ABSTRACT
Madness was banished from professional jargon. No one was mad; psychiatric science sorted and differentiated. Madness thus disappeared from the classification of disorders as a shameful reference, witness to the era when psychiatry was stumbling through its infancy. To speak of William Shakespeare’s many references to madness is as commonplace as to point out its link with passion. A. Freud approached neurosis in such a way as to purge it simultaneously of the passion and the madness that it continued nevertheless to transmit. That psychoanalytic theory has itself carried the mark of this repression, or suppression, is of no small consequence. When one re-reads the literature on passion, one is struck by the analogy with Aesop’s language: the best or the worst of things. One is bound to admit that it is more often the worst than the best.
