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

elements of his theory. Together with Breuer he published in 1895 the epoch-making
book Studies on Hysteria.28 The essence of hysteria is that, in the face of intolerable
stress, symptoms develop which provide a defence against the stressful circumstances.
According to psychoanalytical theory, neurosis is an outward manifestation of deepseated
intrapsychic conflicts which were set up in early life. By this time, however,
Freud had already abandoned the use of hypnotism in favour of the method of "free
association". When he announced the startling conclusion that various
psychoneuroses were indeed caused by unconscious sexual conflicts he was received
coldly and almost condemned as a crank. In his Interpretation of Dreams29, which
later came to be regarded as his opus magnum, he dedicated himself not only to the
puzzling problems of the dream world, which had baffled all previous investigators,
and the complex mechanisms at work in the manufacture of dreams, but also to the
structure and mode of how the deeper layers of the mind function, the unconscious.
With Freud, at the beginning of the twentieth century, madness thus basically came to
be seen as a manifestation of intrapsychic conflicts. In his model forms of behaviour
were not simply due to biological factors, inherent in the nature of the respective
human being, but cultural constructs. In principle, although not always in practice,
psychoanalysis was not moralistic either. It did not judge the hysteric as weak or bad,
but saw hysterical symptoms as the product of unconscious conflicts beyond the
person's control. Finally, psychoanalysis was attentive to the process of therapy,
recognizing the fantasies that therapist and patient might project upon each other. The
patient became an active, although not an equal, partner in cure. Foucault thus
honours Freud as the first modern man to "listen" to what the insane were saying, to
try to find reason in their unreason, the method in their madness. On the other hand,
while Freud delivered the patient from "the existence of the asylum"30, he did not
liberate him from the authority of the doctor himself. That is to say, that Freud's
'talking cure' was, of course, not without its own deep ambiguities, both in theory and
in practice. If asylum life encouraged scenes of silence, with Freud we sometimes have
dialogues of the deaf, conversations conducted in different languages (in which 'no'
typically means 'yes') and with an interpreter suffering from fixed ideas about the
meanings of certain words. A similar point is made by Foucault when he hints at the
fact that
28 Freud, Sigmund; Breuer, Josef: Studies on Hysteria.- Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.-
29 Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretations of Dreams.- In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud:
Vol. IV / ed. by James Strachey.- London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74.-
30 Foucault, Michel: Mental Illness and Psychology.- Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1987.- p. 85
16