The Meaning of Madness
“Should I return in my absence, kindly detain me until I come back.”
an anonymous schizophrenic
In tragedy we can recognize madness as a style of behaviour, as a convention, and as an extreme deviation from a character's normal behaviour, but ultimately madness in tragedy is a discourse resulting from the negation of the individual's sense of reality . Stereotyped behaviour such as wandering about, dishevelment, garbled language, hallucinations, strange gestures and body movements, as well as violence, uncontrolled passion, and flat affect and catatonia, depression, anti-social behaviour, aberrant or erratic reactions, suicidal, destructive and obsessive tendencies--all are signs and signals of madness. Madness, according to varying cultures, may be understood as divine intervention, as a curse or possession, as the work of ghosts or spirits or devils or witches, or it may be understood as "humours," or a brain defect, or a dietary deficiency. Madness may be understood as having psychological causes and to be based on environmental stress and overwrought emotions. In fact, the popular imagination seems capable of embracing several, if not all, of these conventions at the same time and calling them all "madness." Deviation from one's normal patterns of behaviour seems particularly prevalent as an accepted sign of madness. The idea of one not being one's self is clearly rooted in ancient times and remains inherent in modern notions of madness. All this, in total, is the vernacular of madness with which the playwright must express himself.
The "negation of reality" implies the schizoid condition of a rent between the self and the world and the consequent fragmentation of the self. What we find in tragedy, I would argue, approximates what R.D. Laing describes, in his studies of schizophrenia, as "ontological insecurity." The ontologically secure individual, according to Laing, feels "real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person." 1 The ontologically insecure person, on the other hand, may
feel more unreal than real, in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency and cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.
It is, of course, inevitable that an individual whose experience of himself is of this order can no more live in a ‘secure’ world than he can be secure ‘in himself’. The whole ‘physiognomy’ of his world will be correspondingly different from that of the individual whose sense of self is securely established in its health and validity. 2
Laing himself does not acknowledge the connection between ontological insecurity and tragedy. As do a variety of writers we have already considered, Laing upholds the nostalgic notion of a culturally rich past which seems almost to guarantee each individual a sane and sound sense of self. Laing distinguishes between "a basic existential position of ontological security and one of ontological insecurity " by quoting Lionel Trilling's contrast between the world of Shakespeare and Keats, on the one hand, and that of Kafka, on the other.
. . . for Keats the awareness of evil exists side by side with a very strong sense of personal identity and it is for that reason the less immediately apparent. To some contemporary readers, it will seem for the same reason the less intense. In the same way it may seem to a contemporary reader that, if we compare Shakespeare and Kafka, leaving aside the degree of genius each has, and considering both only as expositors of man's suffering and cosmic alienation, it is Kafka who makes the more intense and complete exposition. And, indeed, the judgement may be correct, exactly because for Kafka the sense of evil is not contradicted by the sense of personal identity. Shakespeare's world, quite as much as Kafka's, is that prison cell which Pascal says the world is, from which daily the inmates are led forth to die; Shakespeare no less than Kafka forces upon us the cruel irrationality of the conditions of human life, the tale told by an idiot, the puerile gods who torture us not for punishment but for sport; and no less than Kafka, Shakespeare is revolted by the fetor of the prison of this world, nothing is more characteristic of him than his imagery of disgust. But in Shakespeare's cell the company is so much better than in Kafka's, the captains and kings and lovers and clowns of Shakespeare are alive and complete before they die. In Kafka, long before the sentence is executed, even long before the malign legal process is even instituted, something terrible has been done to the accused. We all know what that is--he has been stripped of all that is becoming a man except his abstract humanity, which, like his skeleton, never is quite becoming to a man. He is without parents, home, wife, child, commitment, or appetite; he has no connection with power, beauty, love, wit, courage, loyalty, or fame, and the pride that may be taken in these. So that we may say that Kafka's knowledge of evil exists without the contradictory knowledge of the self in its health and validity, that Shakespeare's knowledge of evil exists with that contradiction in its fullest possible force. 3
I would challenge the dichotomy which Laing deduces from this quotation on the grounds that it is apparent that the Kafkaesque vision begins where the vision of Shakespeare's tragic heroes leaves off. They are therefore contiguous and not mutually exclusive as Laing seems to interpret. The process of Shakespeare's great tragedies is one in which the heroes are stripped of the basis of their ontological security. The fate of Shakespeare's tragic hero is always to be rent of "parents, home, wife, child, commitment" and appetite and power and beauty and love, wit, courage and loyalty. What better description of Lear on the moor than Trilling's description of Kafka's character, "stripped of all that is becoming a man"? What better exemplifies the encroaching ontological insecurity of being unable to assume that what one is made of is "genuine, good, valuable" than Hamlet's wish "that this too too sullied flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew"? (I. ii. 129-30) Who better than Macbeth exemplifies that feeling of being "more unreal than real" "more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world"? Each of the tragedies demonstrates a progression toward an extreme point of ontological insecurity and the actions, gestures, and words, consequent to this insecurity, constitute a corresponding degree of madness.
Passion, as Foucault suggests, is the stuff of madness, but the absence of ontological security is what madness both covers and reveals. If we allow ourselves to think categorically for a moment, it becomes apparent that the interim step between sanity and insanity, between reality and delusion, must be a cancelling out, a negation, the determination or imminence of absence. The movement from sanity to madness cannot be a movement from one way of thinking to another. In order for madness to be madness, it must imply something other than mere change or difference. Madness must include the movement from the presence to absence, from reality to non-reality, from existence to nothingness. Sane perception is based on a successful, culturally constructed sense of reality, insane perception is based on the unacceptability of existence, on the necessary absence or breakdown of reality. Imminent nothingness, then, is the true face which madness both masks and expresses, and the cracks in and blockages to reality, the widening void, and the general movement toward utter nothingness form the growing process of madness.
This movement toward nothingness, and its adjunct delusions, is central to the process which tragedy records. In the typical tragedy the elements of the hero's reality, including the hero's own character, manoeuvre her or him into a passionate, profound and inescapable dilemma. The point of juncture and disjuncture between the tragic situation and the extremities of madness, between passion and delusion, between being-in-the-world and the unreality in which individuals may find themselves forced to live, is existential crisis, nothingness, the growing emptiness they face as they become evermore alienated from the world around them and estranged from their normal sense of reality.
Nothingness, however, is an impossibility in terms of human consciousness. We can only understand it in negative terms, and we certainly cannot think of what it would mean to perceive nothingness. In fact, the perception of nothing is a logical impossibility. It is precisely for this reason that we can assert an integral relationship between nothingness and madness. Since it is impossible to perceive nothing, when faced with nothingness or rather the possibility of nothingness, the mind supplies its own images in the form of delusions, hallucinations and obsessions. This phenomenon has, of course, been empirically verified by sensory deprivation experiments. However, we can logically intuit that something of the sort would have to happen.
Hallman substantiates this point.
It has long been known that not merely self-consciousness and intelligence but the total organism can maintain itself only to the extent that it remains in contact with the physical order. Attempts to block off its sensory contacts cause the mind to begin to disintegrate, to hallucinate, and to fail to function as a healthy organism. 4
In a similar vein, R.D Laing, in discussing the case of a young schizophrenic in The Divided Self , comments that
the sense of identity requires the existence of another by whom one is known; and a conjunction of this other person's recognition of one's self with self-recognition. It is not possible to go on living in a sane way if one tries to be a man uncoupled from all others and uncoupled even from a large part of one's own being. 5
Along the full scale of ‘madness’ from a hyperbolic label for stubbornness, irrationality or great passion to psychosis, the idea that madness implies the negation of reality remains consistent. Rage, ecstasy and delusion are all, to varying extents, abandonments of reality. In tragedy, madness appears in all these forms and may be immediately understood according to various conventions, but minor moments of madness and the conventions of madness can always be understood in terms of the negation of reality. Tragedy does not provide an absolute or fixed degree of madness. However, tragedy always displays a serious and extreme negation of the individual's sense of reality, and the individual's resulting discourse--his/her madness--affirms this negation. 6
Though tragedies display the conventions of madness accepted in their historical milieu, we repeatedly find in tragedy that the madness of the individual can also be understood in terms of the situation through which the individuals live negating their senses of reality. As to how this negation is arrived at, the "double bind" hypothesis, first developed by Gregory Bateson as a hypothetical etiology of schizophrenia and adopted by R.D. Laing, gives us the beginnings of an answer. Here the pathology of madness and the archetypal situation of tragedy coincide. The double bind implies an unresolvable dilemma. It is precisely in this situation that the nothingness of madness becomes imminent. Laing describes the double-bind situation of the schizophrenic as follows:
In over 100 cases where we have studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic, it seems to us that without exception the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation . In his life situation the person has come to feel he is in an untenable position. He cannot make a move, or make no move, without being beset by contradictory and paradoxical pressures and demands, pushes and pulls, both internally, from himself and externally, from those around him. He is, as it were, in a position of checkmate. 7
We should note that the double-bind hypothesis has not been validated as a theory/etiology of schizophrenia. As Anthony I. Schuham details in his essay, "The Double-Bind Hypothesis a Decade Later," despite various attempts, the double bind has yet to be empirically re-verified and basic questions as to what constitutes the double bind leading to schizophrenia remain unanswered. 8 As a result, as Coulter ( Approaches to Insanity ) confirms, the double bind has declined in recent years as a framework for the etiology of schizophrenia. 9
However, in tragedy, as we shall see, a double-bind pattern remains a basic motif. This is no mere coincidence. The intuition from which the double-bind hypothesis emerged and which has kept the idea of the double bind alive for so many years, is closely allied with the basic intuition of tragedy, which, for millennia, has encouraged tragedians to present the situation of individuals deeply divided within themselves facing paradoxical situations, typically forced to choose between two "rights" in conditions which make both "rights" seem wrong.
Bateson et al derived the double-bind hypothesis from their observations of the conflicting patterns of communication which typically surrounded the schizophrenic, and which in turn led to a general breakdown in the schizophrenic's ability to communicate. Within a human relationship the double-bind situation, in basic terms, consists of:
1) "A primary negative injunction."
2) "A secondary negative injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishments or signals which threaten survival."
3) "A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field." 10
Bateson, to elucidate his argument, offers a situation which he sees as analogous to the double bind--the training of a Zen Buddhist novice.
In the Eastern religion, Zen Buddhism, the goal is to achieve Enlightenment. The Zen Master attempts to bring about enlightenment in his pupil in various ways. One of the things he does is to hold a stick over the pupil's head and say fiercely, "If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don't say anything , I will strike you with it." We feel the schizophrenic finds himself continually in the same situation as the pupil, but he achieves something like disorientation rather than enlightenment. 11
The most telling example, for our purposes, is one Bateson cites of the double bind imposed on a subject under hypnosis.
A great array of phenomena that occur as schizophrenic symptoms--hallucinations, delusions, alterations of personality, amnesias, and so on--can be produced temporarily in normal subjects under hypnosis. . . . For example, Erickson will produce a hallucination by first inducing catalepsy in a subject's hand and then saying, "There is no conceivable way in which your hand can move, yet, when I give you the signal, it must move." That is he tells the subject his hand will remain in place, yet it will move, and in no way the subject can consciously conceive. When Erickson gives the signal, the subject hallucinates the hand moved, or hallucinates himself in a different place and therefore the hand moved. 12
In both the structure and discourse of tragedy we find these double binds of situation and communication re-enacted. For example, Oedipus is divided between his desire to serve as a good king and find justice, and his growing suspicion of the horrible truth. His double bind is ultimately that he has attempted to be prudent, virtuous and just, and yet his actions have produced reckless patricide, incest and the suicide of Jocasta. In Antigone , Creon is caught between his belief in the absolute authority of the king and his need for the support of his family and his people who sympathize with Antigone, whom he has condemned. He clings to his authority up to the last minute, yet when he relents he still cannot prevent and remains responsible for the deaths of Antigone, and of his own son and wife. Macbeth is trapped between the abhorrence of the crimes he commits and the fact that he must commit them in order to fully be what he considers it is to be a man. Hamlet is driven by the contradictory codes of Christianity and of revenge, by love of his mother and hatred of what she has done, by the ignominy of existence and the countervailing ignominy of death. These schematic descriptions only begin to illustrate the double-bind situations which, as Laing points out, are seldom apparent.
The untenable position, the "can't win" double bind, the situation of checkmate, is by definition not obvious to the protagonists. Very seldom is it a question of contrived, deliberate, cynical lies or a ruthless intention to drive someone crazy, although this occurs more commonly than is usually supposed . . . A checkmate position cannot be described in a few words. The whole situation has to be grasped before it can be seen that no move is possible, and making no move is equally unlivable. 13
Recognizing the total double bind would require that we uncover the whole matrix of characters, events and circumstances which make up the world of the tragedy and, as Bateson suggests, the system of communication operating within that matrix.
The opening scene in King Lear is a salient example of a double bind in communication. As in the other tragedies mentioned, the underlying basis of the situation is paradoxical. Lear's blind faith in his role as a paternal liege costs him both his sense of paternity and his kingdom. However, his relationship with his daughters and the false communications which operate between him and them is a particularly telling aspect of his double bind. Bateson offers an anecdote which will elucidate what I wish to point out about King Lear .
An analysis of an incident occurring between a schizophrenic patient and his mother illustrates the "double bind" situation. A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, "Don't you love me any more?" He then blushed , and she said, "Dear, you must not be so embarrassed and afraid of your feelings." The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. 14
Bateson boils down the young schizophrenic's situation as follows: “The impossible dilemma thus becomes: ‘If I am to keep my tie to my mother I must not show her that I love her, but if I do not show her that I love her, then I will lose her’." 15
King Lear begins with Lear putting Cordelia into a similar double bind. Cordelia recognizes that her sisters' declarations of love to their father are hypocritical. Therefore for Cordelia to join them in their hypocrisy would be to betray the love she feels for her father. Thus, the more Lear demands a declaration of love from Cordelia, the more her refusal indicates the strength and truth of her love. Her dilemma becomes: "If I declare my love for my father it will mean I don't really love him. If I don't declare my love for him, it will seem to him that I don't really love him." Cordelia is stymied. Cordelia's repeated answer of "Nothing" to Lear's request that she speak reminds us of the basis of madness. This "nothing" is of course the beginning of Lear's madness. Lear initiates his own double bind. His situation becomes one in which those to whom he shows love reject him and those whom he rejects love him. We can recognize the passion which is the beginning of his madness in this opening scene. As Feder notes:
Lear not only uses his wrath to assert his failing authority, he makes it clear that it fills the lacuna Cordelia's "Nothing" has left in the composite image of himself as king and father loved above all else to which he had expected his daughters would respond on demand. If love cannot affirm his identity, then, at least for the present, wrath must replace it. 16
Tragedy, like the situation of the schizophrenic, is pregnant with irony, paradox, contradiction, and aporia. The double bind might logically produce frustration, anger, confusion, silence, but it, of course, does not in itself account for a psychosis. No one considers Cordelia mad, yet she seems to have faced a serious double-bind situation. How then does the double bind come to produce greater extremities of madness? For Bateson it is simply a matter of "repeated experience," most frequently involving mothers and sons. A constant bombardment of double-bind type situations would certainly be one factor in creating great ontological insecurity. If the double bind produced greater shock and/or passion then we could more easily understand how it might produce an extreme form of madness. If the individual entrapped by the double bind was for some reason lacking in resilience then we could all the more easily appreciate that the impossible dilemma might obfuscate the individual's sense of reality. We find all of these cases in tragedy but, in the final analysis, it is because the double bind is intricately integrated in the individual's sense of who he/she is and what the world is that it causes what amounts to an explosion of his/her sense of reality. Feder gives an apt encapsulation of this explosion as she continues to chart the unravelling of Lear's sense of reality.
No longer protected by the myth of his own omnipotence, Lear discovers qualities that he could not earlier have imagined. The reversal of roles has so shaken his image of himself that for the moment he does not respond with his customary anger. Reality, as he has apprehended it through the narrow focus of his impulses and his power, is now disintegrating before his eyes and, since his familiar responses will not serve him in these new circumstances, he experiences a sense of dissociation from his own perceptions, and thus from himself as an autonomous being. His cry, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" heralds the disintegration not only of his self image but of the natural world and political order that he had envisioned but as an extension of his own attributes and powers. 17
Our understanding to this point is that tragedy is the portrayal of the negation of an individual's sense of reality. Madness is the marker of this negation and therefore of tragedy as well. This negation is predicated upon a double-bind type situation which by its very nature threatens the individual's sense of reality. Finally, what remains to be clarified is the expression ‘a sense of reality.’ We can to a certain extent predict or rather set criteria for an individual's sense of reality. Reality, at a primary level, is the objects of the world combined with the conditions, senses and awareness which make them perceptible. Human reality, furthermore, must include other people and one's self and, as such, must include relationships, images, attitudes, emotions, principles, conventions, understandings, rules, values, and mores, as defined by a time, a place and a group of people. No individual shares completely in the reality of a social group and, therefore, defines and inhabits a unique version/perspective of the universe around him. As we speak of reality in the present context what is implied is that which is significant to an individual and through which an individual gains an awareness and completion of self.
Hallman outlines three basic theories of how the individual "develops an adequate sense of selfhood." 18 The first theory sees the individual defining herself or himself "through the process of identifying himself with a socio-cultural role." 19 In the second theory, "the individual may be guided by his own demon voice rather than by a set of social codes. He will identify himself with his own personal ideals, with images of what he himself is capable of becoming, with the inner visions which compel his respect." 20 Finally, the individual "will also seek identification with the external world in so far as the physical order can be distinguished as an agency separate from himself." 21 Looking at these propositions conversely we may identify some of the basic elements of an individual's reality as: 1) a socio-cultural structure in which she/he holds a position, 2) her/his principles, ideals, and visions, and 3) her/his relations with the physical world. One or more of these elements may be more or less dominant in a particular individual's sense of reality. A full discursive disclosure of an individual's reality would require an analysis of everything which might affect this individual. Such an analysis is simply not possible--even in the limited, artificial, frozen world of a play. However, in being conscious of these three elements we can assure ourselves of a reasonable, yet succinct, awareness of a character's reality.
In tragedy the double bind puts the individuals at odds with their own dreams and principles, denies their sense of position or belonging in society, contradicts the virtue of their intentions, cuts them off from the sustenance of contacts and relations with the world and finally estranges them from all attachments to order and meaning. The double bind of tragedy is therefore a paradoxical or "self-contradictory" situation or series of situations which negate the individual's sense of reality . This is the double bind which warrants and, in fact, defines the madness of tragedy.
From the perspective of the entrapped individual, the social and moral order, all dreams and principles, and even the physical world have been rendered meaningless. This meaninglessness is not the blasé meaninglessness of the existential intellectual. This meaninglessness is lived and felt; moreover, it comes into the individual's life at precisely the moment when meaning is essential; when understanding, order and significance are not merely distant intellectual preoccupations but, because of the dilemma he or she is living through, are an immediate necessity for psychic survival. This is the situation capable of producing the passion which attempts to cancel itself out by its own excess. This is the moment of madness.
Madness signals that reality--whatever the individual must do or think or connect to in order to be--has been destroyed or lost or made impossible by the tragic double bind. Whoever the tragic individual is or tries to be, or whatever she or he tries to be part of in order to know herself or himself, that, most frequently, is what creates the double bind in tragedy, and that reality is what is destroyed.
The basic subtextual questions of tragedy are always ontological: how to be? what to be? who to be? Heros of typical tragedies may be seen to address these questions in a wide variety of ways. They may address them tacitly or explicitly. They may be more or less confident in their own answers; may sin or save, succeed or fail, act or fail to act. As individuals are visited by mishap and suffering they must face their inability to answer these questions fruitfully within the confines of their senses of reality. At one and the same time they are compelled to answer these basic questions, and equally compelled not to answer them because of the pre-determined inadequacy of their answers. Reality is overwhelmed, contradicted, denied, cancelled, negated, fragmented, disoriented, or estranged; not simply by the reversals and passions of events but by the paradoxical and contradictory nature of the double bind and by the fact that the double bind is interwoven with the individual's sense of self and reality.
Madness, an expression of nothingness, is the logical outcome or response to the fact that the individual's reality has been reduced to a void, that a person has been forced beyond her/his boundaries into emptiness, that she/he must face the opposite of what to her/him is everything. The situation is such that something must be said and yet nothing can be said. Action must be taken, but no foundation for action exists and all possible outcomes are futile. The discourse of words, gestures, actions, silences and erratic behaviours which emerges from this situation has no content of its own. Having no content, no meaning, madness can only be understood by its causes or by virtue of the various misunderstandings and associations which enwrap it. We best understand madness in terms of what it is not, as being outside of or estranged from reality.
Our reading of tragedy, then, is as a drama of the negation of an individual's sense of reality. We can identify among the intimations of madness--the god, the omen, the curse, the evil spirit, the disease, the emotional crisis, and the witch. We can include in the discourse of madness--the howl, the gesture, the gun shot, the incoherent utterance, the fatal lethargy or silence born of a reality-negating double bind. This madness is pressed from contradiction and paradox, for it is what is said when nothing can be said; what is done when nothing can be done; what is, when things simply cannot be.
Notes
1. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 41.
2. Ibid, p. 42.
3. L. Trilling, The Opposing Self (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), pp. 38-9, quoted in The Divided Self , p. 41.
4. Hallman, pp. 17-18.
5. The Divided Self , p. 193.
6. The Halletts explicitly address the problem of the degree of the revenger's madness. They point out that "though the chaos passion engenders in the mind of the revenger is symbolized by insanity, the madness never so far overtakes him that, were he to control this passion, he could not reason normally again. His mind remains capable of ordering the world." (61) They thereby distinguish between the madness of Ophelia and that of Hamlet. They specifically define madness as "(1) the madness of the revenger , (2) the mode of experience toward which his actions are driving him (a mode which he passes into and out of), and (3) a state of being in which the ordering powers of the mind never entirely cease to function." (62)
Theodore Lidz, in his book, Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet , (New York: Basic Books, 1975) points out that "psychiatrists have been offering their opinions about Hamlet for almost two hundred years, about as long as there have been specialists in mental disorders to express opinions."(7) From Lidz's perspective the entire action and structure of Hamlet revolve around "the hero's distraction and the heroine's lunacy." Therefore Lidz also distinguishes the conditions of Hamlet and of Ophelia. He waffles on the question of Hamlet's madness, essentially accepting Hamlet's self diagnosis: "I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." (II, ii, 360-1) However, his description of the central image of the play corresponds to our analysis of tragedy.
The play holds its audience because in it we witness how the youth is kept from realizing his potential by the bitter and disillusioning ways of the world and from becoming the man we know he could become. Hamlet's world and his own self-esteem are torn apart by his mother's infidelity--and only then does he become the purveyor of death. The tragedy, therefore, is not basically his death or Ophelia's but, rather, the tragedy of the blasted hopes of youths with whom we identify.(26-27)
I would draw the reader's attention to the fact that these distinctions between degrees of madness or between real madness and "almost" or symbolic madness are not crucial to this or any other discussion of madness in literature. It is of little relevance to the present discussion whether Hamlet is or is not clinically mad or that Orestes, for example, is certifiable. My concern is the manner in which madness, as a label, a convention, an accusation, an intimation, a concept and a series of images is used in a tragedy to transmit the idea of the negation of reality. The degree or ontological status of madness is of concern here only to the point of the claim that tragedy portrays madness--to borrow an expression from Aristotle and Mandel--"of a certain magnitude."
Feder takes the time to note the distinction between real psychosis and the madness of literature, but essentially concludes with the intention to--quite rightly--draw little attention to the distinction through most of her argument.
Throughout this study I analyze literary representations of madness as ordered composites and fusions of the same elements--phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and environmental--that produce the apparent anarchic inner and overt symbolizations of the psychotic. I am, however, continually aware of the differences between actual insanity and its portrayal in literature. The madman of literature is, to some extent, modeled on the actual one, but his differences from such a model are at least as important as are his resemblances to it: he is rooted in a mythical or literary tradition in which distortion is a generally accepted mode of expression; furthermore, the inherent aesthetic order by which his existence is limited also gives his madness intrinsic value and meaning. A mad literary character must thus be approached on his own terms, through the verbal, dramatic, and narrative symbols that convey the unconscious processes he portrays and reveals. Even when a writer draws on his own experience of insanity as the subject or emotional source of his work, what is of most interest in his study is his adaptation of delusion, dissociation, or other aberrations to the creation of a unique view of his society, his art, and his own mind. (9-10)
Since, in the present context, we, like Feder, are interested in the symbolic meaning or use of madness within literary texts, there is no crucial distinction to be made between "real" madness or near, feigned, pseudo or lesser madness. All the madness we will be considering is symbolic madness.
From this perspective what I identify as madness in a tragedy may be at odds with some psychiatrists' assessments. For example, Andrew Croyden Smith, a psychiatrist, argues that Oedipus is never insane.
Oedipus is in as desperate a situation as Orestes, and he acts desperately--he blinds himself--but not insanely. He still grasps reality without distortion or misinterpretation, and his behaviour does not transgress what is understandable.(61)
R.D. Laing, as we have seen, would argue that a schizophrenic's behaviour never transgresses what is understandable, and that schizophrenia is, in fact, a grasping of or, at least, toward reality. This, however, is not the argument which I wish to engage. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Robert Spitzer, et al, American Psychiatric Association, 3rd ed., Washington D.C. 1980), "the diagnosis of schizophrenia requires that continuous signs of the illness have lasted for at least six months which always includes an active phase of psychotic symptoms, and may or may not include prodromal or residual phases." (184) On this basis it is difficult to see how any psychiatrist can claim or disclaim, on the authority of his being a psychiatrist, that a character in a play is insane. There are at least five possible grounds for labeling Oedipus's self blinding as madness: 1) the action is in itself, extraordinary and self-destructive, 2) the conventions dictate madness--he murdered his father, he has attempted to overshoot his moira , he seems to have been condemned by the gods, 3) it is repeatedly intimated in the play, by Creon and Jocasta, that Oedipus might be going mad, 4) his passion has overwhelmed and cast aside reason, 5) finally, and most significantly, his world has been torn apart; there is no sense of reality to which he can appeal for solace or guidance and his act of self-blinding emerges from this emptiness.
7. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise , p. 95.
8. B. Schuham, "The Double-Bind Hypothesis a Decade Later," Psychological Bulletin (November, 1967), Vol. 68, no. 5, pp. 409-415.
9. Coulter, p. 50.
10 .Gregory Bateson, et al, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," Behavioral Science , Vol. 1, 1956, pp. 253-4.
11. Ibid, p. 262.
12. Ibid, p. 262.
13. The Politics of Experience , p. 96.
14. Bateson et al, pp. 258-9.
15. Ibid, p. 259.
16. Feder, p.122.
17. Ibid, pp. 122-3.
18. Hallman, p. 16.
19. Ibid, p. 16.
20. Ibid, p. 17.
21. Ibid, p. 18.
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