ABSTRACT
There are many threads in psychoanalysis and madness is a privileged one. Freud’s structural concepts are imbued with portrayals of madness. Id as a seething cauldron of excitations, no no in the unconscious, opposites meld, reverse, are indistinguishable, the law of contradiction and common sense do not hold. Ego as hallucinatory organ, idealizing-denigrating (over-underestimating), projecting, identifying, denying, splitting, dis-integrating; a double agent, developing anti-hallucinogenic properties and perceptual, reflective sanity. A sanity often soaked with madness that seeps through personal and world events. A superego concerned with morals, turning moralistic, overly self-critical, punishing, cancerously destructive, devouring reality with hate-filled ideals. Freud takes us to places where madness stains psyche. Capacities that try to set things right are not exempt. Psychoanalysis can lay no special claim on sanity but joins the struggle, replacing obsession with sin by analysis of madness, opening possibility for further ethical development (Eigen, 1986: Chapter 1).
