans levels of analysis and has the capacity to promote both personal and social change. Narrative research allows us to explore individuals' own stories about their lives and contributes to description and analysis of the settings and cultural narratives that assist individuals in making meaning of their experiences. This chapter draws on work from a long-term collaboration with Schizophrenics Anonymous (SA), a mutual-help organization for individuals experiencing a schizophrenia-related illness, as an example of how a narrative approach can help us to understand and facilitate the experience of recovery from serious mental illness.

This chapter looks at the association between music and schizophrenia, interrogating the phenomenon of musical hallucinations (‘hearing’ music when there is no music to be heard); investigating links between schizophrenia and musical creativity; and finally outlining how music and music therapy in particular might assist people with schizophrenia and help them deal more effectively with their psychotic symptoms and enhance their socialization. It begins with a brief description of the nature of schizophrenia.

This chapter explores the tension span occupied by the schizophrenic boy in Melanie Klein’s case of Dick and Lord Byron’s Faustian drama Manfred. In her 1930 chapter “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” Klein explores a case of childhood schizophrenia, the treatability of which as arrested development is the very measure, measured in reverse, of treatment difficulties encountered with young adult schizophrenics who must fill in the blank of held-back development with the double whammy of regression. Klein opens with the all- importance of sadism in early mental development and its transmutation through symbolism. She treats Dick successfully because his so-called psychotic traits are, in the real time of development, inhibitions that can be overcome. In Manfred, Byron wrests Faustian striving from Christian pact psychology and sends his Faust figure through a series of sessions that leads through mourning to a cure.