Blurb: FOUNDATIONS: Rebuilding After Mental Breakdown Roberts has explored the practice and philosophy of the discovery of self and narrative production of identity that reflect a ritual practice and process of recovery of a normal human being. He reviews the competing understandings of disorder and inadequacy and the dominant local understandings of well-being and mental illnesses. and the forces resisting these concepts. He explores the process embedded in the performance of recovery that makes manifest a powerful example of 'strategy, program and technology of power' to heal. He portrays how this process determines the trajectory of recovery and develops the concepts embedded in the theories and tenets of wisdom distilled from the experience over 50 years. He has sought a hermeneutic of a ritual which enacts healing in a process of integration of external identities and reincorporation of an internal self in a rite-of-passage, from break-down to treatment and from break-through to recovery and break-out to thriving. Recovery that leads to thriving is understood as living at ease in internal personal and external social relationships that enables a meaningful life to blossom