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Not only can man's being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man's being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom … Not just anyone can go mad. (Lacan, 1946, p. 144)
The collection of papers edited by Gherovici and Steinkoler can be read as something of a commentary on this statement from Lacan. The idea that madness holds some clue to solving the mystery of our very being is appealing. We all imagine that we have experienced something of madness - when we are in love, in our dreams, when struck by grief. Surely madness leads to some understanding? Some essential truth of being human? Some knowledge? So too does the association between madness and freedom appeal. Surely only the crazy woman, the mad artist, the screaming queen, the fanatical revolutionary knows the exit from the box of convention/oppression? Nevertheless both the figure of the mad man and the feeling that we're going crazy are terrifying. Perhaps then, the idea that ‘not just anyone can go mad’ engenders both some disappointment and some relief.
Readers less familiar with the Lacanian tradition may be surprised by the essays in this volume which challenge the idea that madness is an illness, and thus the hierarchy of suffering in which psychosis is somehow so much ‘worse’ than neurosis and therefore inaccessible to clinical work, or that it is something to be avoided as its manifestations are meaningless. On the other hand, the mad man or woman is deemed to be so sick, so disordered that he must be set right by the clinician who has the better grip on reality and who knows how to be healthy. The ever increasing proliferation of