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

disembodied mind, which becomes the detached spectator of the behaviour of the
"false self"44 located in an unfeeling, mechanized body. The disembodied self protects
its perilous autonomy by cutting itself off from relation to others and functions
primarily through observation and fantasy. In Laingian terms madness itself became
intelligible as a strategy, a form of communication in response to the contradictory
messages and demands of society45, a form of protest. Or as Foucault puts it:
The contemporary world makes schizophrenia possible, not because its events render i t
inhumane or abstract, but because our culture reads the world in such a way that man himself
cannot recognize himself in it.46
In the special strategy that a schizophrenic person invents in order to live in an
unliveable situation47, he becomes perceived as other.
At this point it seems advisable to take a closer look at the publications of Michel
Foucault as they form a basis for the understanding of what is to follow. Foucault's
ambitious, detailed and encompassing work began in the early 1950s with an
impressive inquiry into the social, economic, political, and philosophical conditions of
the modern definitions of sanity and insanity in the so-called Western civilisation.
Since then, his unfolding interdisciplinary production has triggered a profound
intellectual appeal which cuts across a wide diversity of academic interests traditionally
separated into various fields and disciplines. What he is basically concerned with is a
dismantling of our modern, naturalized conception of insanity as 'illness', and of
psychopathology as the science that seeks to understand it.
The recognition that enables one to say, "This man is mad", is neither a simple nor an
immediate act. It is based in fact on a number of earlier operations and above all on the
dividing up of social space according to the lines of valuation and exclusion. When the doctor
thinks he is diagnosing madness as a phenomenon of nature, it is the existence of this threshold
that enables him to make such a judgement. Each culture has its own threshold, which evolves
with the configuration of that culture […].48
44 Ibid., p. 82
45 What, according to Laing, is happening in schizophrenic experience is that, feeling existentially threatened, people
convince themselves that they are someone else because then they themselves are no longer threatened by the untenable
situation. Alternatively, they may pretend to be deaf or dumb, for then they cannot be expected to give an answer. It is at
the cost of a split into an inner and an outer self that the separation between self and world, between thinking and
being, between end and means is healed.
46 Foucault, Michel: Mental Illness and Psychology.- Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1987.- p. 84
47 Laing, Ronald D.: The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.- Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.- p. 79
48 Foucault, Michel: Mental Illness and Psychology.- Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1987.- p. 78
20