Working on Foucault’s critique of psychology and psychoanalysis has made me very nervous around my numerous friends who are enthusiastically committed to the project of the psyche as either therapists, analysts, or patients. The cause of my nervousness was confirmed one morning at breakfast with friends, one of whom is a therapist. Over eggs and coffee, I casually mentioned Foucault’s History of Madness as the focus of my current scholarly investigations.
I should say here that, although I’ve never been psychoanalyzed, I myself have spent years in therapy and respect those practioners, like my friend, who work hard at listening and helping us feel better. But, over the course of more than a decade of relentlessly talking about myself, I grew not only bored by my own story but also increasingly disillusioned, experientially speaking, by the talking cure. Carefully working through Foucault’s critique of Freud in Madness has helped me to see why, to find a conceptual and historical language for that inchoate sense of dissatisfaction I felt, which, ultimately, led me to quit therapy. It has also led me, in my intellectual work, to question my previously unreflective use of psychoanalysis as a master code for deciphering the mysteries of the world.
In any event, four of us were there—two lesbian couples—enjoying a sunny Sunday brunch on a restaurant patio in Atlanta. We were talking about Madness and my partner, Tamara, enthusiastically said, “Yeah, Foucault basically argues that we don’t really know what madness is, that it’s socially constructed.”
The therapist friend, call her Laura, immediately replied: “I strongly disagree.” She paused for a moment, then continued: “Here’s my coming out … much more important than my coming out as a lesbian. Compared to this other thing, that was nothing.”
She went on to tell us that she was bipolar, and had been on medication for years. Working now as a psychotherapist, she says her experience with mental illness gives her special insight into her patients’ suffering.
“When I was nineteen, I was homeless and crazy,” she told us. “I was forcibly committed to Bellevue, twice. Do you know how crazy you have to be to be committed to Bellevue? To be picked up off the streets of New York and locked up? Madness is real.”
I nodded in sympathy, but was feeling defensive. I had to explain about “madness as a social construction.” A little voice in my head was whispering: she doesn’t get what Tamara just said, that something socially constructed can still be real.
“In Foucault, it’s a bit more complicated,” I began. “He’s really critiquing philosophical rationalism, going after Descartes. Plus the moral exclusions of bourgeois culture that result in the confinement not only of ‘crazy people,’ but of prostitutes, poor people, beggars, sodomites, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, and libertines. He’s tracing the historical movement or structure that defines an experience we have come to call madness.”
I paused. I’d been writing and thinking about madness so much lately, it came out of me automatically, like a prerecorded message:
“He’s asking us to question the category of ‘unreason’ that produced this great mass of excluded ‘others’ and locked them all up together, never to be seen or heard from again. It resulted from the Cartesian exile of the body from the mind, which allows the thinker to say: ‘I’m not mad.’”
Laura and her partner looked at me quizzically, polite and attentive but also, I thought, wondering how anyone could talk in weird paragraphs like that. Another kind of crazy. I finished my thought:
“Foucault’s work was taken up by the antipsychiatry movement, by David Cooper and others. They used it to contest the psychiatric establishment. To say that madness wasn’t real. But Foucault himself was never part of that movement.”
I had said my piece, but, still, it felt lame. My work felt like a big fat balloon, all puffed up, then suddenly pricked by the expert voice: the voice of psychosis and also the therapeutic voice that holds the key to the cure. It was the voice that “knew” better than I ever could.
But what am I to do with this true voice of madness that combines the perspective of the expert doctor and the suffering patient? I’ve had bouts of “madness” myself, never diagnosed except as clinical depression. Those years in the early nineties, when I was living in France, I was close to the edge of something deeper than depression. I don’t know what to call it. Alcohol-induced psychosis? Suicidal despair? Was my “madness” like the madness Foucault experienced, also in France, as a young man in the 1950s? He too drank until he blacked out, was repeatedly suicidal, almost went over the edge:
He would often be immobilized by emotional exhaustion for several days running after a nocturnal visit to a gay bar or cruising place. Following a suicide attempt in 1950, Foucault wrote to one of his friends, “Don’t make me say anything…. Let me get used to lifting my head again; let me leave behind the night with which I have grown used to surrounding myself even at midday.” There were several occasions on which Dr. Etienne [the doctor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure] had to intervene to prevent Foucault from taking his own life…. Foucault’s father took him to a psychiatrist … the famous Professor Jean Delay…. It is easy to imagine how damaging, how dangerous even, it must have been for a young gay man to find himself in this man’s office. The possibility of hospitalizing Foucault at Sainte-Anne was taken under serious consideration. It was probably Louis Althusser, who had gone through such a hospitalization a few years earlier, who talked Foucault out of it…. During the same period, Foucault became a serious alcoholic, to the point of needing to go through a detoxification treatment. (People recount that during his time in Sweden there were still moments when he would pass out, stone drunk).1
Madness is everywhere, I think, as I look back on the strange similarities between my experience and Foucault’s. Like me during my teens, twenties, and part of my thirties, Foucault was “mad” with alcohol even during the time he was writing Madness. In fact, I muse, it was there from the start, even in the family in which I grew up. My mother had narcolepsy (I think of her when I see Glenda Jackson playing Charlotte Corday in the Peter Brook production of Peter Weiss’s play, Marat/Sade). As a “sleeping sickness,” my mother’s narcolepsy would have earned her the title of “mentally ill” and a berth in an asylum, like Charenton, along with Sade and the raving lunatics who theatrically replay, in a brilliantly inverted mise en abyme of the society that excludes them, the bloody glories of an “enlightened” Revolution carried out in the name of the “Rights of Man.” But there’s more. My mother is not only a narcoleptic but also a lesbian, just like me. We’ve both been lucky, historically speaking, to escape the great confinement, if not for her narcolepsy or my alcoholism, then certainly for the perversion we both embody. My sister, who ran away from home as a teenager, didn’t escape, and was locked up for a while in a mental hospital in Denver. My brother, like me, is a recovering alcoholic. And my father, in the late 1960s, not long after History of Madness was published, was hospitalized for several months after suffering a nervous breakdown. So it is not an exaggeration to say, in a very real sense, that my entire (all-American) family is “crazy.”
“I know madness too,” I wanted to say to Laura.
I didn’t say it. I just sat there and listened, feeling deflated. But that voice is familiar, the one that says: “I know madness.” It sounds like Descartes. Was Laura speaking as someone with bipolar disorder or as the expert who can now talk about it and heal it in others? Turning madness into the object of scientific perception is part of what Foucault calls the effect of a suffocated strangeness: silenced and hidden away, unreason only reappears in the modern era as manageable, perceivable, measurable mental illness. To describe it as such is in itself an act of distancing: alcoholism, narcolepsy, bipolar disorder, lesbianism, perversion. To speak about madness as an object of knowing is tantamount to saying: I’m not mad.
So here’s the truth—no, not the truth, but a truth-effect, as Foucault might put it. I don’t really know how to juggle all these “mad” voices: Foucault’s, my friend’s, my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s, my brother’s, the multitudinous ones that swirl around in my own head. This project, in places so heady and philosophical, is closer to the core than I’d like to admit. And, ultimately, it leaves me not knowing.
It leaves me not knowing, and I don’t know what to call it. The experience is real, but I cannot name or diagnose it. Every experience is specific, singular: untranslatable. “It is strictly original,” Foucault says in Mental Illness and Psychology.2 “It’s idiosyncratic,” Kay Redfield Jamison tells us in her memoir about her own madness:
People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind’s rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet.3
FIGURE 3.2 Catherine wheel (breaking wheel)
FIGURE 3.3 Catherine wheel (firework)
What an exquisite description of a singularly beautiful but painful experience. Perhaps this is what Foucault means in the 1961 preface when he describes Madness as tracing the “rudimentary movements of an experience” (M xxxii). Like the Catherine wheel, the experience of madness is both the wheel of torture (figure 3.2) on which human spirits are broken and a magnificent spiraling firework of colored sparks and flames (figure 3.3). There is, I think, rereading Mental Illness and Psychology, something in this movement of madness that is repeated, an eternal recurrence of the Catherine wheel of history. As a professor of psychiatry who suffers from bipolar disorder, Jamison is, like my friend, the crazy expert. And Foucault himself, in his magisterial command of the history and language of psychiatry, is another expert fractured by madness. So there’s more of a connection—a swirling movement, perhaps—that links Foucault to Jamison—than either of them would be likely to admit. It’s there in the doubling, the turns of language that, without knowing, repeat themselves as images of crystallization and flight. For when, in Mental Illness and Psychology, in a passage initially written in the 1950s, Foucault describes “schizophrenia” decades before Jamison published her memoir, he sounds like the meteorologist’s daughter: “Thinking has disintegrated and proceeds in isolated fragments…. All that still emerges, as positive signs, are stereotypes, hallucinations, verbal schemata crystallized in incoherent syllables, and sudden affective interruptions crossing the demential inertia like meteors.”4
As a mad literary critic, I can’t help but see it. The serendipitous convergence is there: Jamison’s “fields of ice crystals” are like Foucault’s “verbal schemata crystallized;” the “meteorologist’s daughter … flying past stars” strangely, chiastically, mirrors Foucault’s “affective interruptions crossing … like meteors.” The terms are set, between an emergence of crystallization as stasis and a movement of crossing as flight. And movement is the way out of the trap. “If Foucault was able to recover from his psychological problems,” Eribon writes, “it is because he chose flight.”5 And flight, Foucault writes in a 1954 letter to Jean Barraqué, brings “frightful pleasures of which I had no inkling … of incomprehensible languages”: “the pleasure of being unnecessary, in excess.”6
The rotating Catherine wheel of history, of a planet, traces the movement of crystals and meteors, stasis and flight. The images keep converging, building on each other, serendipitously reconverging into new constellations among Jamison’s “circling rings” and “pallid moons.” But I still don’t know what madness is. However poetic or precise the language to describe it might be, on some level that language remains “incomprehensible.” For me, in the singularity of my encounter with Foucault’s queer madness, the crystals and the stars say it better than any diagnostic language of science.
Untranslatable, I reach toward myself as I’m left behind: the shattered light of a comet.
