ABSTRACT
The meanings of madness are thus manifold, equivocal, and hard to interpret…. But can we ever hear the mad themselves speaking—indeed communicating their thoughts down the ages? … With the insane, we are seeing quite distinctive power relations. Even so, it is important to get inside the heads of the mad: For one thing, their thought-worlds throw down a challenge, being at once so alien and yet so uncannily familiar, like surrealist parodies of normality.
