Madness and Literature Research Papers (original) (raw)

Mental illness, mild or severe, is a topic with which many have been and are all too grimly familiar. In this beautifully illustrated synthesis, the noted historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull offers a sweeping and insightful analysis of the way that this fact has informed human culture. In twelve chapters, Scull moves from madness in antiquity through to the pharmacological and diagnostic revolutions of the late twentieth century. Along the way, his book covers demonic possession in the Middle Ages, melancholia in the Renaissance, the emergence of early hospitals and asylums, transformations in care, and the emergence of occupations concerned with the treatment and incarceration of the mentally disturbed. Important chapters at the end of the volume cover the dominance psychoanalysis after Freud enjoyed in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the emergence of biological psychiatry and the writing of all of the controversial editions of the new " Bible " for psychiatry and psychology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Rather than focusing his synthesis on the social, institutional, and conceptual transformation of madness in civilization, Scull uses the vast secondary literature on those topics to prepare background scenery for his preferred sources—canonical and noncanonical works of imagination, from across the arts and letters. Religion, poetry, operas, novels, concerts, plays, paintings, drawings, and films are Scull's chosen primary sources throughout each chapter, and although he carefully sets those works of culture in a secondary literature exploring meaningful economic, social, and political contexts, his real focus is on creative engagement with the implications of madness for being, philosophy, and politics. Some figures' past engagement with madness are, of course, so well known as to have become clichés; thankfully, Scull knows this and spends comparatively little time, for example, wallowing in war poetry from World War I. Much more to be appreciated are his less familiar discoveries—for example, John Dryden, George Frederick Handel, Émile Zola, and Otto Dix—or his somewhat subtler digs at authors such as Ernest Jones, Peter Gay, and Michel Foucault, who nevertheless emerge as workers at the cultural front in Scull's hands. In short, there is something here for every reader. This volume is, in truth, nearly flawless in execution, and its ambition will rightly place it among the works defining the historiography of madness for a generation. But is it right? A book this polished nearly begs the question. Yet some of the book's central concepts almost dissolve under bright light and higher magnification. Surely the word " civilization " deserves at least a contemplative pause. After all, the term does have a polemic tone. And should it be plural? At this point it seems too essentialist to assume that even a particular civilization dominated as a cultural construct from the Bible to Freud. Aside from brief nods to ancient civilizations, the world of Islam, and China, Scull seems to mean our civilization only, or at least our imagined civilization, that comforting one that came through a Great Books tradition and included in the very best schools works by figures such as Dryden, Zola, Freud, and Edmund Wilson. Next is the question of culture. There is a tendency in historical, philosophical, and even scientific studies of neurology, psychiatry, and madness to vest patients with profound meanings and import. Yet why are we so certain that the cultural representations and iconography of madness say much about madness at all? Here, of course, we encounter one of the dearest conceits of every undergraduate course on mad