Madness as Unreason

The unreason analysis of insanity is derived from a time in the history of the understanding of madness in Europe revealed in Michel Foucault’s explorations of earlier structures. Foucault introduces the concept of unreason to characterize an image of madness which followed the religious understanding of earlier medieval or ‘Gothic’ thinking. Foucault makes a number of points about the image or structure of madness as unreason. The criticism that medical thinking about madness has alienated its sufferers and thus perpetuated and even initiated inhumane attitudes towards them is a standard one voiced by anti-psychiatry followers. The unreason of madness does share similarities with the want of reason found in sane adults, but differences separate madness from sanity. The history of madness in Europe since the dark ages falls, on a superficial analysis, into several great categories.