Review of History of Madness

Review of History of Madness by James Hollis Reprinted by permission of the California Literary Review, www.calitreview.com Foucault, Michel.  History of Madness.  New York: Routledge, 2006.  “Is it not by locking up one’s neighbor that one convinces oneself of one’s own good sense.” Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary The epigraph above, used by Michel Foucault (1926-84) in his magisterial History of Madness, reveals his angle of entry into the subject.   Not only does he recount the history of how we have understood or prejudiced, punished or treated madness, but  deconstructs the idea of madness, and offers his own working understanding of the boundary lines which shift so uncertainly in all of us.   The English reader is to be grateful for this new 700 page edition of the 1961 Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie á l’âge classique, for not only does it restore the c. 300 pages missing in the truncated Madness and Civilization published heretofore, but also includes Foucault’s impassioned, albeit pedantic quarrel with Jacques Derrida over the nuances of terminology and its precarious purchase on something we might call reality. In approaching the subject of madness, Foucault employs the terms reason and déraison, which does not translate well as “unreason.”   Perhaps Creon’s appeal to Oedipus that it is not reason not to listen to reason gets us close enough to “unreason.”   That “madness” is defined variously as a spiritual problem, a chemical disorder, a moral defect, and so on, not only glosses over the various forms of mental suffering, but suggests how provisional our definitions are.   And if we can look askance at the superstitions of our predecessors, might not those who follow us also seem perplexed by our “medicalizing” such phenomena?  While Foucault’s scholarship is extensive, one feels that he is always coming from a place in the heart, a silent passion whereby the subject commands both fascination and necessity.    He notes that the marginalization of social elements once took such form as the leprosaria where lepers were housed and castigated as God’s judged, and subsequently those having fallen into the venereal “sins,” but by the late Middle Ages, early Renaissance, the appearance of the Narrenshiff, the ship of fools, the outcasts who migrated from port to port on inland rivers, and were memorialized in the phantasmagoria of Bosch, Breughel, and Dürer.   The operative metaphor of the ship of fools was of course that of the fragile bark of sanity cast loose upon tempestuous, tenebrous seas. From these exiled souls, the era of confinement followed where they were housed in monasteries, prisons, or way-stations.   By the 1700s the “correctional” metaphor prevails and most of them are placed in moral and physical restraints in order to correct their aberrant attitudes or behaviors.   Many of these souls were chained as animals in appalling conditions which would get us convicted if we treated our dogs similarly today.  Such unfortunates included those convicted of debauchery, crime, sexual license “where reason was the slave of desire and a servant of the heart.”  (I suppose all of us would require sequestration under those criteria).  In the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century we find the humanization of treatment in the work of Pinel freeing the chained at the Salpêtriére, the Quaker Tuke in England, and Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, leading the reform movement.  As Rush insists, madness is a disease of “mind,” not possession by evil demons.  Still, madness remains something “other,” something “not I.”   As partial evidence witness the audience who came to watch the “loonies” at Charenton, or in 1815, the c. 96,000 enlightened souls who came to watch the inmates at Bethlehem Hospital in London, and paid a good price for admission to the show.   From the mid-nineteenth century through the present we see a shift in the treatment of madness to the “asylum,” a metaphor suggesting a retreat from the “madness” of the world, and a restoration of those deracinated.   By medicalizing madness, we presumably move from moral derision to scientific categories of etiology, nosology, and treatment plans.   Psychiatry has its origins in the ancient world and noticeably may be found in the middle ages and the renaissance in the concept of the four humors, an imbalance of which—say black bile which produces melancholia—can presumably be adjusted.   The classificatory impulse from Kraepelin and Bleuler and others continues to the present in the continuous revisioning of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the Bible of modern therapy and required by an insurance company in a neighborhood near you.  Currently the DSM-IV-TR (that is, fourth volume, text revision) is no doubt being revised further.   While Foucault leaves off his history with the nineteenth century, with only a nod toward Freud and company, one suspects that he would likely wish us to consider the history of this concept of “madness” and suspect that we, too, are bewitched by our own language, seduced by our metaphors, and will be subject to the scrutiny and dismay of our descendents.  One last but challenging thought which Foucault leaves us. Does he have a definition of madness?   No, and yes.   Clearly, the idea of madness is a cultural construct, referring at different times to different phenomena, and fraught always with the moral presuppositions of the observer, still he seems to suggest that the proof is in the pudding, namely, the degree to which one is able to carry on the necessary work of life.   As illustrations he refers to the productivity of such “mad” artisans as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Artaud, and suggests that madness is found in the absence of the oeuvre; where there is oeuvre, there is no madness—only suffering.   James Hollis, Ph. D., is a Jungian analyst, executive director of the Jung Center of Houston, TX, and author of numerous books.

Jungian Dream Interpretation

Carl Jung taught that the structure of a dream is similar to that of a drama, comprised of four different stages:

1. Exposition: The opening scene, which introduces the place, characters, and situation that the dreamer will face–the issue or problem as expressed through metaphor.
2. Development: The emergence of the plot.
3. Culmination: Something significant occurs, and the main character responds.
4. Lysis: The result or solution of the dream’s action. The lysis signifies how the dreamer might deal with the problem or issue that was expressed during the exposition stage. In effect, the work of the dream has produced a solution or result for the dreamer.

Jung considered the lysis the most important part of the dream because it showed where the dreamer’s energy wanted to go. Daryl Sharp writes, “Where there is no lysis, no solution is in sight” (Jungian Psychology Unplugged).
While some dreams are too short or fragmented to lend themselves to interpretation, the manifest (or remembered) dream can be important. Such a dream contains within itself the actual meaning of the dream; one needn’t understand its esoteric symbols in order to glean the meaning. The dream is a message from the unconscious, spoken through symbols meaningful and peculiar to the dreamer.

A person wanting to interpret a dream may, like Jung, use the method of amplification. This involves elaborating on a dream image in order to find its significance through association. Ask the dreamer the following questions:

1. What personal associations do you have with the image or symbol? What does this image mean to you? What else? And what else?
2. What feelings do you have associated with this symbol/image/person in the dream?
3. What hidden parts of myself might this dream image represent?
4. Is there a cultural significance to this dream image? If so, what is it?
5. Are there any archetypal meanings to this image? If so, what are they?

The conscious situation of the dreamer is also quite important. The dream is not an isolated event and cannot be detached from the dreamer’s everyday life. Therefore, a number of conscious attitudes will begin to cluster together within the unconscious. Dreams tend to compensate for these conscious attitudes or personality traits, which will otherwise be repressed, hidden, or forgotten. For example, if the dreamer is repressing his feelings of anger or rage in waking life, he may dream rage-filled, angry dreams to compensate for this. The dream has a balancing effect by producing another point of view for the dreamer. 
Another method of Jung’s that helps with dream interpretation is that of active imagination. The dreamer, once awake, meditates, concentrating on a specific dream image. He then allows the image to develop freely without making a conscious effort to change it, in effect “dreaming the dream on.” This method is particularly helpful when a person is dealing with a series of dreams, or a recurrent and troubling dream.
Finally, one should look at the people in his dreams, because dream people are personifications of one’s complexes. As such, they show our complexes at work in determining our attitudes, which in turn cause our behaviors.
Resources. Dream interpretation isn’t as simple as Googling symbols. In fact, dream interpretation from a Jungian perspective is as complicated and unique as the individual himself. One of the best sources for interpreting dream symbols and images from an archetypal position is Jung’s last psychological work before his death, Man and His Symbols. Anyone wanting to establish good insight into symbolism ought to own this book.