Abstract

Joseph Gabel's theoretical synthesis of psychiatry, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and Marxism is examined, partly by evaluating the use he makes of ideas common to the works of Lukacs, Mannheim, Minkowski, Binswanger, Dupreel, Lalo, Meyerson, and others. Gabel's major contention-that false consciousness and schizophrenia are mutually illuminating phenomena at analytic and empirical levels-is considered, principally by hermeneutic analysis of his key concepts: "de-dialecticization," "reified consciousness," "socio-pathological parallelism," and so on. His work is contextualized among competing theories of ideological expressiveness and collectively significant cognitive distortions of reality