Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

would be able to cure them generated noble optimism. It was the new dawn in the
treatment of the mad. In a gesture of psychiatric liberation the Parisian Dr. Philippe
Pinel, in 1774, struck off the chains from the lunatics at the Bicêtre and the Salpetrière
and almost simultaneously William Tuke essentially banished physical constraints
and irksome discipline in favour of moral therapy at his new asylum, the York
Retreat. Psychiatry was thus constituted and madness released from its physical chains.
For many contemporaries this new emphasis of the intellectual over the physical
seemed the hallmark of progress. As Foucault has stressed, this liberation, however,
only masked a new form of confinement. The substitution of physical restraint by
surveillance may well have imposed another and perhaps more absolute kind of
restraint on the insane which implicated their whole being. It had its more sinister
dimension, a potential for subtler and more masked mastery, for brainwashing, and
later for the political abuse of psychiatry. In the very acquisition of its specificity,
madness, according to Foucault, is still excluded the possibility of appearing in its own
right still forbidden, still prevented from speaking for itself in a language of its own.18
A similar conception of the Western world's attitude towards madness is held by
Szasz:
Instead of being born into sin man is born into sickness [...] And, as in his journey from the cradle
to the grave man was formerly guided by the priest, so now he is guided by the physician. [...]
Indeed, when the justificatory rhetoric with which the oppressor conceals and misinterprets
his true aims and methods is most effective - as had been the case with tyranny justified by
theology, and is the case now with tyranny justified by therapy […].19
2.4. Romanticism
However, attacks against the general ideas associated with the Age of Reason and the
triumph of the ratio were already being launched and the close of the century and the
early decades of the 19th saw another change which manifested itself in the whole tone
and tendency of intellectual life of the time. With the emergence of Romanticism,
imagination as the power which gave form to visions was once again highly valued.
Naturally, this mental revolution not only affected all spheres of thought, all artistic
and literary standards and modes of expression, but its pronounced inclination
towards the emotional, mysterious, strange, supernatural and fantastic also made their
marks upon doctors of the mind. As the tyrant, the rationalist, and the materialist
were opposed and the individual exalted over the masses, emotion, wonder, and
18 cf. Foucault, Michel: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.- Transl. by Richard
Howard.- London, Sydney, Wellington: Tavistock Publ., 1965 [1961].-
19 Szasz, Thomas: Ideology and Insanity.- Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1969.- p. 5
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