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

Another point of criticism which has variously been raised is that schizophrenic living
experience is presented as psychologically accessible and generalized as the truth about
schizophrenia while traditional psychiatry is condemned in general and the
relationship between the schizophrenic and society is perceived as that of martyr and
executioner. Others even go as far as to suggest that in the case of anti-psychiatry
narrow-mindedness is sold as ideological criticism. The possibility that not the others,
but the demented, could be in error is not considered, as the state of schizophrenia
certifies the pathological person as in possession of the truth.75 Where the truth is
anthropologically founded beyond the social critical level, the antipsychiatry pays
tribute to a concept of totality in which all intellectual contradictions are cancelled out.
According to Glatzel, it is a tendency towards irrationalism and totality which leads to
a "mystische[…] Überhöhung der Krankheit als eigentlicher Gesundheit".76 Glatzel
traces the popularity of the antipsychiatric, or late romantic, movement back to the
need of the sane for transcendence of the rough reality to which the self of the insane
person is supposed to have access. On the basis of the interpretation of insanity as
truth, antipsychiatric social and psychiatric criticism indeed appears not only as a
confrontation with concrete social defects and problems, but also as a justification and
reason for an unspoken yearning for the original, all-in-one and contradiction-free in
the pre-rational non-differentiated.77
2.9. The (Post-) Structuralist Approach to Madness:
Barthes, Derrida and Lacan
Michel Foucault, who throughout this chapter has proved to be a very helpful and
eloquent source to underline and exemplify various aspects introduced so far, can be
seen as the perfect link between this social-critical approach to madness presented
above and yet another movement which forms the latest context within which to
view the subject of madness. Although Foucault's own work is largely preoccupied
with social, cultural and historical issues and he often joins forces with Marxist
radicals over specific causes, his investigation of Western thought tradition is also
closely related to the theoretical and philosophical concepts expounded by a group of
innovative French thinkers, such as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the
literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes, the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,78 who can loosely, or for want of better classification, be
75 Glatzel, Johann: Die Antipsychiatrie: Psychiatrie in der Kritik.- Stuttgart: Fischer, 1975.- p. 106.-
76 Ibid., p. 108.-
77 Ibid., p. 110.-
78 (The works most relevant here are: Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Structural Anthropology.- Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.-;
Barthes, Roland: Mythologies.- First publ. in French 1972.- Transl. and ed. by Annette Lavers.- Frogmore: Granada,
1973.-; Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology.- First publ. in French 1967.- Transl. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.-
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