The imitation of madness

To deny that radical social change can be understood as being ‘pathological’ or ‘dysfunctional’ is not to dismiss the possibility that institutions may, on occasion, develop through unusual or extreme – ‘psychopathological’ if we will – individual experiences. If we accept, along with descriptive psychiatry, some relatively autonomous, and to an extent culturally invariant, and thus ‘naturalquo;, domain of psychopathology, manifest to us in popular notions like ‘madness’, how can such specific experience or its interpretation actively engage others?

Engage them, that is, not only in serving as some emblem of ‘what shall not be’, as society's dark mirror, but in the experience itself as meaningful. If it does, how is such experience recognised and transformed by others? We can never have psychological representations of brain states independent of social experience and action, for the notion of a culturally unfettered ‘nature’ is a fiction. Because medical observers of social patterns, as we have seen in Chapter 2, freely ascribe a psychopathology explained as biology on decidedly slender biological evidence, it will be appropriate to restrict the possibility to situations where we have already some more convincing understanding of psychopathology in terms of biological science – ‘coarse brain disease’, epilepsy or manic-depressive psychosis. Social appropriation of madness may, of course, not value or amplify such patterns in themselves but rather seexsk to render them decent, as less abnormal, as ‘only symbolic’, or even to conceal them altogether. I would suggest five general situations in which such an ‘appropriation of madness’ may be recognised:

(a) A person who is already influential becomes psychotic but retains their power for a time.