ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the figurations of children and childhoods in late twentieth-century women's madness narratives to explore, unravel and discuss the kinds of childhoods that are constructed in the texts that take women's madness and its treatment as their subject. It discusses different figurations of children and childhood in madness narratives: the madwomen narrators/protagonists as children, the children the protagonists cannot have, and the children that the madwomen protagonists have. The chapter discusses the practices within psychiatry that infantilize the patient, constructing the mad protagonist as children – and thus keeping them from having children. It also discusses two different child figures identified in these narratives: the fragile child and the child as a force that pulls the mother out of her madness. In psychoanalytic discourses, childhood and childhood family structures are explored as the primary sources of madness.
