And thereby we find the suggestion of the third cycle we must now trace: that of chimeras, of hallucinations, and of error—the cycle of non-being.
Let us listen to what is said in these fantastic fragments. Imagination is not madness. Even if in the arbitrariness of hallucination, alienation finds the first access to its vain liberty, madness begins only beyond this point, when the mind binds itself to this arbitrariness and becomes a prisoner of this apparent liberty. At the moment he wakes from a dream, a man can indeed observe: "I am imagining that I am dead": he thereby denounces and measures the arbitrariness of the imagination—he is not mad. He is mad when he posits as an affirmation of his death—when he suggests as having some value as truth—the still-neutral content of the image "I am dead." And just as the consciousness of truth is not carried away by the mere presence of the image, but in the act which limits, confronts,
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unifies, or dissociates the image, so madness will begin only in the act which gives the value of truth to the image. There is an original innocence of the imagination: "The imagination itself does not err, since it neither denies nor affirms but is fixed to so great a degree on the simple contemplation of an image";9 and only the mind can turn what is given in the image into abusive truth, in other words, into error, or acknowledged error, that is, into truth: "A drunk man thinks he sees two candles where there is but one; a man who has a strabismus and whose mind is cultivated immediately acknowledges his error and accustoms himself to see but one."10 Madness is thus beyond imagination, and yet it is profoundly rooted in it; for it consists merely in allowing the image a spontaneous value, total and absolute truth. The act of the reasonable man who, rightly or wrongly, judges an image to be true or false, is beyond this image, transcends and measures it by what is not itself; the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to its immediacy, and affirms it only insofar is it is enveloped by it: "Many persons, not to say all, succumb to madness only from being too concerned about an object."11 Inside the image, confiscated by it, and incapable of escaping from it, madness is nonetheless more than imagination, forming an act of undetermined content.
What is this act? An act of faith, an act of affirmation and of negation—a discourse which sustains and at the same time erodes the image, undermines it, distends it in the course of a reasoning, and organizes it around a segment of language. The man who imagines he is made of glass is not mad, for any sleeper can have this image in a dream; but he is mad if, believing he is made of glass, he thereby concludes that he is fragile, that he is in danger of breaking, that he must touch no object which might be too resistant, that he must in fact remain motionless, and so on. Such reasonings are those of a madman; but again we must note
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that in themselves they are neither absurd nor illogical. On the contrary, they apply correctly the most rigorous figures of logic. And Paul Zacchias has no difficulty finding them, in all their rigor, among the insane. Syllogism, in a man letting himself starve to death: "The dead do not eat; I am dead; hence I do not eat." Induction extended to infinity, in a man suffering from persecution delusions: "A, B, and C are my enemies; all of them are men; therefore all men are my enemies." Enthymeme, in another sufferer: "Most of those who have lived in this house are dead, hence I, who have lived in this house, am dead." The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language. "From these things," Zacchias concludes, "you truly see how best to discuss the intellect." The ultimate language of madness is that of reason, but the language of reason enveloped in the prestige of the image, limited to the locus of appearance which the image defines. It forms, outside the totality of images and the universality of discourse, an abusive, singular organization whose insistent quality constitutes madness. Madness, then, is not altogether in the image, which of itself is neither true nor false, neither reasonable nor mad;
nor is it, further, in the reasoning which is mere form, revealing nothing but the indubitable figures of logic. And yet madness is in one and in the other: in a special version or figure of their relationship.
Let us consider an example borrowed from Diemerbroek. A man was suffering from a profound melancholia. As with all melancholies, his mind was attached to a fixed idea, and this idea was for him the occasion of a constantly renewed sadness. He accused himself of having killed his
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son, and in the excess of his remorse, declared that God, for his punishment, had assigned a demon to tempt him, like the demon which had tempted the Lord. This demon he saw, spoke to, heard, and answered. He did not understand why those around him refused to acknowledge such a presence. Such then is madness: this remorse, this belief, this hallucination, these speeches; in short, this complex of convictions and images which constitutes a delirium. Now Diemerbroek tries to find out what are the "causes" of this madness, how it can have originated. And this is what he learns: this man had taken his son bathing and the boy had drowned. Hence the father considered himself responsible for his son's death. We can therefore reconstitute in the following manner the development of this madness: judging himself guilty, the man decides that homicide is execrable in the sight of God on High; whence it occurs to his imagination that he is eternally damned; and since he knows that the chief torment of damnation consists in being delivered into Satan's hands, he tells himself "that a horrible demon is assigned to him." This demon he does not as yet see, but since "he does not cease thinking of it," and "regards this notion as necessarily true," he imposes on his brain a certain image of this demon; this image is presented to his soul by the action of the brain and of the spirits with such insistence that he believes he continually sees the demon itself."12
Hence madness, as analyzed by Diemerbroek, has two levels; one is manifest to all eyes: an unwarranted melancholia in a man who wrongly accuses himself of having killed his son; a depraved imagination which pictures demons; a dismantled reason which converses with a phantom. But at a deeper level, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself, it advances by judgments and reasonings which connect
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together; it is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness. And this in a double sense, since we find here both what makes madness true (irrefutable logic, perfectly organized discourse, faultless connection in the transparency of a virtual language) and what makes it truly madness (its own nature, the special style of all its manifestations, and the internal structure of delirium).
But still more profoundly, this delirious language is the ultimate truth of madness insofar as it is madness's organizing form, the determining principle of all its manifestations, whether of the body or of the soul. For if Diemerbroek's melancholic converses with his demon, it is because the demon's image has been profoundly impressed by the movement of spirits on the still-ductile substance of the brain. But in its turn, this organic figure is merely the other side of a preoccupation which has obsessed the patient's mind; it represents what might be called the sedimentation in the body of an infinitely repeated discourse apropos of the punishment God must reserve for sinners guilty of homicide. The body and the traces it conceals, the soul and the images it perceives, are here no more than stages in the syntax of delirious language.
And lest we be criticized for elaborating this entire analysis around a single observation from a single author (a privileged observation, since it concerns melancholic
delirium), we shall also seek confirmation of the fundamental role of delirious discourse in the classical conception of madness in another author, of another period, and apropos of a very different disease. This is a case of "nymphomania" observed by Bienville. The imagination of a young girl, "Julie," had been inflamed by precocious reading and
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aroused by the remarks of a servant girl "initiated into the secrets of Venus, ... a virtuous handmaiden in the mother's eyes" but "a dear and voluptuous stewardess of the daughter's pleasures." Yet Julie combats these—to tier-new desires with all the impressions she has received in the course of her education; to the seductive language of novels, she opposes the lessons of religion and virtue; and despite the vivacity of her imagination, she does not succumb to disease so long as she possesses "the strength to reason thus with herself: it is neither lawful nor virtuous to obey so shameful a passion."13 But the wicked remarks, the dangerous readings increase; at every moment, they render more intense the agitation of the weakening fibers; then the fundamental language by which she had hitherto resisted gradually gives way: "Nature alone had spoken hitherto; but soon illusion, chimera, and extravagance played their part; at length she acquired the unhappy strength to approve in herself this horrible maxim: nothing is so beautiful nor so sweet as to obey the desires of love." This fundamental discourse opens the gates of madness: the imagination is freed, the appetites continually increase, the fibers reach the final degree of irritation. Delirium, in its lapidary form of a moral principle, leads straight to the convulsions which can endanger life itself.
At the end of this last cycle which had begun with the liberty of the hallucination and which closes now with the rigor of delirious language, we can conclude:
1. In madness, for the classical age, there exist two forms of delirium. A special, symptomatic form, proper to some of the diseases of the mind and especially to melancholia; in this sense we can say that there are diseases with or without delirium. In any case, such delirium is always manifest; it forms an integral part of the signs of madness; it is immanent to madness's truth and constitutes only a sector of it. But there exists another delirium which is not always mani-
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fest, which is not formulated by the sufferer himself in the course of the disease, but which cannot fail to exist in the eyes of anyone who, seeking to trace the disease from its origins, attempts to formulate its riddle and its truth.
2. This implicit delirium exists in all the alterations of the mind, even where we would expect it least. In cases of no more than silent gestures, wordless violence, oddities of conduct, classical thought has no doubt that madness is continually subjacent, relating each of these particular signs to the general essence of madness. James's Dictionary expressly urges us to consider as delirious "the sufferers who sin by fault or excess in any of various voluntary actions, in a manner contrary to reason and to propriety; as when they use their hand, for example, to tear out tufts of wool or in an action similar to that which serves to catch flies; or when a patient acts against his custom and without cause, or when he speaks too much or too little against his normal habits; if he abounds in obscene remarks, being, when in health, of measured speech and decent in his discourse, and if he utters words that have no consequence, if he breathes more faintly than he must, or uncovers his private parts in the presence of those who are near him. We also regard as being in a state of delirium those whose minds are affected by some derangement in the organs of sense, or who use them in a fashion not customary to them, as when, for example, a sufferer is deprived of some voluntary action or acts inhabitually."14
3. Thus understood, discourse covers the entire range of madness. Madness, in the classical sense, does not designate so much a specific change in the mind or in the body, as the existence, under the body's alterations, under the oddity of conduct and conversation, of a delirious discourse. The simplest and most general definition we can give of classical madness is indeed delirium: "This word is derived from lira, a furrow; so that deliro actually means to
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move out of the furrow, away from the proper path of reason."15 Hence it is not surprising to find the eighteenth-century nosographers often classifying vertigo as a madness, and more rarely hysterical convulsions; this is because it is often impossible to find in hysterical convulsions the unity of a language, while vertigo affords the delirious affirmation that the world is really "turning around." Such delirium is a necessary and sufficient reason for a disease to be called madness.
4. Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature. That the essence of madness can be ultimately defined in the simple structure of a discourse does not reduce it to a purely psychological nature, but gives it a hold over the totality of soul and body; such discourse is both the silent language by which the mind speaks to itself in the truth proper to it, and the visible articulation in the movements of the body. Parallelisms, complements, all the forms of immediate communication which we have seen manifested, in madness are suspended between soul and body in this single language and in its powers. The movement of passion which persists until it breaks and turns against itself, the sudden appearance of the image, and the agitations of the body which were its visible concomitants—all this, even as we were trying to reconstruct it, was already secretly animated by this language. If the determinism of passion is transcended and released in the hallucination of the image, if the image, in return, has swept away the whole world of beliefs and desires, it is because the delirious language was already present—a discourse which liberated passion from all its limits, and adhered with all the constraining weight of its affirmation to the image which was liberating itself.
It is in this delirium, which is of both body and soul, of both language and image, of both grammar and physiol-
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ogy, that all the cycles of madness conclude and begin. It is this delirium whose rigorous meaning organized them from the start. It is madness itself, and also, beyond each of its phenomena, its silent transcendence, which constitute the truth of madness.
A last question remains: In the name of what can this fundamental language be regarded as a delirium? Granting that it is the truth of madness, what makes it true madness and the originating form of insanity? Why should it be in this discourse, whose forms we have seen to be so faithful to the rules of reason, that we find all those signs which will most manifestly declare the very absence of reason?
A central question, but one to which the classical age has not formulated a direct answer. We must approach it obliquely, interrogating the experiences which are to be found in the immediate neighborhood of this essential language of madness: that is, the dream and the delusion.
The quasi-oneiric character of madness is one of the constant themes in the classical period. A theme which doubtless derives from a very old tradition, to which Andre du Laurens, at the end of the sixteenth century, still testifies; for him melancholia and dreams have the same origin and bear, in relation to truth, the same value. There are "natural dreams" which represent what, during the preceding day, has passed through the senses or the understanding but happens to be modified by the specific temperament of the subject. In the same way, there is a melancholia which has a merely physical origin in the disposition of the sufferer and alters, for his mind, the importance, the value, and so to speak the coloration of real events. But there is also a melancholia which permits the sufferer to predict the future, to speak in an unknown language, to see beings ordinarily invisible; this melancholia originates in a supernatural intervention, the same which brings to the sleeper's mind those
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dreams which foresee the future, announce events to come, and cause him to see "strange things."
But in fact the seventeenth century preserves this tradition of the resemblance between madness and dreams only to brea
k it all the more completely and to generate new, more essential relations. Relations in which madness and dreams are not only understood in their remote origin or in their imminent value as signs, but are confronted as phenomena, in their development, in their very nature.
Dreams and madness then appeared to be of the same substance. Their mechanism was the same; thus Zacchias could identify in sleepwalking the movements which cause dreams, but which in a waking state can also provoke madness.
In the first moments when one falls asleep, the vapors which rise in the body and ascend to the head are many, turbulent, and dense. They are so dark that they waken no image in the brain; they merely agitate, in their chaotic dance, the nerves and the muscles. The same is true in the frenzied, in maniacs: they suffer few hallucinations, no false beliefs, but an intense agitation which they cannot manage to control. Let us continue the evolution of sleep:
after the first period of turbulence, the vapors which rise to the brain are clarified, their movement organized; this is the moment when fantastic dreams are born; one sees miracles, a thousand impossible things. To this stage corresponds that of dementia, in which one is convinced of many things "which are not in real life." Then at last the agitation of the vapors is calmed altogether; the sleeper begins to see things still more clearly; in the transparency of the henceforth limpid vapors, recollections of the day before reappear in accordance with reality; such images are at most transposed, on one point or another—as occurs in melancholies, who recognize all things as they are, "in particular those who are not merely distracted." Between the gradual de-
Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness) Page 11