Abstract
The previous chapter explored two important approaches to English interwar psychiatry, psychoanalytic and physicalist. These two approaches were interdependent and mutually influential, but were finally constituted by differences in their visions of madness and the mad. For psychoanalysis, symptoms had a kind of narrative sense: neurosis and psychosis emerged from interruptions or distortions to the formation of a coherent self, and from peculiar mechanisms of negotiation between the self and the world. For physicalist approaches, mental disorder or illness was a product or symptom of endocrinological or neurological malfunction, or a deterioration of the cells, or the blood, or a trauma to the brain or other organ. In other words, to simplify and schematise, psychoanalysis saw madness as a disease of the mind, physicalist psychiatry saw it as a disease of the body. In 1916 Freud underlined the differences between these two approaches. The symptoms of obsessional neurosis, he wrote, appear to be:
all-powerful guests from an alien world, immortal beings intruding into the turmoil of mortal life - these symptoms offer the plainest indication of there being a special region of the mind, shut off from all the rest. They lead… to a conviction of the existence of the unconscious in the mind; and that is precisely why clinical psychiatry, which is acquainted only with a psychology of consciousness, can deal with these symptoms in no other way than by declaring them a special sort of degeneracy.1
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Madness
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© 2003 Kylie Valentine
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Valentine, K. (2003). Madness. In: Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919366_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919366_4
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