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To define true madness— what is't but to be nothing else but mad
Polonius is a pedant whose chatty platitudes ironize the traditional role of the father as authority and advisor to his children. Hamlet, who he addresses, feigns madness to solve the mystery of his father's murder only to find himself in a distinctly modern relation to madness-in thinking he controls madness, he becomes mad.
Shakespeare's poetic reflections on madness-and practically every play contains a reference to it-are followed later in the 16th century by Pascal (1669), the greatest rationalist, who wrote in his Pensées, “not to grant a place to madness in the understanding of humanity would be madness itself.”
For the Romantic movement, this rationality risks the repression of the nature of humankind and madness becomes equated with forms of insight that contribute to works of genius in art and music. Some aspects of this romantic validation of madness reprise the role of the “daimonic” in classical civilization, as Nietzsche (1886) forcefully argued in the distinction he makes between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy.
With the exception of Pascal, most Christian theologians equated madness with possession by the devil, and while a place was made for the holy fool in medieval culture, with the Christian reformation came the attempt to defend the notion of a stable self-one that communes directly with God-and hence, madness, the de-stabilization of the self or ego, is equated with some form of satanism or punishment for sin.
Nineteenth century and some 20th century psychiatry has retained a complicity with this theological conception of madness. The resistance to the ideological notion of a stable self has marked both postmodern thinking as well as one of the inspirations for postmodernity-the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The leaders of that movement, R. D. Laing (1970), Donald Cooper (1978), and their philosophical allies,