The Signs of Madness

 The Signs of Madness 

Across the millennia,  the term ‘madness’ has been used with a multiplicity of meanings and implications.   The scale of the term ranges from mere anger and rashness to irrationality, intoxication and ecstacy  to fantasy and illusion to transcendence, delusion and psychosis.  Whether we consider madness a physical disease, a brain dysfunction, a deluge of passion,  divine intervention,  possession,  repression or the consequence of environmental stress, consistent in these understandings and etiologies is the underlying concept that madness is or entails estrangement from reality.  “Reality” here does not mean any absolute or essential set of truths but an ecology, a successful cultural construction which allows individuals to function comfortably and securely in the world around them.  Tragedy is consistently concerned with the limits of this reality:  that is to say, the social order, the immediate relationships, the ideologies and belief and value systems, and the physical world which surrounds particular individuals.  The prevalence of madness in tragedy is evidence that tragedy, throughout its history, has been concerned with the limits of convention, ideology and belief.  Tragedy explores boundary lines, dissolves borders, disrupts the order of existence, and madness, in one degree (that is, passion and irrationality), suggests the possibility and/or imminence of this ontological upheaval and destruction, and in a more extreme degree (delusions, extreme depression, suicide), is a symptom and a symbol of this destruction of the order and meaning of existence.  Tragedy, in keeping before us the etiologies and expressions of madness, keeps us mindful of the fragility, the limits and the relativity of what any individual might call reality or ascribe to existence as its meaning.      

The journey toward what is not reality can be seen as both heroic and catastrophic, as both divine and ruinous.  In primitive thinking madness is frequently  associated with a  spiritual realm.  Psycho-anthropologists have documented cases  of tribes which adopt schizophrenics as religious leaders and witch doctors. 1  Agnes Carr Vaughan outlines a  variety of connections between madness and religious belief in her book, Madness in Greek Thought and Custom .  Among the ancient Greeks the tradition  of  connecting madness  and divinity is long  and well established.  In the tragedies we  find explicit instances of the gods inflicting madness on  Orestes, Pentheus, Agave, Heracles, Ajax, Phaedra and Io.   

In   The Greeks and the Irrational , E.R. Dodds traces the concept of madness or ate from its pre-Homeric and Homeric origins to Socrates' declaration in Phaedrus that divinely inspired  madness was "our greatest blessing."  As Dodds describes it:

Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind--a temporary clouding or bewildering  of the normal consciousness.  It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external "daemonic agency." 2

As Greek culture develops, the concept of ate takes on new connotations of punition and guilt.  The basic pattern of madness which Dodds outlines is one in which the hero goes beyond his moira , his "lot" or "portion" 3 , and thereby encounters the jealousy of the gods.

Albert Cook, in Enactment: Greek Tragedy , succinctly outlines this pattern in tragedy,  and develops the connection between madness and transcendence.

Hybris sets the act going beyond a limit ( hyper ) into a spacial metaphor, and isolates it as  a single unconnected act.  The term ate , however, (1) "madness," not only internalises  the excess by attributing it to a state of the person; it also  carries suggestions (2) of a moral connection with some act ("reckless guilt"), of (3) a "visitation" from some daimonic source, and (4) of a permanent condition ("ruin"). 4

Of ate , Cook concludes:

Ate , the final agent of misfortune, is displayed as far more savage than any military conquest or explicable human grudge; it breaks  even the close calculations of the historian and the philosopher, and so they do not use the word.  It  was left to the tragedians to keep  the term  from  Homer as an axis of connection between man and gods,  the inner world and outer world, an axis leaving the connection incalculable and inexplicable, but demonstrable in the  presented contemplation of a dramatic enactment. 5

The dominant, popular attitude or understanding of madness during the time of the ancient Greeks was that it was caused by supernatural forces, most often through the direct intervention of particular gods.  Myth and tragedy record  specific  references to madness being caused by  Hera, Aphrodite, Pan, Cybele, Artemis, Athena and Apollo, and of course by Dionysus, the god of tragedy and of madness. 6  The most common etiology of madness was  impiety or disobedience or refusal to worship the god. 7

    Attitudes toward madness were, however, not uniform.  The depth of ambivalence about madness seems an upshot of opposed notions of  its causes:  the supernatural on the one hand, and physical causes on the other.    While the madman was, in some instances reported to be mantic and sanctified,  there are also references to his being ridiculed, chased through the streets, stoned, neglected and considered polluted and contagious. 8  Vaughan concludes that

among the ancient Greeks the personal sanctity of the madman, as in some way connected with the divine, varied in direct proportion to the reverence in which the gods were held.  As the latter decreased, the former kept pace with it.  This explains the descent of the madman, once considered, perhaps, under the protection of the gods, to the level of the beggar. 9

The word, ‘madness,’ as Rosen points out, was used as widely and as loosely in Graeco-Roman times as it is today.  The word might characterize any number of behavioural phenomena.   “When a Greek or a Roman spoke of madness, at one extreme the term might be applied to nothing more than queer or unreasonable behaviour, at the other it might well designate undoubted neuroses and psychoses.”10  As Rosen points out, in the fifth century BC,  a variety of approaches to madness--medical, religious, psychological and superstitious--had become widely accepted. 

Clearly, by the fifth century BC, a medical view that madness was caused by black bile had become sufficiently current among the people for the words derived from this idea to be used in daily speech and to serve as synonyms for other terms denoting mental derangement.  

The tendency of popular speech was to unify and mix divergent notions of madness.

“As in our own day, the public adopted medical terms but used them side by side with words derived  from older ideas of possession and divine punishment.  Such words were used without any attempt at consistency, often interchangeably.” 11

     At the same time the understanding of madness appears to have accommodated a wide variety of causes.  Evil spirits known as Keres were thought to bring disease, disaster and madness.  As Rosen points out:

The malign spirits known as the Keres were initially the ghosts of the dead.  Vague and unelaborated at first, they developed into more differentiated spirits associated with specific evils.  They were feared because of their possible harmful action on living men, and therefore as evil influences to be averted.  The spirit of the murdered man, for example, was believed to send madness as a punishment for the murderer. 12

Madness could also be inflicted by magic spells and rites, 13 or by a curse which would make the insane person not only mad but polluted and an evil omen, 14 or by physical factors such as heat, cold or concussion or physiological factors such as excessive drinking, or sexual excess or drugs, 15  and,  as Rosen points out, "psychological factors, such as grief, excessive anger, anxiety, and straining the mind and the senses through study, business, or other ambitious pursuits, were also regarded as causes of mental illness." 16  The frenzy and inspiration of poets and prophets, and religious ecstacy were also considered forms of madness. 17 "Moreover," as Vaughan outlines, "transformation into animal shapes, seizure by the nymphs, the unaccountable, sudden panic which terrorized whole armies were also characterized as madness." 18   In Schizophrenia and Madness , Andrew Croyden Smith, like Bennett Simon, notes that in the Greek tragedies of the fifth century B.C., "madness is shown occurring when the hero is overwhelmed by intolerable emotion." 19   Clearly, as Vaughan concludes, there was a "lack of discrimination throughout Greek literature in the use of various terms employed to convey the idea of madness." 20   The result of this indiscrimination is that in the tragedies of the ancient Greeks the madness of the hero is, in fact, multifarious and overdetermined. 

The vocabulary, the etiologies, and the various phenomena and understandings which gather about the word ‘madness’ are in total its vernacular.   What we find in tragedy is an exploration of the boundaries of a particular sense of reality and the vernacular of madness is the language used by the tragedian to signal his enterprise. Thus Creon's failure in Antigone is one of impiety and desecration of a corpse.  Such crimes announce the possibility of madness as his destiny.  Oedipus' and Orestes' crimes were the murders of family members and as Vaughan points out:

Coexistent in the life of the primitive Greek were two apparently opposed beliefs:  first, he who was guilty of murder was subject to an attack of madness caused by the spirit of the murdered man;  second, deeds of exceptional violence, such as the murder of members of a man's own family, were caused by madness sent by the gods. 21

This contradiction of beliefs is a legal conundrum which is of little concern to the present argument.  I draw attention to these beliefs simply to make the point that the audience for whom the Oresteia , Antigone and Oedipus, the King were written would intuit that the plays were substantially concerned with madness (and the parameters of reality) not only because the plays fit the pattern of hubris leading to ate but because of the specific nature of the crimes committed and because of the general nature of the language and images of these plays.

In tragedy the various, widely known diagnoses of madness become part of the language through which tragedy tells of the crossing of the boundaries of an individual's sense of reality.  An inexplicable or unreasonable action or belief, or states of anxiety, obsessions, compulsions, phobias, delusions and hallucinations, or depression or melancholy, or inappropriate social behaviour, or wandering about aimlessly, or violence, or misanthropy, moroseness, or self injury or suicide, and  poetic inspiration and ritual possession are all considered examples or indications of madness in the most general sense of the word. 22  Each of these becomes a potential sign with which the playwright might suggest, forebode or signal the abandonment of reality.  

According to Andrew Croyden Smith, traces of Greek medical notions of madness survived through the middle ages.  Nonetheless, despite the efforts of the medical profession and some advances, the popular and dominant notions of madness remained religious, mystical and superstitious.  As Smith points out, scientific enquiry was at an embryonic stage, books were scarce,  the transmission of information difficult, and the Catholic church was in a position to exercise tyranny over much of intellectual life.  The diagnosis and treatment of mental illness were much affected by folk beliefs in demons, magic and witchcraft, and dominated by notions of the saving grace of religious fidelity and the sins of heresy.

It was the Church, therefore, that provided the religious mode in the understanding and treatment of mental disorder, which was thought to be caused by external influences, stigmatised as the devil,  favourable but unexpected changes in the condition being attributed to divine grace, intercession, conversion, visitation in vision, and infliction of the holy stigmata. 23  

In the fifteenth and sixteenth century exorcism and pilgrimage remained the dominant forms of treatment of mental illness though, as Rosen notes, "during the sixteenth century there appears a slowly growing tendency to place mentally deranged people in special institutions." 24

In general, then, as Rosen outlines:

Concepts of mental disorder in this period and the treatment of mental illness derived from the ideas of classical antiquity and the modifications which they experienced during the Middle Ages.  To these must be added theological dogmas and popular beliefs concerning demonic possession and witchcraft. 25

 

Though many physicians struggled against the conception of mental illness as supernatural, as the famous case of Mary Glower demonstrates, it was frequently a losing battle.  Mary Glower was a fourteen-year-old girl who began to display an odd array of physical and frenzied symptoms.   Her doctors concluded that the case was beyond natural causes.  An old charwoman, Elizabeth Jackson was indicted and brought to trial, and in 1602 was convicted of having bewitched the girl. Elizabeth Jackson is but one example of numerous individuals, many of whom who were themselves mentally ill, who were convicted of witchcraft.    

In Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England , Michael MacDonald confirms that

early seventeenth century methods of explaining the natural and supernatural causes of insanity and relieving the suffering of its victims were marked by a traditional mingling of magical, religious, and scientific concepts.  Individual cases of mental disorder might be attributed to divine retribution, diabolical possession, witchcraft, astrological influence, humoural imbalances, or to any combination of these forces. 26

In discussing Robert Burton's seventeenth century publication, Anatomy of Melancholy , D.H. Tuke ( Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles ) points out that "it should be said of the disease he distinctly recognizes the same uncanny influences that his contemporaries Coke and Hale regarded as a legal fact--I mean witchcraft."   The issue was much debated in the early sixteen hundreds.  In responding to Reginald Scot's The Discovery of Witchcraft , in which Scot decries the attribution of mental illness to witchcraft, Burton argues that "of the contrary opinion are most lawyers, physicians and philosophers."    Burton continues his argument, claiming "they can cause tempests, etc, which is familiarly practiced by Witches in Norway, as I have proved, and last of all, cure and cause most diseases to such as they hate, as this of melancholy among the rest." 27

Although Robert Reed acknowledges the persistence of devil-possession in Elizabethan notions of insanity, in Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage , he argues that the "humoural" etiology of madness, first presented by Hippocrates, had, by 1600, become widely accepted.  However,  as Reed points out,  the Jacobean playwright had a particular agenda in mind for his use of this pathology.  “‘What is man,’  the playwright seems to have asked, ‘and what is wrong with him?’   As the drama of the period amply testifies, he found the pathological answer to this question in the theories of the humors and, especially, in those of melancholy. ” 28    The Jacobean playwright, according to Reed, used the pathology of madness as a means of expressing the emotional pulse beat and psychological misgivings of Jacobeans.  Reed describes the basic pattern of Jacobean playwrights' dramatic use of madness as follows:

A natural humor, usually melancholy or choler, is first of all presented; then, with the occasional exception of studies in "love -melancholy,"  some kind of devastating shock is prepared; finally, as the result of shock working upon the already aggravated humor, the unfortunate character is driven insane. 29  

The most obvious purpose served by the use of madness on the stage was, as Reed points out, sheer spectacle, but Reed also underlines that the playwright's use of "Jacobean pathological studies of mad folk had not one but several fundamental objectives."

. . . pathological studies of mad folk were an unusually fortunate medium to the playwright; not only did they both readily motivate his plot and provide spectacular entertainment  for the audience but they also offered him an opportunity to express in unusually artistic terms his misgivings about the world in which he lived. 30   

In referring specifically to the tragedies of the early Jacobean period, Reed notes that the madmen of these dramas

in reflecting the very evident scepticism of the playwright, had been portrayed by their authors as embodiments either of human insignificance or of moral degeneration; they and their distraught brethren, together with the social background from which they evolved, were mediums through which the early playwrights, such as Shakespeare, Tourneur, and Webster, studied and expostulated upon the futility and the evil of mankind. 31

In The Revenger's Madness , Charles and Elaine Hallett see the basic Elizabethan notion of madness as reason overthrown by passion.  The Halletts identify the ghost of revenge tragedy--after having traced its lineage to Seneca, to the Furies and to the madness-inflicting Keres from which the Furies derive 32 --as a key motif for the introduction of excessive passion.   However, the underlying cause of the revenger's madness is, according to the Hallett's, the situation he lives through, and that situation carries a fundamental, universal message.

Here was a situation--the same situation used by Aeschylus in The Eumenides --where the hero was caught between two goods.  Whichever way he turned, he was right--and yet wrong.  The revenger, seeking to comprehend the meaning of his situation and frustrated by the seeming injustice of it, became for the playwrights an emblem of Man himself. 33

The motif of the revenger's madness is ultimately an expression of emotional stress, social upheaval and what the Hallett's eventually identify as a "civilizational crisis."34  

According to the Halletts it was Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy which introduced the revenge configuration and with it the possibility of tragedy to the Elizabethan age. 

Kyd taught the Elizabethan playwrights how to put together a dramatic action that operated on two levels at once.  On the realistic level, it was simply the narrative of Hieronimo's search for justice, a search that leads him to madness and revenge.  On the symbolic level, The Spanish Tragedy is a myth of the civilization.  In this case the myth is not, as myths usually are, a symbolic narrative of the civilizational origins, but a symbolic rendering of where the civilization is now.  Nor did Kyd's new myth provide the grounds for the troubled individual to comprehend his role in the world.  That understanding could only come from a knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, and this myth had as its burden the theme that knowledge was to be denied to the hero, as it was denied to the Elizabethan citizen.   On the symbolic level, then, the revenge tragedy would be a myth of the civilizational crisis of the Elizabethan Age.  That is what the other playwrights who wrote revenge tragedy learned from Kyd, and what some, like Shakespeare, were able to learn from the revenge tragedy and apply to other situations. 35  

Though the Halletts restrict themselves to revenge tragedy and a few other Elizabethan tragedies, I would argue that, in these comments, they approach defining the mode and the essence of tragedy across its history.  That is to say, tragedy on one level is the portrayal of the progress of madness according to accepted or acceptable convention and on another, closely linked  level it implies the necessary estrangement of the individual from his sense of reality because of the situation in which he finds himself forced to live.  On this second level, the hero's madness is an indictment of his culture--a culture which predicates or at least allows the existence of the tragic situation--and a penetration of the myths which should serve to guide the individual and resolve his dilemma but which in the case of a tragedy do not.

All tragedies, it would seem, are destined to broach madness because they are stories depicting the  extremities of passion.  However, as Michel Foucault, in his history of neo-classical thought on madness, Madness and Civilization , reports, for the classicists, tragedy was the ultimate expression of being; madness, by contrast, was an expression of confusion, irrationality and blindness.  The tendency to emphasize the positive  content of tragedy and the negativity or null value of madness reached its peak after Racine.  Thus madness was confined and excluded  from  society, and in tragedy it was equally confined or contained or excluded.

Foucault offers both a final definition of madness and an assessment of the symbolic meaning of madness in the neo-classical age.  Foucault observes that  "an intense  emotion can provoke madness." 36  Foucault quotes Robert Whytt from his Traité des maladies nerveuses , of 1777:   “It is thus that sad narratives or those capable of moving the heart, a horrible and unexpected sight, great grief, rage, terror and other passions which make a great impression frequently occasion the most sudden and violent nervous symptoms.” 37  Foucault concludes:  "it is here that madness, strictly speaking, begins." 38

According to Foucault, passion is the basis of madness, and the beginning of madness he points to is passion's attempt to cancel itself out by its own excess.  This situation is one of "contradiction and the impossibility of continuance," and may lead to physiological symptoms such as "a kind of tetanus or catalepsy" or "violent convulsions." 39  In other words, madness is wrought of passion and the contradictions of passion, which necessitate the cancelling out of passion, even at the cost of cancelling out reality itself.  Madness, Foucault concludes, is a discourse without content and  "is ultimately nothing."

But the paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures.  Inextricable unity of order and disorder, of the reasonable being of things and this nothingness of madness!  For madness, if it is nothing, can manifest itself only by departing from itself . . . 40

In the neo-classical age, as Foucault outlines, the practice of confining the mad became widespread.  The meaning of this gesture--the confinement, exclusion and ostensible control of madness--is "that madness in  the classical period ceased to be the sign of another world, and that it became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being." 41

This change in the symbolic meaning of madness, according to Foucault, is apparent in its literary treatment.

Ironically, Don Quixote's insane life pursues and immortalizes him only by his insanity; madness is still the imperishable life of death: "Here lies the famous hidalgo who carried valor to such lengths that it was said death could not triumph over life by his demise."

But very soon, madness leaves these ultimate regions where Cervantes and Shakespeare had situated it; and in the literature of the early seventeenth  century it occupies, by preference, a median place; it thus constitutes the knot more than the denouement, the peripety rather than the final release.  Displaced in the economy of narrative and dramatic structures, it authorizes the manifestation of truth and the return of reason.

Thus madness is no longer considered in its tragic reality, in the absolute laceration that gives it access to the other world; but only in the irony of its illusions. 42

At that moment in history, the age of Racine, in which  Steiner locates the death of tragedy, Foucault identifies the bifurcation of tragedy and madness.

As if, at the moment  when madness was vanishing from the tragic act, at the moment when tragic man was to separate himself for over two centuries from the man of un-reason--as if, at this very moment, an ultimate figuration were demanded of madness.  The curtain which falls on the last scene of Andromaque also falls on the last of the great tragic incarnations of madness.43

Madness, Foucault argues,  was  silenced for two hundred years, until it was once again given voice and meaning and value by men like Nietzsche and Artaud.

Shoshana Felman, in Writing and Madness , contends that, in the aftermath of Nietzsche's elevation of Dionysian frenzy, "we are experiencing today an inflation of discourses on madness."  Felman observes that

the fact that madness has currently become a common discursive place is not the least of its paradoxes.  Madness usually occupies a position of exclusion ; it is outside of a culture.  But madness that is a common place occupies a position of inclusion and becomes the inside of a culture. 44

The upshot of this situation according to Felman, is that "no discourse about madness can now know whether it is inside or outside of the madness it discusses."45  Such a statement would seem to discourage the reader from reading further; however, this paradox, as we shall see, is a central issue in modern discussions of madness, and furthermore, Felman's program, as it turns out,  is not to discuss madness but to discuss discussions of madness and discussions of discussions of madness.  Felman's discourse on the discourse on madness and on the discourse on the discourse on madness thus makes madness the still but mysterious center of all of this discourse about that which resists discourse.  Amid this convolution of language and circularity of logic a degree of insight begins to reveal itself ever so coyly.  Felman's real goal, as becomes apparent, is to attempt an understanding of what literature is.  She concludes that madness is the key to that understanding.      

If literature, from its unique position, has something to teach us about madness, can madness in turn teach us something about literature?  It seems to me that if something like literature exists, only madness can explain it.  But if, as in my view, it is madness that accounts for the thing called  literature, this is not, as some have thought, by virtue of a "sublimation" or a properly therapeutic function of writing, but rather by virtue of the dynamic resistance to interpretation inherent in the literary thing.  In the end, madness in this book can be defined as nothing other than an irreducible resistance to interpretation. 46

    In direct contrast to Felman, throughout her book, Madness and Literature , Lillian Feder implies that the literature of madness implies a sublimation of madness and is consequently therapeutic.  Through the literature of madness we become aware of the mind; unconscious processes and the habits and modes of thought are brought to consciousness and consequently brought under control.  Feder writes:  

The treatment of madness in literature reflects human ambivalence toward the mind itself; madness, comprising its strangest manifestations, is also familiar, a fascinating and repellent exposure of the structures of dream and fantasy, of irrational fears and bizarre desires ordinarily hidden from the world and the conscious self.  In literature, as in daily life, madness is the perpetual amorphous threat within and the extreme of the unknown in fellow human beings.  In fact, recurrent literary representations of madness constitute a history of explorations of the mind in relation to itself, to other human beings, and to social and political institutions. 47

Greek myths of madness, we should note, seem the particular heritage of ancient tragedy.  From Feder's comments these tragedies seem a particularly fertile source of instances of madness and consequently of insight into not only the workings of the mind but of the whole psychological, social, and ontological context which accounts for madness and which madness therefore reflects.  

Certain ancient Greek myths of madness reveal with remarkable clarity the evolving mental processes of particular stages of human phylogenetic development; even relatively late literary versions of such myths--Dionysiac frenzy, the pursuit of by the Erinyes, prophetic raving--elucidate the archaic thought processes characteristic of states of madness.  The figures of Dionysus, Pentheus, Agave, Orestes, and Cassandra, even depicted from the point of view of the fifth century BC, convey the mental and emotional experience of human beings in much earlier stages of social and religious development.  The madness of Ajax on the other hand, portrays the pressures of emerging democratic institutions on a mind that clings to earlier adaptive mechanisms inappropriate to the rapid changes he cannot assimilate.  Unconscious thought processes generally accepted as characteristic of the insane are reflected and illuminated in the action, conflict, suffering, and achievement of the mad gods, men, and women of ancient myth. 48

Feder takes exception to the tenor of much of the modern theoretical treatment of madness.  She points out that her reason for dealing with Foucault's work on madness is that "it represents an approach that has currently become all too fashionable:  an idealization of madness that actually confuses compulsion with freedom, anarchy with truth, suffering with ecstacy." 49  Feder argues that in discussing the  inner experience of madness Foucault--and this claim seems irrefutable--"becomes vaguely mystical." 50

Feder herself defines madness as

. . . a state in which unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them and determine perceptions of and responses to experience that, judged by prevailing standards of logical thought and relevant emotion, are confused and inappropriate. 51

Feder does not specifically align her notion of madness with tragedy but many of the dramatic characters which she discusses in this context are taken from the tragedies.      As we enter the modern age, new approaches to madness repudiate the notion of madness as seen in terms of the non-integration of the self in its surrounding reality.  Feder maintains that many of the motifs of the literature of madness are "symbolic portrayals of adaptive psychic mechanisms in the development of the self in its relation to communal life." 52  A forceful modern tendency in discussions of madness, on the other hand, is to adopt a vision of the self, a priori , in isolation, suffering the alienated conditions of modern existence, in which case madness becomes a kind of mystical truth, ultimate freedom or final reality.  As Feder explains:

What primarily distinguishes the modern approach to the mind through the non-rational primary processes from earlier ones is not only the cultural adaptations of psychoanalytic discoveries, but, beginning with Nietzsche, the growing belief that, since God is dead, the individual consciousness supersedes all authority.  This consciousness, restricted for millennia by its rational masks and lies, can be freed, it is assumed, only by a return to its eternal roots in the primordial process manifested in madness.  Implicit in Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysiac is a restoration of its original social function of producing new apprehension of reality, but this is to be achieved not through the projection of instinctual impulses on a deity but rather through the recognition of deity within; the human being, unfettered, is himself the superman, the god.  In this respect, Nietzsche is the progenitor of the religious character of many modern proposals of the value of non-egoic experience.  But this is a religion without its original function of social cohesion.  Inherent in its very genesis is the failure of any societal avenue--political, cultural, as well as religious--to engage individual action and response.  The committment to non-egoic transcendence of hitherto known reality is based on the belief that only an individual rebirth into undifferentiated mystic apprehension can restore the mind alienated from the products of rational consciousness. 53

Feder's notion of madness and the modern notions she opposes can both be applied to tragedy.  As Felman's investigation indicates, attempts to bring madness "inside" language and rationality demonstrate that madness is by definition that which lies outside or beyond language, that it is that which cannot be expressed or interpreted without ceasing to be what it is.  Tragedy expresses this centrifugal movement from within culture, rationality and sanity toward what lies beyond and seeps through the cracks of accepted reality.  Tragedy, to a degree, sides with and upholds madness by presenting the limits of reality as bounded by culture and rationality.

On the other hand, tragedy expresses this movement in terms of individuals and the world in which they live.  Tragedy reveals madness as Feder has presented it; that is,  in terms of the failure of integration, not only within the self but between the self and its communal surroundings. 

Contemporary attitudes toward madness thus appear very similar to those of the ancient Greeks.  We are, like the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in fact, deeply ambivalent in our attitudes and divided in our understanding of madness; between notions of neurological and psychic dysfunction, on one side, and visions, like those presented by R.D. Laing and others, of the transcendence and even "divinity" of madness, on the other.        Laingian notions of madness serve the present discussion, not because they return us to the possibility of transcendence, but because they look at madness "from the inside;" that is, in terms of events, characters, relationships and communications--exactly as the drama treats it.  The disadvantage of this approach, at least from the point of view of an attempted discussion of madness, is, as Felman has warned,  that madness, from this perspective, disappears--by virtue of being explained, made rational or simply being expressed clearly it ceases to exist as madness.  Jeff Coulter outlines this apparent impasse in his book, Approaches to Insanity .

Philosophers of action have often pointed out that in relating someone's conduct to his social situation we are normally engaged in justifying or excusing such conduct.  We see that a person is acting, in context, in a certain way and explain it with reference to the contextual particulars of the situation or the person's history, but in doing so we are not providing a causalaccount; rather, we are seeking out those normal conventions that provide for the activity as an intelligible activity, as one which the agent is entitled to perform in the given circumstances. 54

This simple fact predicts much of what we find in modern non-neuro-physical investigations of madness. Thomas Szasz, for example, in Insanity:  The Idea and Its Consequences , presents a thorough and extensive argument for his conviction that "mental illness" does not exist.  He identifies madness, as many of his contemporaries have done, as a "label" of disapproval in general terms and more specifically as a "legal fiction" convenient to hospitals, the courts, and the prerogatives of a particular culture. 55  In The Age of Madness and The Manufacturing of Madness , Szasz argues that madness is to the Age of Reason what heresy was to the Age of Faith, not simply a form of exclusion but a denigration and sublimation of the "Other" as a reaffirmation of the self-esteem of the righteous and a valuation of presiding culture.  Madness and heresy, as we have seen, have been entwined, despite continuous efforts to disentangle them, since at least the fifth century B.C.  In other words, madness has been the ultimate symbol of exclusion, of the "outside" and "otherness" since the beginning of tragedy and it remains so even today.

Modern and postmodern theorists not only confirm this basic signification of the label ‘mad’ but they provide insight into the circumstances and individuals which come to warrant this ascription.  Theorists who investigate the experience of madness necessarily follow in the footsteps of the tragedians.   Like the tragedians, they attempt to tell the story of madness.  R.D. Laing's studies of schizophrenia, in particular his notion of "ontological insecurity" and his use of Gregory Bateson's "double-bind hypothesis" reveal the same themes we find in tragedy.  However, Laing's existential phenomenological approach to schizophrenia  exemplifies the fact that as madness is approached from the inside it necessarily disappears.  As the logic of madness becomes clearer, the forces that repress that logic begin to appear ‘mad’.  Laing's writings show a growing tendency to eulogize the schizophrenic, to focus on what he calls the "false-self system"  and to lament the conditions of what is normally called the sane world which force the individual to adopt a "false self" as a mode of survival.  Laing argues that "true sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality." 56  Laing's approach is therefore both informative, as a humanistic analysis of madness, and problematic, as it repudiates much of our normal, pejorative understanding of the concept of madness and replaces it with mysticism.

 However, not only do humanistic, existential and phenomenological analyses of madness predict what we  discover in tragedy, but the fact that these analyses repeatedly turn madness and sanity around, making madness sanity and sanity madness, instructs us in what it means, what it does, to portray or even to look at madness without confining, repressing or ostracizing it.  This inclination to reverse the labels mad and sane holds before our eyes the revelation that any empathetic presentation of madness--including that which we find in tragedy--is necessarily an indictment of the culture, "the reality" within which that madness occurs.  Furthermore, what is called sanity and what is called insanity is a litmus test of any society's values.  The questioning of what is sane and what is not must therefore arise from social change.  Tragedy, as a display of the process of madness on the stage, is the sign of a society willing, perhaps wanting, perhaps even needing to have its own values clarified.

Brian W. Grant carries this third point forward in his book, Schizophrenia:  A Source of Social Insight.  Grant notes that as society changes, cognitive changes are required as well.  "Social insights," he argues, are the "bottlenecks to" and, at the same time, "the most pregnant opportunities for, social change and growth."  Such experiences necessarily take first form in individuals and "can be experienced as immensely powerful, completely reorganizing experiences analogous to religious conversions."  It is on this basis that Grant presents his thesis that "schizophrenia is peculiarly suited to be part of the process that brings high-level, inclusive attitudinal changes to effective clarity and power in contemporary society." 57   

John Vernon, in his book, The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture , confirms that an awareness of schizophrenia provides insight into the operation and changes in perception taking place in society at large.  As Vernon looks at schizophrenia he finds that its definitive characteristics--fragmentation, implosion, atrophy of perceptions--are more justly applied to that which is called reality than to that which is called madness.

From one perspective, as Vernon notes, insanity is a social label for those who escape culturally determined perceptions.   From a more attached perspective, it is "a basic alteration of one's being-in-the-world.  It is the alteration which tears one's being out of the world, which alienates the self by fragmenting it." 58  In The Map and the Garden , Vernon adopts both of these perceptions, making them the sub-text of the dichotomy he establishes between two forms of schizophrenia:  one the alienation of division, compartmentalization, separation; the other, the failure to make distinctions, the compulsion to see the world as inseparable, anonymous and indistinct.  The former he calls the world of the map, the latter is symbolized by the garden.  These worlds relate to each other as sanity and madness,  each calls the other mad.  Vernon claims they are both right.  

As I have noted, the empathetic unfolding of the process of madness on the stage is necessarily an exprobration of the culture within which that madness occurs.  This occurrence--the display of madness in tragedy--implies a shift in values.  I would contend, pursuant to Vernon's argument, that madness becomes a prominent symbol and a subject of serious drama because society itself is growing restless, alienated and has become vaguely conscious of the threat of change in the way the world is to be perceived,  from the world as one, harmonious, unified organism to the world as divided, full of separated, independent, detached, compartmentalized units or, conversely, from the world as orderly, categorical and  bounded to an imploded vision of the world as devoid of boundaries and separations, the limits of order and organization broken down and replaced by chaos, indiscrimination, anonymity and the domination of primitive passion.         

    Feder argues that "one finds a basic similarity in the types of responses to insanity from earliest records to the present, which indicate that few, if any, societies have had a consistent attitude toward madness." 59  Andrew Croyden Smith, though he notes that cases resembling schizophrenia grow more apparent as we approach modern times, argues that "a schizophrenic kind of insanity occurs in all times and places, regardless of the culture." 60  However, in the final analysis, as Hallman has argued, it is tragedy itself which confirms the conditions of alienation in past ages.

Tragedy not only portrays conditions of alienation but it, in itself, rehearses alienation in that it imposes rationality upon what has been affective, irrational, unconscious, perhaps even primitive.  It furthers this estrangement by allowing the madman on stage--an affront in itself--and, by displaying his history,  revealing the limits of the rational universe.  By allowing the madman to tell his story and to unfold his liminal journey, the playwright equivocates upon the absolute justice of the universe, displaces confidence in the notion of the fixity of reality, and may even, to some degree,  challenge specific cultural precepts of his audience.  Viewed another way, the reason we find the madman, the accusations, references and intimations of madness, and the conventions of madness--jealous gods, curses, ghosts, witches, humors, hallucinations, neurosis and so on--prevalent in tragedy, is that these are the images through which the playwright can pursue and transmit to an ambivalent (e.g., secular and religious, rational and mystical, existential and transcendental) audience the idea of a daring and determined inquiry to the very limits of what is considered acceptable, believable, real and true.  It is because tragedy is the drama of an individual reaching the limits of his perceptions of reality that we find a long list of correspondences between understandings of madness and understandings of tragedy--between, for example, tragedy as transcendence (Steiner, Jaspers) and madness as a form of transcendence (the Greeks, R.D. Laing), and between tragedy as a conflict of passions (Hegel) and madness as a conflict of passions (Smith, Foucault), between tragedy as caused by a flaw and madness as the imbalance of humours, between madness as irrationality caused by shock and uncontrolled passion (the Elizabethans, the Halletts) and tragedy as an emotional shock (Aristotle) and as Dionysian frenzy (Nietzsche), between tragedy as an analogue of a civilizational crisis and madness as a symptom of civilizational crisis, between  tragedy as knowledge and insight, and madness as new knowledge and insight, between tragedy as the story of one alienated from his community and the understanding of madness as alienation from one's community, between the liminality of tragedy and the liminality of madness, between tragedy as failed communication and failed personality and madness as failures in communication and ego development, between tragedy as sublime and madness as inspiration and ecstasy, between tragedy as existential and/or nihilistic vision and madness as existential crisis, as nothingness and chaos,  between madness as exclusion, pollution and blindness, and tragedy as a story of scapegoats and pariahs, of exile, curses, contagion and blindness,  and ultimately between madness as tragic and tragedy as a portrayal of the process of madness.             

Notes

  1. See, for example, A.F.C. Wallace, "Anthropology and Psychology," in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry II , vol. I, 2nd ed. (Baltimore:  Williams and Wilkins, 1975), pp. 366

2.  E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational , (Berkeley:  U. of California Press, 1951), p. 5. 

3. Ibid, p. 6.

4  A. Cook, Enactment:  Greek Tragedy  (Chicago:  Swallow Press, 1971), p. 64.

5.  Ibid, p. 76

6. This list is confirmed by Vaughan, p. 21. and by G. Rosen, Madness in Society (New York, Harper & Row, 1968), p. 77.  

7.  Vaughan, p. 19 and Rosen, p. 77.

8.  Vaughan, pp. 18-28 and Rosen, pp. 86-9.

9.  Vaughan, p. 74.

10.  Rosen, p. 90.

11.  Ibid, p. 93.

12.   Ibid, p. 75.

11 .  Ibid, p. 81.

14.  Ibid, p. 86.

15.  Ibid, p. 132.

16.   Ibid, p.152.

17.  Vaughan, p. 25.

18.   Ibid, p. 25.

19.  A.C. Smith, Schizophrenia and Madness (Boston:  George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 60.

20.  Vaughan, p. 25.

21.  Ibid, p. 59.

22.  This list is taken from Rosen, pp. 94, 96, 97, 98, 99.

23.   Smith, pp. 69-70.

24.  Rosen, p. 142.

25.   Ibid, p. 145.

26.  M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 7.

27.  This discussion and these quotations are cited from D.H. Tuke's Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles , reprinted from the London version of 1882  (Amsterdam:  E.T. Basset, 1968), p. 72.

028. R.R. Reed, Jr., Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (New York:  Octagon Books, 1970), p.72.

029.  Reed, p. 73.

30.  Ibid, p. 82.

31.   Ibid, p. 157.

32.  C.A. Hallett and E.S. Hallett, The Revenger's Madness (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 20.

33. Ibid, p. 6.  N.B.  The Halletts seem to be referring to the wrong play here.  Orestes faces the dilemma they describe in The Libation Bearers not The Eumenides .   The Eumenides is basically a denouement--Orestes' trial before the gods and furies--to The Libation Bearers in which he has murdered his mother, Clytaemestra (which of course is the action/decision which the Halletts are describing).  My source is The Oresteia , ed. trans. R. Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies , ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1953).  The Halletts do not list a source for their comments on the play. 

34.   Ibid, p. 111.

35.  Ibid, pp. 118-9.

36.  M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization , trans. R. Howard (New York:  Vintage Press, 1980)), p. 89.

37.  Ibid, p. 90.

38.  Ibid, p. 90.

39.  Ibid, p. 90.

40.  Ibid, p. 107.

41.  Ibid, p. 15.

42.  bid, p. 32.

43.  Ibid, p. 112

44.  S. Felman, Writing and Madness , trans. M.N. Evans, the author and B. Massumi (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 13.

45.   Ibid, p. 14.

046.  Ibid, p. 254.

047.   L. Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 4-5.

48.  Ibid, pp. 10-11.

49.  Ibid, p. 33.

50.  Ibid, p.33.

51.  Ibid, p. 5.

52.  Ibid, p. 279.

53.  Ibid, p. 280.

54.   J. Coulter, Approaches to Insanity (London:  Martin Robertson, 1973), pp.36-7.

055.  T. Szasz, Insanity: the Idea and Its Consequences (New York:  John Wiley and Sons, 1987), p. 362.

056.  R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (Markham, Ontario:  Penguin Books, 1967), p. 118.

57.   B.W. Grant, Schizophrenia:  A Source of Social Insight  (Philadelphia:  Westminster Press, 1975), pp. 24-5.

58.   J. Vernon, The Garden and the Map (Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1973),  p. xi.

59.  Feder, p. 5.

60.  Smith, p. 60.