ABSTRACT
In my first chapter, I argue for three key insights that can only be gained by an approach to madness that integrates experience in history and demonstrate how these insights avoid some of the problems of modern psychology. For each insight, I draw on contributions from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Foucault’s archaeology and show how they can be brought together in unity. First, to evade the pitfalls of individualism and determinism, we explore the way history is expressed in experience by linking historical structures in the history of madness to characteristics of experiences of madness. Secondly, to steer clear of the stark division between the normal and the abnormal, we see that intelligible explanations of human behavior and social constructions go beyond the categories of the rational and the nonrational and, thus, the categories of the normal and the abnormal. And lastly, to counter the view that mental illness is only a biological sickness, we pay attention to the loss and tragedy of madness which often goes unacknowledged.
