ABSTRACT
We are now ready to embark on the journey that is at the core of this book: making sense of madness. Now, before this rather lofty-sounding, perhaps even grandiose title engenders a set of expectations that we would find impossible to satisfy, it might be appropriate at this point to make clear what our aims are here and exactly how we intend to go about the business of making sense of madness. First, we should declare that it is not our intention to endeavour to provide a full and definitive explanation of what madness ‘really’ is, were such a thing ever possible: our position, as will be stated in Chapter 6, is that, ultimately, it is not. Our ambitions are more humble than this, and hopefully, as a result, more achievable. What we hope to do over Chapters 3, 4 and 5 is to consider some of the ways in which madness can be, and indeed has been, made sense of from different perspectives or positions. Our aim here is to demonstrate the myriad ways in which madness is understood by different contributors to the question of what we are to make of this unusual human experience.
