Madness and Literature

in: Lutz Greisiger, Alexander van der Haven & Sebastian Schüler (eds.), Religion und Wahnsinn um 1900: Zwischen Pathologisierung und Selbstermächtigung / Religion and Madness Around 1900: Between Pathology and Self-Empowerment, Wurzburg: Ergon Verlag 2017, 101-135.

I draw theoretically on the works of critical pedagogues to unpack my instructor experiences developing and teaching critical disability studies (CDS) and Mad studies in university contexts. My intent is to insert CDS and Mad pedagogies into the literature in adult education, where such discourses have been and continue to be absent from critical pedagogy in general and from teacher education more specifically. In this paper, I offer a critique of the absence of CDS and Mad studies‑informed approaches and perspectives in critical pedagogy in ways that may inform adult education. CDS and Mad studies can also help us to unpack the often ableist and sanist nature of Canadian teacher education.

Mes théorisations font appel aux travaux de pédagogues critiques afin d’analyser mes expériences de développement et d’enseignement des études critiques du handicap (« critical disability studies ») et des études de la folie (« mad studies ») en contexte universitaire. Mon intention est d’intégrer les pédagogies de ces deux champs dans les travaux sur l’éducation des adultes, au sein desquels ces discours ont été et continuent d’être absents de la pédagogie critique en général et de la formation du personnel enseignant en particulier. Dans ce texte, j’offre une critique de l’absence, dans la pédagogie critique, d’approches et de perspectives s’inspirant des études critiques du handicap et de la folie qui pourraient contribuer à l’éducation des adultes. Ces champs d’études peuvent aussi nous aider à déconstruire la nature souvent capacitiste et « sain-iste » (« sanist ») de la formation du personnel enseignant au Canada.

A queer theory informed analysis of the findings of an ethnographic study detailing the experiences of children in relation to diagnosis within a psychiatric hospital is provided in this article. The perspective of the diagnosing psychiatrist in relation to symptoms and diagnoses is compared to the children's understandings, along with an analysis of the consequences of the normative approach inherent to bio-medical psychiatrization. The dehumanising process of psychiatric diagnosis, which strips people of their dignity, leads to what we have termed psychiatrised abjection. The act of diagnosis is shown not only to categorize, but also to 'other', to make abject and to make queer.

Editorial Dossier “Cuerpos y estéticas de la locura”

Por: María Angélica Ospina Martínez
Doctora en Antropología
Investigadora Red de Etnopsiquiatría: Estudios Sociales y de la Cultura
Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

Con esta colección de trabajos, que bautizamos “Cuerpos y estéticas de la locura”, hacemos eco al llamado a la decolonización de la aesthesis. Según Walter Mignolo, el secuestro occidental de esta noción a manos de la estética —como “sensación de lo bello”— restringió, sin más, lo que originalmente aludía a “un fenómeno común a todos los organismos vivientes con sistema nervioso” (2010,10-25). Aesthesis, más allá, es un terreno de intersección entre sensación y percepción, experiencia y conocimiento, intimidad y contexto… entre saber, pensar, hacer y sentir en y desde los cuerpos.

Para este retorno a la dimensión más amplia del concepto, propusimos una vía que creímos conveniente: la locura, ámbito donde el caos interpela al orden. Desde y frente a ella, la aesthesis desborda sentidos, algunos discordantes, que rozan desde la más íntima experiencia hasta los enclaves más férreos de la sociedad, la historia y la cultura. Locura que sigue tocando estésicamente la anormalidad y el sufrimiento, el terror y la violencia, el conocimiento experto y las disciplinas corporales, pero que también se vuelve desafío estético en su imputada monstruosidad, como objeto de testarudos regímenes de representación.

Los siete artículos presentados se orientan en esa vía. A través de la obra El infarto del alma, de Diamela Eltit y Paz Errázuriz, una suerte de relato visual que documenta las historias de amor en un hospital psiquiátrico chileno, la literata venezolana Celiner Ascanio explora la categoría de desmonstrificación como artefacto cultural crítico. Por su parte, el psiquiatra y antropólogo colombiano Abel Guerrero González se desliza fenomenológicamente por la particular potencia creativa del cuerpo sufriente de Frida Kahlo y la mediación artística de sus experiencias autoscópicas. La doctora en ciencias naturales y antropóloga argentina Anahi Sy selecciona la historia clínica de una migrante española, internada en un psiquiátrico de la provincia de Buenos Aires por casi 45 años, para analizar cómo, en nombre del discurso psiquiátrico, se reproducen estereotipos como la peligrosidad y la anormalidad femeninas. Meira del Busto, psicóloga y artista visual colombiana, revisa la relación entre psiquiatría y fotografía en la emergencia de un régimen visual científico en el siglo XIX, marcado por una pretensión de objetividad mecánica. A su turno, el historiador
colombiano Jairo Gutiérrez Avendaño elige los murales del Hospital Mental de Antioquia, realizados por el pintor Antonio Herrera, con el propósito de revisar la múltiple producción de sentidos sobre la locura en Colombia en la década de 1980.

Finalmente, dos antropólogos colombianos toman como pretexto la experiencia ritual para exponer la relación entre aesthesis, cuerpo y locura. De un lado, Andrés Felipe Ospina Enciso explica el rol de la religión evangélica en el tratamiento de la aparición de espíritus malignos en el pueblo indígena Nasa Wesx, conflicto mental y social que refleja a su vez la misma doble condición del mal, en la coyuntura del posacuerdo de paz con las FARC. De otro lado, María Angélica Ospina Martínez registra la potencia estésica en la producción de conocimiento etnográfico cuando se transitan las atmósferas rituales, a partir del trabajo de campo en una serie de misas católicas de sanación y liberación espiritual.

La Red de Etnopsiquiatría: Estudios Sociales y de la Cultura agradece profundamente la invitación de la Revista Corpo-grafías a participar en su espacio de reflexión académica. Sea esta una oportunidad para continuar hermanando, desde una vocación crítica, las artes y las ciencias sociales en Colombia.

Referencias
Mignolo, Walter. (2010). Aiesthesis decolonial. Calle 14, 4 (4): 10-25.

Long Review: Mad, Bad and Sad is a monumental work which deserves our atten- tion. Unwieldy intellectually, this work is nevertheless full of fresh insights and contentious suppositions, and is bound to provoke the reader in interesting ways. The writing is full of verve; it’s like a stallion running through the British Library reading rooms!

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course description. Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

Nel contesto del pensiero greco antico, la transizione fra età arcaica e classica (VI-V sec. a.C.) fu un momento di notevole importanza per l'inizio di un'approfondita riflessione sulla follia, soprattutto alla luce di una sua concettualizzazione come "disturbo mentale". Le "Baccanti" di Euripide possono fornire numerose chiavi di lettura per intendere l'approccio greco alla follia da un punto di vista non solo terapeutico, ma anche culturale, sociale e religioso.

In this article, the relation between philosophy and madness is examined from both the  perspective of phenomenological philosophy and psychiatry, and the narratives of those with a diagnosis of psychosis. Three theses are proposed: 1) a (phenomenological) philosophical attitude toward psychotic experience yields more insightful, substantial descriptions of  adness, 2) serious and consistent philosophical reasoning shows remarkable affinities and similarities with patterns in psychotic experience, and 3) from madness protophilosophical thought springs forward. In following the lines of intense mad ‘hyper-reflexivity’ and perplexity we may discover a rich world of para-philosophy, one that corresponds with philosophical ideas driven by a less strained reflexivity and wonder. By examining the relation between philosophy and madness, both parties may profit: psychotic experience may be further clarified and brought into easier relation with non-psychotic thought and practice, and philosophy may gain by widening its range of perspectives on reality and human subjectivity.

Lo spirito della cultura rinascimentale italiana è indagato attraverso le suggestioni del massimo capolavoro letterario del Cinquecento: due tematiche dell'"Orlando furioso", la Fortuna e la follia, già esplorate nella letteratura di tutti i tempi, permettono, nell'originale (re)interpretazione ariostesca, di decifrare un'intera stagione culturale.

This study is devoted to the emotional experience of the famous Renaissance sculptor, goldsmith, and writer, Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), as it is portrayed in his life writing, the Vita. Providing the variety of arguments on the connection between the artist and contemporary intellectuals, who attended the Florentine Academy (1540–1583) together, I demonstrate that Cellini’s literary production can be examined productively against the background of Neoplatonic thought. In particular, Marsilio Ficino’s On Love, first published in the vernacular Italian in 1544, helps to establish an explanation of what Cellini meant when he decided to play the cornet while falling in love simultaneously with a young boy and girl, or  how he justified kicking or punching his servants, or why he did not kill his adversary, the artist Baccio Bandinelli, when he had the chance. These cases of radical affectivity are inscribed into Ficino’s concept of the “melancholy genius” manifesting melancholic madness. In Cellini’s Vita, the latter can not only turn humans almost into beast, literally (for example, in a bat); but, properly tempered by the means of music and poetry, as well as of individual and collective magic, it elevates one’s soul “on high,” which corresponds to the Neoplatonic concept of divine madness.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1.  Benvenuto Cellini and the Florentine Academy
1.1 Why did the Italian academies emerge?
1.2 Academic movement before the Florentine Academy
1.3 The Florentine Academy
1.4 Benvenuto Cellini’s writings in the context of the Florentine Academy
Chapter 2.  “Essendo io per natura malinconico”: Benvenuto Cellini and the Ficinian Legacy
2.1 “Grand theories” and “grounded” early-modern artists
2.2 Marsilio Ficino’s On Love
2.3 “Melancholy genius” concept
2.4 (Neo)Platonic love
Chapter 3.  “Tu ten sei gito a contemplar su ’n Cielo l’alto Fattore”: Benvenuto Cellini Ascending on High
3.1 Esoteric knowledge and censorship
3.2 “Furor divino” and “diabolico furore”
3.3 Different kinds of furor divino in the Vita
Conclusion

Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) wrote the first French-language synthesis of transcul-tural psychiatry ("Ethno-psychiatrie") for the French Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale in 1965. His work casts new light on the early development of transcultural psychiatry in relation to scientific communities and networks, particularly on the role of Georges Devereux (1908–1985). The Ellenberger archives offer the possibility of comparing published texts with archival ones to create a more nuanced account of the history of transcultural psychiatry, and notably of the psychological treatment of Native Americans. This paper examines some key moments in the intellectual trajectories of Devereux and Ellenberger, including Devereux's dispute with Ackerknecht, the careers of Devereux and Ellenberger as therapists at the Menninger Foundation (Topeka, Kansas) in the 1950s, and their respective positions in the research network developed by McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) with the newsletter Transcultural Research in Mental Health Problems. Finally, I consider their ties to other important figures in this field as it transitioned from colonial medicine to academic medicine, including Roger Bastide (France), Henri Collomb and the Ortigues (France and Africa), as well as Eric Wittkower and Brian Murphy (Canada) and Alexander Leighton (United States and Canada).

Abstract
When “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether” was published in 1845 (the same year in which The Lunatics Act was implemented in England, dramatically changing the concept of the insane from prisoner to patient), Poe’s readers were already familiar with a whole gallery of “madmen.” Up to that point, though, their mental disorders had been described as inherited faults, primarily qualified as “hypertrophy of the senses” and acted out within domestic spaces. “The System,” by contrast, is the first and only short story by Poe that deals with mental illness as a recognized pathology and with a lunatic asylum, the ideal locus for its treatment and, in particular, for Philippe Pinel’s “moral treatment” here called “the system of soothing.”
Because of its humorous tone, most of Poe’s critics classified this tale as a satire. What I argue is that Poe’s irony is directed to America at large through the narrator. Poe’s intention is to cast doubts on the supposed philanthropic aims of these institutions’ founders, while operating in the historical context of social policy development. Lastly, I address a larger subject: how Poe’s fiction manifests scientific knowledge and ideas on madness as legitimized by contemporary psychiatry.

Key Words: Poe, irony, mental illness, lunatic asylums, moral treatment, Philippe Pinel, law and enforcement.

Essay on mutual relations between mental illness, social opression, genius, art and creativity. Contains references to ideas of Hans Prinzhorn, Cesare Lombroso, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, as well as works of Paul Klee, Andre Masson, Adolf Wölfli, Jean Dubuffet and the like.

Although celebrated in several world literatures, the story of Majnun Layla began in the Arabian desert of the 7th century with the tragic ‘Udhri love story of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and his beloved Layla. After an introduction to the origin, meaning, and development of the ‘Udhri love phenomenon, this paper will trace the roots, historical or otherwise, of the Majnun Layla story as narrated by later biographers such as Ibn Qutaybah (d. 885) and Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967), and show how it evolved into a legend taken up by Persian littérateurs such as Nizami Ganjavi (d. 1209) and ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492) who developed it into an allegory for the sacred love of the Sufi tradition. The paper will give a brief overview of Majnun’s life and poetry as presented in both the early Arabic sources, and the later Persian versions, and will discuss the various types of behaviour exhibited by Majnun which can be recognised as typically Sufic or similar to those practised by many Islamic mystics, as well as discussing the ideas found in his poetry which can be interpreted as evincing a mystical type of philosophy. The paper will also investigate the idea that Majnun, and Layla – a poet herself – can be seen as representing the ‘drunken’ and ‘sober’ schools of Sufism respectively, with the ecstatic utterances of the former, and the outward silence but intense inner burning of the latter.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” embodies the idea that Victorian women were oppressed both by the institution of marriage and the male-dominated medical profession, as seen in the narrator’s disempowerment, infantilization, and, ultimately, true madness caused by the resting cure.

This article examines the association of homosexuality with madness in two contemporary novels, Hanan al-Shaykh's Innaha London ya Azizi (Only in London) and Hamdi Abu Golayyel's (Julayyil) Lusus Mutaqa idun (Thieves in Retirement). Through a comparative reading of the figure of Majnun, an impassioned lover and mad rebel, I argue that literary articulations of queer desire operate as embodied resistance to social and political normativity, both in the Arab world and in the diaspora. Discussing the aesthetic transformation of the contemporary novel and drawing on the Arab-Islamic literary and philosophical tradition, I critically engage Michel Foucault's reading of sexual and epistemological developments in light of current debates about Arab homosexuality. I show how discursive models of sexuality are situated in modernity's intertwinement with other structures of power and systems of belief, crossing cultural contexts and linguistic registers.

This translation of Tomaso Garzoni's Renaissance "best-seller" provides a rich and revealing window on sixteenth-century views of madness and foolishness, and social deviance. Garzoni's encyclopedic work is perhaps the most important contribution of the last half of the century to the "fools" genre to which Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools also belong. Garzoni provides a spoof of academic writing on madness, with extensive "reviews of the medical literature" on certain types of madness. A final, intriguing section on the varieties of madness to be found in Garzoni's female "patients" reveals much about late-Renaissance attitudes towards women.

Don Quixote is back again, notices Magdalena Barbaruk tracing the resurgence of the knight errant in the contemporary humanities.  In the aftermath of World War Two, the figure underwent the most radical re-interpretation since Romanticism. These changes speak volumes about our culture. The Long Shadow of Don Quixote is a pioneering, cultural studies-driven reading of Quixotism. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the specifically Polish variety of cultural studies, it makes Don Quixote a patron of cultural reflection. With culture conceptualised as performative, Quixotism is “the cultivation of the soul,” an axiotic space which forms human ways of life across epochs. In this way, the history of culture can be re-written as a history of a values frenzy, bibliomania or evil.

Ἄνθρωπε, […] τί οὖν δεινόν, εἰ τῆς πόλεως ἀποπέμπει σε οὐ τύραννος οὐδὲ δικαστὴς ἄδικος, ἀλλ̓ ἡ φύσις ἡ εἰσαγαγοῦσα, οἷον εἰ κωμῳδὸν ἀπολύοι τῆς σκηνῆς ὁ παραλαβὼν στρατηγός;-ἀλλ̓ οὐκ εἶπον τὰ πέντε μέρη, ἀλλὰ τὰ τρία.-καλῶς εἶπας: ἐν μέντοι τῷ βίῳ τὰ τρία ὅλον τὸ δρᾶμά ἐστι. τὸ γὰρ τέλειον ἐκεῖνος ὁρίζει ὁ τότε μὲν τῆς συγκρίσεως. νῦν δὲ τῆς διαλύσεως αἴτιος: σὺ δὲ ἀναίτιος ἀμφοτέρων. ἄπιθι οὖν ἵλεως: καὶ γὰρ ὁ ἀπολύων ἵλεως.

The challenge of madness discourse targeting a young audience is to offer readers something that they can engage with cognitively and emotionally, with the limited cognitive-affective skills they possess, at the same time retaining the artistic rigour and narrative irony necessary to convey the mental state. Unlike general fiction, representing adolescent madness in a novel intended for adolescent readers has to take into account both the cognitive discrepancy between the (adult) author and the adolescent protagonist and the cognitive discrepancy between the (adult) author and the adolescent reader. Employing cognitive poetics as a theoretical framework, this essay explores representation of madness in two young adult novels, Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese (1977) and Sonya Hartnett's Surrender (2005). The purpose of the essay is not primarily to offer an analysis of these novels, but to use them as examples of how madness, against all odds, can be represented for an audience that not only lacks experience of it, but also lacks cognitive capacity to understand it.

In his 1972 article entitled “La prise du pouvoir par les Fatimides en Égypte”, Thierry Bianquis mentions a fool living in Fusṭāṭ under the Ikhshidids, whose nickname was Sībawayh. He describes him as a “Muslim Alceste”, a misanthrope who harassed his fellow townsmen.
Although contemporary historiography generally ignores him, information about this character reached us through a booklet written by al‑Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm b. Zūlāq (d. 387/998). Twenty‑two years younger than Sībawayh, Ibn Zūlāq had frequented him closely, and been
the eyewitness and auditor of many of his verbal exploits. By examining Sībawayh’s life in its historical context, I question the political and social significance of his madness. Beyond topoi belonging to the literary genre devoted to “wise fools” (ʿuqalāʾ al‑majānīn), Sībawayh was protected by his popularity among masses and by his dementia, which allowed him to become the voice of many of Fusṭāṭ’s inhabitants who were exasperated by their elites and their rulers’ behavior.

The focus of this article will be Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s thoroughly anthologized story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892). Beyond the patriarchal perception of the narrator as progressively falling into madness, this study aims to prove that, in line with some feminist readings of the story (e.g. Haney-Peritz, 1986), the unnamed female protagonist consciously elaborates a mad language and discourse as part of her strategy to fight patriarchy from within. A careful study of this language will break the reader’s initial illusion that the protagonist is mad and will show how she finally embraces the rational discourse of medicine to perpetrate her revenge.

The transition from medieval heroism to modern paranoia is best understood in the context of psychoanalysis and its representation in the famous case of the neuropath Daniel Paul Schreber. The essay urges a deeper understanding of Schreber's mystical experiences and his attempts to reconcile modernity with medieval belief. The text invites reconsideration of how historical perspectives on madness and cultural perceptions inform the narratives of individual psychiatric cases.

La poétique de l'espace, l'écriture du lieu dans le récit, c'est aussi envisager des manières toujours nouvelles d'appréhender l'espace. Leonora Carrington, dont la vie est un exemple de décentrement géographique et de traversées spatiales, s'attache à recréer la géographie, à la recréer sous la forme d'un espace mental, entre voyage ésotérique (mystique, chamanique) et bouleversements oniriques. Cette artiste présente la situation exemplaire d'être à la fois un peintre mexicain et un écrivain anglais. D'un point de vue biographique, le décentrage géographique est évident.

This is the introduction to the monograph "Madness in Cold War America" (Routledge, 2016). This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.

Both Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Charlotte Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper have strange similarities in their portrayal of madness. This arises questions regarding the conventions of madness and whether insanity is the correct label for these 'psychopathic behaviours' inhibited in these individuals or if society is the problematic agent.

En este libro se reúnen los fragmentos que Pessoa dedicó al genio, la locura, la degeneración y la psicopatología. «El genio es la mayor maldición con la cual Dios puede bendecir a un hombre», afirmó. El problema de las relaciones entre el genio y la locura fue para Pessoa una preocupación a lo largo de toda su vida. En el fondo pessoano de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa han aparecido recientemente numerosos textos, en gran parte inéditos, así como proyectos de diverso tono sobre esta cuestión, que hoy se nos revelan como importantísimos, en especial por su carácter especulativo en el terre­no estético, pero también por lo que nos muestran sobre la construcción de la personalidad artística del poeta. Jerónimo Pizarro los ha reunido y organizado en un volumen que pre­tende responder a la pregunta «¿depende el genio de la locura?».

Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.

After beginning his historical work in Switzerland in the 1950s and then continuing it in the United States at the Menninger Foundation, Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) became the leading historian of " dynamic psychiatry ". This expression commonly denotes mental medicine that draws from psychotherapeutic practices and psychological theories to improve our understanding of mental diseases and to cure them. Although still used today, usually in juxtaposition to 19th century alienism or to biological psychiatry, the origin and meaning of this expression are unclear. An unpublished lecture (1956) by Ellenberger on this subject, accompanied by an explanatory introduction, is reproduced here to shed light on Ellenberger's interpretation of that term. This article additionally aims to draw certain parallels and distinctions between Ellenberger, Michel Foucault and George Devereux's teaching in the 1950s. Considering that the history of psychiatry is now a well-established speciality in the academic world, Ellenberger's lecture is also an original document which enables us to trace the professionalization of psychiatric historiography as an academic discipline back to its beginnings after World War II.

En 1955 le psychiatre Henri Ey (1900-1977) publie sous sa
direction un Traité de Psychiatrie dans la collection de
l'Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale (EMC, Editions
Techniques), rassemblant autour de lui plus d'une centaine de
collaborateurs. Parmi eux, une grande partie des
psychanalystes français, avec qui les psychiatres du cadre des
hôpitaux psychiatriques publics se répartissent les matières à
exposer, tandis que les principaux représentants de la
neuropsychiatrie universitaire sont exclus. Lors d'un banquet
offert pour fêter la parution de l'ouvrage collectif, Henri Ey
fait la lecture à ses hôtes d'une parodie (ou pastiche, voire
satire ?) de Bouvard et Pécuchet de FLAUBERT. Je propose
d'appréhender ce document méconnu des historiens par le
biais de l'ironie : écrit sur le ton de la dérision par un
psychiatre évoquant les pratiques et les doctrines qui prêtent le
flan à la moquerie dans sa discipline (du mesmérisme au
freudisme), le texte peut aussi se lire comme un roman à clef
des rapports de force et des défenses de monopole, dans une
profession médicale où les dissensions sont nourries par des
titres professionnels, par des itinéraires intellectuels et par des
réseaux savants différents. Dans un premier temps, je
montrerai qu'à travers l'emprunt des « deux bonshommes »,
Henri Ey avait certainement pour but de désamorcer toute
critique vis-à-vis de son ambition d'encyclopédiste. On peut
comparer à cette occasion la posture d'Henri Ey à celle de
l'écrivain Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), directeur de l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade à la même époque : lui aussi fut
hanté par les figures du savant fou et du scientifique amateur
et il rédigea deux préfaces pour des rééditions de Bouvard et
Pécuchet. Cependant, le Bouvard et Pécuchet d'Henri EY évoque
moins l'exercice de style de Queneau que la pugnacité des
textes corporatistes de défense de la psychiatrie. Dans un
second temps, il s'agira donc d'analyser le statut de l'imitation
burlesque d'une œuvre déjà burlesque : ce texte cache une
véritable satire sous le travestissement du comique. L'auteur
vise une série de personnes bien réelles, parfois nommées
dans le texte et présentées de manière grotesque. La parodie
apparaît ici comme mise au service du persiflage.
http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/article.php?id=24

Texte d'Henri Ey :
http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/article.php?id=25