The Center Cannot Hold (book)

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness is a 2007 memoir by USC Gould School of Law professor Elyn Saks. Originally published by Hyperion Books, the book recounts Saks's experiences with schizophrenia, beginning in childhood and continuing through her academic and professional career.

While attending Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, Saks was admitted to Warneford Hospital, where she burnt herself and wandered underground tunnels. After graduating from Oxford in 1981, she attended Yale Law School and was hospitalized at Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) after a psychotic break, where she was later restrained on and off for three weeks. Saks accepted a position at USC following her graduation from Yale, married, and summarized that "[w]hile medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that had helped me find a life worth living".

The Center Cannot Hold was reviewed positively in a number of publications, with reviewers emphasizing the importance of psychoanalysis in Saks's journey, though some found the book slow-paced. After publication, Jerry Weintraub optioned the book, a process that "rents" the rights to a source material to a potential film producer, and Saks won a 2009 MacArthur Fellows Program grant for US$500,000.