Merely a Madness?
Probing the Boundaries
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Lisa Howard
Dr Ken Monteith
Advisory Board
James Arvanitakis
Simon Bacon
Kasia Bronk
Jo Chipperfield
Ann-Marie Cook
Phil Fitzsimmons
Peter Mario Kreuter
Mira Crouch
Stephen Morris
John Parry
Karl Spracklen
Peter Twohig
S Ram Vemuri
Kenneth Wilson
A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/
The Making Sense of Hub
‘Madness’
2012
Merely a Madness?
Defining, Treating and Celebrating
the Unreasonable
Edited by
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2012
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-101-3
First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2012. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
Part I
Rationalising Madness
Madness and Civilisation: The Paradox of a False Dichotomy
Noëlle Vahanian
Part II
ix
3
Madness as a Philosophical Problem in Hegel
S. J. McGrath
19
Can We Understand Madness Without Rationalising It? Sense,
Common-Sense and Nonsense in Psychoanalytic Explanation
Johnathan Sunley
35
Institutionalising Madness
The Irony of E.A. Poe’s Lunatick Asylum
Daniela Fargione
51
Madness and Punishment during Apartheid: Insane, Political
and Common-Law Prisoners in the Western Cape
Natacha Filippi
73
Part III Narrating Madness
‘Their Lives A Storm Whereon They Ride’: The Affective
Disorders, Writing and the Case for Neurodiversity Studies
Stephanie Stone Horton
97
An Unsound Mind in an Unsound Body: Physical Manifestations
of Mental Distress in Women’s Madness Narratives
Katarzyna Szmigiero
119
When Love and Madness Converge: A Cross-Cultural Analysis
of Lovesickness
Nicoletta Fazio
145
Part IV
Performing Madness
Madness: An Escape or a Dead End?
Iwona Bojarska
171
Saving the Dreams from the Nightmare, the Light from the
Shadows: Titzina’s and Marta Carrasco’s Theatrical
Lessons on Madness
Núria Casado-Gual
185
‘Because the Drummed Rhythm Was Seven…’
Richard McGregor
205
Acknowledgments
Daniela Fargione wishes to thank her daughter, Giulia, for her
cheerful and complicit attitude while putting up with her mother’s
artistic and literary madness.
Special thanks to Rob Fisher, Daniel Riha and Gonzalo Araoz for
offering us the opportunity to critically discuss the thorny issues
included in this volume.
Introduction
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
The 3rd Global Conference on Madness was held in Oxford in September 2010.
It brought together some thirty people – among them artists, writers, academics,
students and survivors/consumers of mental health services – from eight countries,
each with their own perspective on this fascinating if also troubling human
experience. Over several days they discussed what it has meant to be mad at
different times and in different cultures. What kind of category is this anyway? Are
those who suffer from ‘madness’ in some sense ill or simply distressed? Are they
cursed or inspired? Dangerous or in danger? And what can they expect from the
rest of society? Is it treatment or understanding they need? Cure or care?
In terms of the search for answers to these questions, 2013 will be a significant
year. Almost certainly the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will add to an already long
list of supposedly abnormal behaviour patterns that count as clinical conditions.
Prior to publication of the first version of this manual in the 1950s, it had always
been recognised that there was more than one way to be mad. But now we are told
that there are in fact several hundred discrete syndromes, each with its own
symptom check-list and presumed underlying brain pathology. Excessive appetite
or shyness or sadness: nowadays any of these might be regarded as a medical
matter and diagnosed accordingly.
One word that does not appear in the pages of the DSM or in modern mental
health discourse more broadly is madness. Today this tends to be seen as an
unscientific, backward-looking term. Maybe ‘madness’ does have something of a
bad reputation. But does that justify trying to eliminate it from our lexicons
entirely? Is that not equivalent to pretending that we can easily and painlessly
remove it from our psyches using the latest anti-depressant or other medication?
Certainly Shakespeare did not run away from the term. Madness is a major
theme in his plays. The title of this book is drawn from one of them, from a scene
in As You Like It in which the ‘love-shaked’ Orlando has the nature of his
condition explained to him by Rosalind:
Love is merely a madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark
house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not
so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the
whippers are in love too. 1
The point being made is that to a greater or lesser extent we all take leave of
our senses when we fall in love. And since at one stage or another during our lives
we all fall in love, we all know what it is to take leave of our senses. In other
words, you do not have to be Lady Macbeth or King Lear to know what madness
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Introduction
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is. By the same token, experiencing some degree of madness does not make you a
character in Shakespeare. It is a state of mind that is both extraordinary and
everyday.
The chapters in Merely a Madness? Defining, Treating and Celebrating the
Unreasonable are grouped in four sections. These correspond to some of the ways
– there are many others – in which madness has historically pressed itself on
society’s attention: as a strange, threatening phenomenon that requires explanation
by priests or philosophers in order for us to feel remotely comfortable with it; as a
sickness in need either of treatment or restraint (or both); as a source of creativity –
as well as an obstacle to it; and as a kind of encounter that can be hard to put into
words yet is well-suited to representation on stage or in music. In total there are
eleven chapters. These are based on papers presented at the 2010 conference that
were subsequently revised and extended by their authors, drawing on contributions
from other participants. This is in-keeping with the aims and ethos of InterDisciplinary.Net, under whose auspices the conference series on madness is
organised and this volume is published.
Philosophers have been trying to make sense of madness since the time of
Plato. Their perspectives are the focus of the first section of this book, titled
‘Rationalising Madness’. Plato himself exalted our human capacity for reason. But
the surging desires and emotions that sometimes endanger it he regarded as no less
human. That is why he also welcomed the intervention of the divine in the form of
Eros: to mediate between our two sides as well as to lead us in the direction of the
transcendent.
In her contribution to this section, Noelle Vahanian argues that Descartes
pushed philosophy towards becoming much clearer about madness. But he did so
at a price. In place of the complexity and subtlety of pre-modern thinking about
human nature, he put forward a series of polarities – between mind and matter, soul
and body, reason and unreason. These have remained extremely influential up to
our own day, even if we would now rather speak about ‘mental disorders’ (which,
paradoxically, are held to be primarily biological in origin) than madness. There is
a false dichotomy at work here, says Vahanian. And she approvingly cites
Erasmus, the humanist who became one of the leading figures of the Reformation
due to his unsparing criticism of the church, yet who still celebrated the folly of
faith as being that much more sensible than the folly of reason alone.
S. J. McGrath explores post-Enlightenment theorising about madness. Hegel
had first-hand experience of this subject. His sister was diagnosed with hysteria
and had to be cared for by the German philosopher and his wife. In his view,
madness and reason were not opposites. He understood madness rather as reason
derailed – or possibly diverted. For according to Hegel, madness is a stage through
which the mind (the ‘feeling soul’ as he terms it) necessarily passes on its way to
becoming capable of distinguishing the inner world from the outer. Some people
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
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remain stuck in this stage, however, and do not acquire a sense of reality as others
do. ‘For Hegel’, writes McGrath, ‘the insane is the cousin of the normal mind’.
McGrath sees Hegel’s theories of madness as anticipating those of Freud on a
number of key points. Freud considered himself a scientist rather than a
philosopher. And yet as Johnathan Sunley observes in the final chapter in this
section, the contribution made by psychoanalysis to our understanding of fullblown delusions as well as more manageable neuroses is also a philosophical one.
Psychopathology is all around us, Freud claimed. He found evidence of it in
dreams, jokes and everyday actions for which on one level we seem to have a
perfectly good reason. The issue is not that humans – or rather some humans – lack
reason. On this Freud agreed with Plato. What makes us all fundamentally
irrational creatures, the founder of the ‘talking cure’ argued, is the overwhelming
need we have to repeat in the present emotional conflicts from our pasts. It is as
though we want to remind ourselves who we are – when what we actually do is
express who we were. No wonder we are inclined to feel at odds with ourselves.
The view taken throughout much of history, nonetheless, has been that those
suffering from one form or another of madness need to be kept apart from the rest
of us. Whether this has been for their benefit or ours’ is a question that surfaces
repeatedly in the second section of this volume, ‘Institutionalising Madness’.
This begins with Daniela Fargione’s analysis of one of the least well-known of
Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories ‘The System of Dr Tarr and Prof Fether’. Published
in 1845, this satirical tale follows the story of an unnamed narrator who visits a
madhouse in the south of France. His insistence on meeting the inventor of a
radical new method used to treat mental disturbances (here called ‘the system of
soothing’ and echoing the celebrated ‘moral treatment’ pioneered in postrevolutionary France by Philippe Pinel) leads him to several ‘distractions’. While
reflecting the desire of his contemporaries for more humane care for the insane,
Poe’s short story is scathingly ironical in the view it takes of the practice of
compulsory institutionalisation that was fast becoming the norm both in America
and Europe. After questioning the supposed unproductiveness of the ‘lunatick,’
Fargione shows how Poe’s irony is also directed against the hypocritical
philanthropic intentions of an inadequate government.
With the agreement of the South African department of correctional services,
and thanks also to the generous collaboration of (mostly) anonymous interviewees,
Natacha Filippi was able to conduct groundbreaking research in the archives of
Pollsmoor prison and Valkenberg mental hospital. Her chapter concentrates on a
crucial moment in the history of South African apartheid, from the 1960s to the
democratic transition, and explores how incarceration and disciplinary actions
represented powerful tools in the imposition of a circumscribed subjectivity on
alleged inferior populations. Categories of criminal, political and mental deviance
were deliberately conflated. Filippi concludes that the criminalisation and
punishment of Blacks and Coloureds during these years was legitimised through
xii
Introduction
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the support these policies received from the country’s psychiatric establishment.
She also shows how difficult it has been for post-apartheid governments in South
Africa to escape the burden of these policies as they have attempted to forge a
completely new approach to mental health.
In most parts of the Western world, the era labelled by Michel Foucault (rightly
or wrongly) as the ‘great confinement’ began coming to an end in the 1960s. The
asylum soon became a thing of the past. The last half-century has witnessed a
comparable revolution in the way mental disorders are defined and diagnosed. At
least within the medical profession, nowadays these tend to be viewed as
organically-based conditions similar in most important respects to the diseases or
accidents that affect our bodies. For both types of illness, physical and
psychological, pharmaceutical interventions are usually the preferred means of
treatment.
Two of the chapters in the book’s third section, ‘Narrating Madness’, offer
opposing perspectives on these developments. For Stephanie Stone Horton, the
symptoms of clinical depression or bipolar disorder are as disruptive and
devastating as they always have been. She writes about her own experiences as a
journalist, sitting in front of a computer-screen for hour after hour, waiting for a
single word to emerge through the storm in her brain circuitry. But now that we
have a better understanding of the causes of these conditions, Horton proposes, we
should reclaim our agency and celebrate the extraordinary company – famed poets,
artists and composers throughout the ages – in which our faulty genes or misfiring
neurotransmitters put us. In the words of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan:
‘Not everyone who would be mad, could’.
Katarzyna Szmigiero is not so sure. In her chapter, she returns to the problems
created by Descartes’s mind/body split. The authors of such classic examples of
the ‘misery memoir’ genre as Prozac Nation or Wasted are clearly no strangers to
suffering. But is the source of their distress their minds or their bodies? Szmigiero
observes that in nearly all cases the unhappiness of these female writers is
expressed in the relationship they have with their appearance, with food or with
sex. Her conclusion is as follows: ‘Listening to one’s body with respect and
heeding its needs for rest, affectionate care, nourishment and intimacy, may be an
effective tool in tackling mental distress’. The problem is that contemporary
psychiatry has only updated the terms of Cartesian dualism: our anguish is still
located in our heads – if no longer in our minds then in our brains.
What of the heart? As we have seen, for Shakespeare there was nothing madder
than love. But as Rosalind says, ‘the lunacy is so ordinary’. That is why, in
Elizabethan England, even if you found yourself as ‘love-shaked’ as Orlando, you
did not expect to be ‘punished and cured’ like most madmen. Not all cultures have
been either so indulgent or lenient, however. In the third chapter in this section,
Nicoletta Fazio describes how in the medical systems of the ancient world
‘lovesickness’ was thought to rival melancholy and mania as a form of illness. To
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
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some extent this view was carried over into Christianity. Fazio finds support for
her hypothesis in the text (and associated imagery from the period) of the
Renaissance epic Orlando furioso. Its eponymous hero is driven quite literally mad
by the force of his unrequited love. The end he comes to is in many respects a
shameful one and a dire warning to anyone tempted to copy his example. A similar
fate might have been expected to befall Majnun, who was an equally popular and
emblematic character in Islamic literary culture at about the same time. He too falls
head over heels in love with an unobtainable woman. Yet he manages to preserve
his mind. During these centuries, Fazio argues, Muslim philosophers and
physicians were just as concerned by the malady of ‘lovesickness’ as their
Christian counterparts. But within some of the more mystical strains of Islam, even
passionate love was perceived as having a liberating dimension to it – and this is
what saves Majnun.
The fourth and last section, ‘Performing Madness,’ is made up of three chapters
that explore possible ways of representing psychological distress through various
art forms: literature, dance, drama and music. Iwona Bojarska’s chapter
concentrates on Alan Ayckbourn’s Wildest Dreams, a play in which a group of
people choose to escape from their everyday lives by entering into a role-playing
game that gives them new identities. The author shows how the artificial world
they withdraw into transforms itself: from a protective refuge where they face their
personal inadequacies into a veritable madhouse. Probing the liminal space
between sanity and insanity, Bojarska demonstrates the ‘healthy’ side of mental
illness. But she also warns of the precariousness of this condition and of the risks
involved in slipping beyond a safe limit.
The second chapter in this section discusses the representation of madness in
two avant-garde theatrical experiments from Spain. Núria Casado-Gual argues that
choreographer and dancer Marta Carrasco and the theatre company Titzina have
through their performances helped audiences arrive at a broader and less
judgmental understanding of mental illness. In some ways madness is completely
unsuitable to being staged. ‘There is nothing really comical or lyrical in being mad’
says the author. But Casado-Gual also suggests that these two artistic
representations enable us to gain a new vision of madness through an analysis of
our ever-changing personalities as reflections of an unstable historical moment and
fluid cultural contexts.
The last chapter of this section and of the book analyses German composer
Wolfgang Rihm’s work Tutuguri, a Poème dansé inspired by Antonin Artaud’s
poem of the same name that was written while he was incarcerated in an asylum at
Rodez. Richard McGregor argues that Rihm’s encounter with this poem marked a
turning-point in his stylistic development. After showing the relation between the
imaginary and the symbolic in Artaud’s work, the author pinpoints Rihm’s
difficulties in translating this act of spontaneous creation into a notated musical
language.
xiv
Introduction
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Working on these chapters and revisiting the themes and debates of this
conference, what strikes us as editors is that the aesthetic difficulty faced by Rihm
could be said to be similar to the challenge faced by anyone who loses their reason.
It is not that they no longer have anything meaningful to say. That is clearly not the
case. The question is whether they are still able to express themselves in a
‘language’ (of whatever kind) that others can hear. For that to be possible, of
course, those they communicate with will need to have a good ear. Otherwise they
may miss what is being said. And there is perhaps nothing more likely to leave one
tone-deaf in this regard than the loud clashing between ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’
which is the usual background noise to discussions of madness.
Is that distinction ultimately a sustainable or profitable one? We are grateful to
our authors – as well as to all participants in the 3rd Global Conference on Madness
– for bringing this question into such clear focus, and we hope that readers of this
book will be helped by it to arrive at their own conclusions. In her chapter,
Stephanie Stone Horton presents a quotation from Foucault in which the French
philosopher nimbly overturns the terms of this divide: ‘I was mad enough to study
reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness.’ 2 For our part we would like to
end this introduction with an aphorism from Nietzsche that in our opinion goes
right to the heart of the matter: ‘There is always some madness in love; but also
some reason in madness.’ 3
Notes
1
W Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III, Scene II, in The Portable Shakespeare
(Viking Portable Library), Penguin Books, New York, London, Victoria, Toronto,
Auckland, 1977, p. 515.
2
M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. R. Howard, Vintage Books, New York, 1988, p. 30.
3
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. T.
Common, 7 November 2008, Viewed 1 October 2012. <http://gutenberg.org/files/
1998/1998-h/1998-h.html>.
Bibliography
Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason. Trans. R. Howard. Vintage Books, New York, 1988.
Nietzsche, F., Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. T.
Common. 7 November 2008. Viewed 1 October 2012. <http://gutenberg.org/
files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.html>.
Daniela Fargione and Johnathan Sunley
xv
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Shakespeare, W., As You Like It. Act III, Scene II. The Portable Shakespeare.
(Viking Portable Library). Penguin Books, New York, London, Victoria, Toronto,
Auckland, 1977.