The term 'madness' is of course not used in psychiatry today. However, it
is used generally as a negative term and synonymous with the 'sickness'. What
if the 'sickness' perceived as the madness of the other actually points out the
ignorance of its real and disavowed meaning? Maybe we need to understand the
place of 'sickness' as inherently human rather than depraved of human nature. I
think Freud’s notion of the 'discontent' (unbehagen)
in the culture is able to provide us with a theory of the 'sickness'. (See
Freud, The Civilisation and Its
Discontents; the German original Das Unbehagen
in der Kultur)
The discontent is a tension of inner splitting, or in Lacanese, the
uneasiness felt before the abject encountered as an obstacle to the enjoyment.
The discontent/uneasiness is innate. According
to Freud the uneasiness is “phylogenetically” reproduced in the individual
history of each human being. Its origin is uncertain, but in a Platonic fashion
in the Totem and Taboo Freud approximates the genesis of uneasiness
in his mythological narrative of the decisive event at the dawn of humanity,
supposedly responsible for the shape of human consciousness in the disavowed
image of the primordial repression: the murder of the dominant figure of the
primordial horde. This figure is later arguably to become the symbol of the
Father.
To extrapolate further on Freud, the murderous event was probably a
failure due to some practical reason. The failure of the murderous action – not
of the murder itself – is that it left the emptiness in the place of the dominant
figure who was instinctively perceived as the guarantee of the order, hierarchy
and property in the primal horde. The murder shakes the foundation of the
natural right, instinctively perceived as the ruler the primal horde. The elimination of the
guarantee of this order causes its collapse whereas the human culture is born; now ruled by the Law or,
the Name of the Father, to put it with Lacan - the Law as the the symbolic presence of absence,
of the forever lost figure of the real power (consequently repressed in the real).
The uneasiness we feel before
the 'sickness' of madness echoes our own discontent from within, the dimensions of the self we
disavow - not some alien intrusion from the outer space, as we are rather used to
(mis)perceive it in the Hollywood’s (per)version of reality. However, as Lacan
maintains in the Seminar VII: both the
perversion and sublimation intents the same or other morality.
