May 27, 2020
Why Is It So Difficult Not To Be Crazy?
What Every Schoolchild Should Know
I am trying to write here something that I wish my father, mother, or an educator would have told me when I was young. Now, after 30 years of working in the mental health field, I may have a few echoes worth jotting down.
I once thought it was possible to go crazy, then realized that in the age of Trump and Hillary, COVID and quarantines, the whole world has gone mad.
Any claim that society could round up its crazy people, that the woolly-eyed madmen could all be put away in asylums, is a belief in Santa Claus. For with a closer look, and a tighter grip on my anxiety over admitting this, it is evident that madness entered into the streets quite some time ago. For any schoolchild knows, those Santa Clauses you find in department stores are all just for show.
Foucault in his celebrated Histoire du Folie (History of Madness) claims that in 1656 a reasonable French society first gathered together its ‘unreasonables’ and put them into hospitals (the Hôpital Générale), then the great Pinel came along in 1797 and freed them by transferring them into madhouses that then became the psychiatric asylums of the 19th-20th century.
With all due respect to Foucault’s admirable erudition, I get the impression he either believes in Santa Claus or became mad in writing his book.
There is no quarantine for madness.
I prefer Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geists (Phenomenology of the Spirit) which recounts not only how the whole world goes mad, but if society were ever to attempt to confine madness, then it would have to intern itself.
It is not those few who are rounded up in asylums and hospitals that are mad (Foucault), or just those who are triggered to become mad because of everyday events, rather madness is a constant. One doesn’t need to look to society or go back hundreds of years to discover this constant of madness, just look at a family and the children running around the house! Obviously, the kids are a little crazy, but there is no need to confine them or moralize them or give them psychotropes to calm them down. Just let them play before they have to enter into the grown-up world of work and lying.
Not only is madness never equal to the unreasonable, but madness is not a psychopathological illness or disorder — a psychosis, perversion, narcissistic personality disorder, compulsive-obsessive, etc.
For example, there is nothing inherently crazy about a perversion or pedophilia: just as it is impossible for teachers not to transmit their love to students (pedagogy), it is impossible for parents not to fondle and touch their children. What is important is not to confuse a mad use of perversion-pedophilia and a perverse-pedophiliac structure. The latter, far from being a mere deviation from the norm, is constitutive of the human.
There is no cure for madness.
To think there is a cure for madness, that it can simply be contained and reduced to an illness or disorder, is a prophylactic measure: it avoids the real issues facing mental health today by offering us the reassurance of a pill and the imperative to remain calm.
For example, some people confuse madness with psychosis and think it is possible to cure madness since it is possible to treat psychosis. No doubt, there may be a possible treatment for psychosis, but since it is only a possibility, there may also not be. In the end, nothing really happens with the possible treatments of psychosis since when things don’t work, which is most of the time, they just give their patients psychotropes and sit them in the corner weaving baskets.
If madness has its own dynamics that can not be aligned with unreason, physiological illness, or a behavioral disorder, then it would serve me, and perhaps others, well to give a brief outline of the conditions of madness.
First, madness supposes a kind of moral laziness: an irresponsibility towards one’s act and speech. Here, madness is the logic of attenuating circumstances: it is when someone continually blames others for their own mistakes, or claims they did not mean to do something, but did anyway. In the end, it is when someone is willing to only assume responsibility for their feelings and a self, their own, or others, while their language is always out of synch with an act.
Second, madness supposes a beautiful soul: someone who thinks everything others do is wrong or inadequate, while what they do is better; someone who thinks the cause of all their troubles is society or their family, while they themselves are innocent. Or inversely, it is someone who thinks what society does is good, normal, and powerful, and they are bad, abnormal, and impotent. In short, the beautiful soul is someone who is always misrecognized, caught between being the hero or the victim of a representation of the self in relation to the world.
Third, madness supposes that you are being spoken by the Other(s): it is when someone has identified with the Other’s speech; it is the preferred son, for example, the spoilt child who has been wrapped and packaged by his mother’s speech so that he has no room to take responsibility for his own speech or desire; it is what happens in the world of work when a boss speaks for and about you so that you become exploitable in an economic, if not sexual manner (the MeToo movement recognized this madness); it is when racists identify with a speech that began long before they were born, but which they have no critical relation to: they are only spoken, not speaking; it is when the people who immigrate to the U.S. end up losing their roots, their heritage, and culture to become ideal-workers spoken from the place of the American Dream. In each case, before one begins to speak, one is spoken from the place of the Other, if this excentric place of the Other is misrecognized or identified with, there is a readymade madness that is not necessarily paranoiac, just crazy.
In short, nothing is natural about not being crazy; it is just difficult not to be.
Scully Maywood
Spring 2020
Los Angeles, CA
