ABSTRACT
The process of divesting 'madness' from both meaning and mysteriousness started sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century. The persistence of a cultural configurator could explain the secular reappearance of certain forms of madness without needing to posit a biological invariant. This chapter utilizes a version of historical epistemology according to which concepts obtain their meaning from the historical periods in which they are allowed to be active. Classifications proper assume that the objects classified are related, that the grouping rules are intrinsic to the universe they come from, and that this universe is a closed one. The new epistemological freedoms and prohibitions that accompanied the 'Scientific Revolution' and new questions about man and his afflictions brought about by the secularization of eighteenth-century culture, drastically affected the concept of 'madness'. Epistemological changes led to changes in praxis and these in turn fed back on the theory of alienism.
