Madness: from 'sickness' to 'unbehagen' and beyond

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.