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

madness may be a form in which "often through quite ordinary people, the light
begins to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds"65.
We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate
what they have made of us.66
What is the nature of the apprehension achieved by the mystical lunatic? It seems that
the psychotic crisis may enable one to overcome the deep rift in the human
personality, which is characteristic of "normal" man in our type of society which has
created a fissure between the "inner" and the "outer" layers of existence, between "mehere"
and "you-there", between "mind" and "body", divisions, which - as already
pointed out by Foucault - are not inevitable or natural, but the outcome of "an
historically conditioned split". It is to the point in human existence before this lapse
from fusion occurred, Laing maintains, that the mystic and the schizophrenic both
manage to return.67 Schizophrenics, like children and primitives, are capable of
thinking ways that are somehow prelogical, that is, their thinking can embrace what
from a logical point of view would be called contradiction.68
The proper function of the therapist "in a truly sane society", Laing maintained, is to
act as the patient's guide in the transforming journey. Occasionally we even find an
explicit analogy drawn between the role of the psychoanalyst and that of the religious
celebrant:
I believe that if we can begin to understand sanity and madness in existential social terms, we,
as priests and physicians, will be enabled to see more clearly the extent to which we confront
common problems [...]. Among physicians and priests there should be some who are guided, who
can educt the person from this world and induct him to the other.69
Psychiatry was thus transformed from a negative to a positive force. It ceased to be
simply a remedy for mental disease. Instead it became "a tonic to personal psychic
health, a romantic road to self-discovery, and eventually a licence to let it all hang out
in what Tom Wolfe was to call the 'Me Decade' of the 1960s"70.
65 Laing, Ronald D.: The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.- Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.- p. 90
66 Ibid., p. 47
67 Ibid., pp. 50, 103, 113
68cf. for example Doramus, E. von: The Specific Laws of Logic in Schizophrenia.- In: Language and Thought in
Schizophrenia / ed. by J. S. Kasanin.- New York: 1964.- pp. 112-134.-
69 Laing, R. D.: The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise.- Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.- p. 114
70 Porter, Roy: A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane.- New York: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1987.- p. 190
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