ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of madness as it appears in its foundations in psychiatry, philosophy, myth, anthropology, and literature. It starts with the experience of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated by Western psychiatry; an account which shows a long-standing cultural ambivalence toward madness. We look to the Greeks, who revered a god of madness, Dionysus; to Julian Jaynes’s sense of Homeric culture as itself, “schizophrenic”; and to Plato’s deliberation on the four forms of madness as a boon to humanity. Shamans of native peoples will be seen to treat their patients through an experience akin to madness. The mad King Lear’s speeches will be analyzed for their own logic, indicating the Renaissance sensibility of madness as representing the reality of the darkness of the human condition. We follow Foucault’s footsteps in his sense of madness as a construction relative to the context of societal values and his exposition of the classical age as the turn toward the modern medicalization, separation, and confinement of madness in service to power. The humanization in Pinel’s approach leads eventually to the quest for meaning in madness by Jung and Perry. Finally, the rites engaged by our initial patient with a native healer in Africa will bring our exploration full circle, followed by a closing meditation on the interplay between madness/reason and order/disorder.
