Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology explores the transformation of psychopathologies into cultural phenomena in the wake of the transition from an epistemological to an ontological approach to psychopathology. The author argues that the ontological approach to psychopathology opens up a number of aporias and promotes a therapeutic model of psychopathology with its own ideological function. The major points in this intellectual history considered by the author include: the development of a dynamic model of the self at the fin de siècle; the role of photography and film in the construction of psychopathology; the influence of psychoanalysis on the transition from static, universalizing psychiatric paradigms, which constructed madness in terms of fixed states, to increasingly dynamic styles of psychiatry foregrounding the socially constructed nature of madness; the decline of psychoanalysis; and the 'aestheticization' of madness into a trope describing the conditions of knowledge in postmodernity, as evidenced by the transformation of multiple personality and paranoia into cultural and aesthetic phenomena. Book jacket.