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"Madness"
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Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature
The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical “inner-space” life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.
Journal Article
Entre a tristeza e a ira: emoções em disputa nas narrativas sobre o crime de uma mulher (São Paulo, Brasil, 1939)
In 1939, Marília, a thirty-year-old Brazilian housewife, residing in São Paulo, killed her lover, Armando, with an axe and gunshots. She turned herself in to the police and was admitted by her brother-in-law to the Pinel Sanatorium, a psychiatric institution catering to the city's more affluent social groups. The sources for this research include clinical documents—such as a medical report, lab tests, prescriptions, and a letter written by Marília—as well as newspaper articles from São Paulo that reported on the crime. Drawing on theoretical and methodological frameworks from the socio-cultural history of emotions, the history of women and gender, and the history of madness and psychiatry, this article identifies the emotions that surface in the different documents recounting Marília's story. Our primary objective is to analyze these emotions, not to explore their specific meanings, but to understand what they produce. I aim to comprehend how the collection of these emotions, as articulated across the various narratives I examine, operates through shared meanings to construct both an event and a subject: Marília. The different narratives about her life, including her own, and the crime she committed, highlight two central emotions: sadness and anger. This analysis demonstrates that these emotions operate within an emotional framework that defines places, possibilities, and limitations for women, grounded in the perception of their interconnected bodies and minds, social markers of difference, and expert discourses. It also reveals that emotional resistances are persistent.
Journal Article
A Beat in Time
The Beat generation of writers mounted a sustained attack on postwar models of temporality—the corporate boardroom, the procreative nuclear family, the dystopic scenario of atomic futurity—through a politics and aesthetics of disengagement. Their literary works aspired to the condition of immediacy, often drawing on jazz improvisation, Zen Buddhism, and the celebration of everyday life. Writings by Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, William Burroughs, John Wieners discussed in this essay, offered a series of alternate temporalities through three frames: a poetics of dailiness and the quotidian; technologies and materialities of presence; ideals of Beat futurity and utopia. The essay draws on queer and disability theorists for whom the phenomenology of time is experienced by bodies regarded as “out of time,” either because they don’t conform to heterosexual scenarios of compulsory reproduction or because they fail to “fit” in norms of physical and cognitive health.
Journal Article
My Strategies for Dealing With Radical Psychotic Doubt: A Schizo-Something Philosopher’s Tale
A short autobiographical piece on different coping strategies for handling psychosis symptoms.
Journal Article
Uses and Misuses of Recorded Mental Health Lived Experience Narratives in Healthcare and Community Settings: Systematic Review
Abstract
Mental health lived experience narratives are first-person accounts of people with experience of mental health problems. They have been published in journals, books and online, and used in healthcare interventions and anti-stigma campaigns. There are concerns about their potential misuse. A four-language systematic review was conducted of published literature characterizing uses and misuses of mental health lived experience narratives within healthcare and community settings. 6531 documents in four languages (English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) were screened and 78 documents from 11 countries were included. Twenty-seven uses were identified in five categories: political, societal, community, service level and individual. Eleven misuses were found, categorized as relating to the narrative (narratives may be co-opted, narratives may be used against the author, narratives may be used for different purpose than authorial intent, narratives may be reinterpreted by others, narratives may become patient porn, narratives may lack diversity), relating to the narrator (narrator may be subject to unethical editing practises, narrator may be subject to coercion, narrator may be harmed) and relating to the audience (audience may be triggered, audience may misunderstand). Four open questions were identified: does including a researcher’s personal mental health narrative reduce the credibility of their research?: should the confidentiality of narrators be protected?; who should profit from narratives?; how reliable are narratives as evidence?)
Journal Article
Cripping environmental education: rethinking disability, nature, and interdependent futures
In this article, I call for a cripping of environmental education as a necessary move in shifting away from the field’s current conceptions of disability as defect and deficiency, and towards disrupting the structures and processes that operate as normalizing technologies within ableism/sanism. Through an examination of the ways that the field of environmental education has/has not engaged critical disability politics, I illuminate how disability is not often included within environmental education literature. When it is, it is often through the use of disability as metaphor or through recommendations for best practices in accommodating disabilities. More often though within environmental education, disability has operated as a hidden curriculum, underpinning much of the field’s curricular, pedagogical, and even philosophical foundations. Through a cripping of the field these compulsory able-bodied/able-minded assumptions are made apparent. I suggest that by centering crip bodies and minds through cripistemologies, we might enable new ways of knowing, being in, connecting to, and understanding the natural world.
Journal Article
In the Beginning Was Madness: Divine Folly in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia
This essay examines how Shakespeare’s King Lear and Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia employ fool figures to articulate truths inaccessible through rational discourse. The Fool in King Lear speaks through riddles, songs, and prophecies, revealing uncomfortable realities about power and identity that direct statement cannot safely convey. His performed madness contrasts with Lear’s genuine descent into insanity, yet both states access knowledge unavailable to those maintaining social position and sanity. Tarkovsky’s Domenico embodies the Russian Orthodox tradition of yurodstvo (holy foolishness), performing sacred madness through impossible rituals and apocalyptic prophecy. His mathematical impossibility—“1 + 1 = 1”—expresses spiritual unity that logic cannot grasp. Both figures draw on Plato’s distinction in the Phaedrus between divine madness and human pathology, where four forms of god-sent mania provide superior insight into rational thought. Through Erasmus’s humanist satire and Foucault’s analysis of reason’s violent separation from unreason, the essay traces how Western culture moved from integrating fool-wisdom to confining it as pathology. The protective mechanisms enabling fool-speech—performance frames, liminal positioning, sacred authorization—reveal society’s ambivalent need for dangerous truths. As contemporary culture increasingly medicalizes cognitive deviation, these masterworks preserve essential epistemological functions, demonstrating why certain truths require the fool’s disruptive voice.
Journal Article
Madness and Idiocy: Reframing a Basic Problem of Philosophy of Psychiatry
A basic question of philosophy of psychiatry is “what is madness (mental illness, mental disorder…)?” Contemporary thinkers err by framing the problem as one of defining madness in contrast with sanity. For the Late Modern theorist of madness, the problem was not one of defining madness in contrast with sanity, but in contrast with “idiocy”—the apparent diminution or abolition of one’s reasoning power. This altered reading of the problem has an important consequence. For what distinguishes madness from idiocy is not the failure, absence, or lack of reason, but its presence—albeit in a perverse and mutated form. For the Late Modern theorist, madness was always, by its very nature, infused with reason. This “infusion” of madness by reason has two consequences for philosophy of psychiatry today: it reframes the project of defining “mental disorder,” and it provides intellectual scaffolding for the emerging movement known as Mad Pride, mad resistance, or mad activism.
Journal Article
Fairy Tales, Madness and Total War
This paper sets in context the melodramatic conclusion to R. G. Collingwood’s
(1938) and his exceptional praise of T. S. Eliot’s
(1922). I suggest that the background to this conclusion, with its emphasis on the role of emotion in human agency, must embrace an extraordinary series of essays composed in the mid nineteen-thirties, and which until their publication in 2005 were known as the “folktale manuscripts.” Collingwood’s critique of anthropological method in these essays, with his discussions of ritual, magic and the alleged madness of the so-called “savage mind,” feed into the anxieties about civilization’s condition felt through his reception of Eliot’s poetical diagnosis, and they are developed in Collingwood’s own compelling essay of 1936, “Mad Goes Mad.” The essay is Collingwood’s account of a disease of mind which Art, in the event, proved powerless to cure.
Journal Article