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Madness and madness
Insanity, insanity exudes a special magnetism on people, from the sanctification of such conditions to literary employment. Forms of insanity are fascinating because they seem uncontrollable and incomprehensible. Because fascination is not just attraction, but always holds a secret in itself.
contents
- Religious madness and holiness
- jester
- Eulenspiegel
- Enfant terribles and eccentrics "
- Psychiatry and control
- Insanity and liberation
- Madness and pop culture
- Genius and madness
- Insanity as a literary motif
- Edgar Allan Poe and the desire for perversion
Religious madness and holiness
Different religions regard conditions that are considered delusional in psychoanalysis, as signs of holiness, as signs of the gods or possession of spirits. The question arises whether psychoanalysts do not prematurely classify phenomena as ill whose cultural context they do not understand. And vice versa, whether followers of religions do not classify phenomena as divine, that are insane.
Arthur Koestler described Vahranassi, the holiest city of the Hindus, the city of Shiwas as a religious madhouse. And this impression is obvious to the visitor. Saddhus, holy men, claim to have eaten nothing for twenty years and their followers believe them. The gods of Hinduism are reminiscent of fantasy novels. For example, whether it is crazy that the Hulman monkey has a black face because the god Hanuman has run through the fire is hard to answer. For nonhindus, that's fine. But for non-religious people, it is no less insane that a woman gives birth to a son and retains her virginity. Whether a performance is insane, is also in the eye of the beholder.
Sacred phenomena can also be interpreted as collective psychoses. The founder of anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner, obviously suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. For his "root races", of which humanity consists as a body, can be transferred 1 to 1 to the fragmentation of the perception of schizophrenics. People who hear voices that believe they receive orders from supernatural powers are ill in a psychiatric relationship. The history of humanity is full of religious leaders who believe that they act on behalf of gods, have the mission to save, subdue or rule the world.
The term megalomania also means delusion. Such megalomaniacs always had their supporters. True dances, in which hundreds of people broke under twitches together, can be interpreted as mass persecution as witch hunts. And such mass psychoses occur especially in times of crisis, when patterns of interpretation fail, when familiar world views no longer stop. The time of the witch trials, the early modern era, was such a time. The Thirty Years War had devastated Europe, modern technology broke the feudal structures, life was no longer static as in the Middle Ages. The Christian interpretation of the world could hardly provide answers.
Religious behaviors that spring from insanity, ritual mass suicides, pogroms against minorities, as well as the willingness of people to follow the most absurd promises, are widespread in times of crisis. In the witch hunt, the devil faith offered a hold. The notion that behind all desperation there are secret groups that have allied themselves with the devil freed from doubt and led directly into persecutory delusion. The fascination of this insanity, which also affected intelligent people, was to arrange an unmanageable world with a fantasy.
The wave of esotericism in America and Central Europe is a similar reasonable rationality. What circulates in the esoteric market, has mostly nothing to do with the Indian religions, Buddhism or real existing shamanism, but makes use only of set pieces of these cultures. People with a degree in the academic field suddenly believe that they can cure all diseases by tapping, or have gurus plunder their accounts claiming their money is contaminated with demons.
The same people would not let the preachers of the Christian religion tell such nonsense. For the most part, it is precisely members of the middle class who are too educated to take traditional superstitions of their own culture seriously. And in the phases of despair, people are reaching for every straw that comes with them. Critical demands as to where the guru, who lives on air and love, gets the money for his Rolls-Royce, interfere with this false security.
Masslessness is barely perceived by the mass itself as such. Usually it is the outsiders who do not get involved in social fever processes. In 1914, millions of young men enthusiastically entered the First World War, even though critical reflection would have made them realize the futility and the horror. Often it is precisely the admonishers who are considered crazy, the madness is established, it is considered normalcy.
Court jesters were with their insane behavior a special fascination. (Image: cliffhanger105 / fotolia.com) jester
Court fools belonged to the system of the noble court like the inventory. Fools were in the Middle Ages a term for simple-minded people, for stupid people. They stood for a slight form of insanity that arose out of stupidity. Why did these characters, who were negatively occupied in everyday life, come to court as professional actors who played fools? This is because of what such simple-minded people actually did: simplicity means a crease and thus the inability to think complexly, to make plans and intrigues. And the madness that arises from such stupidity often brings reality to the point. Still in the "foolish bustle", in the carnival, this function and this fascination is reflected. Who played fools at the court was allowed to utter what others thought but did not dare to say. And the rulers needed someone like that.
The fool enjoyed the fool's freedom to practice criticism that was denied to others. The institution of jester shows the importance of the fool, the dolt, the idiot. He is underdog because of his stupidity and because of his stupidity not dangerous. And, in addition, the more intelligent recognize themselves in him. He serves as a negative example and was in the Christianity on the side of evil. For he has not found his place in the community of God and wanders around.
The epitome of a fool was the devil, who wants to copy God in his ignorance and thereby fail. However, the profession of court jester proves that the people in the Middle Ages also knew about the freedom this situation brings.
The straying, the outsider, is not subject to the constraints of society. The jester as a profession is not subject to the rules of the estates. He who played the fool reminded the ruler that he too did not equal God, that even the most powerful king was imperfect. A juggler in the sense of mundane amusement was not such a fool, but he was a serious adviser, an admonisher. And such court jesters had an important social function. The idea that there are real fools, stupid people who have succumbed to the devil, but was the basis for the profession of court jester. And these outsiders included not only mentally debilitated people, but also non-Christians, physically disabled or leprosy patients. Even people with extreme hair growth and physical deformities were among the "fools" at the farms and were exhibited at fairs in the modern age. At the jester everyone knew that he played a role. And society needed someone who played that role and kept her negative aspects in mind. And even in the bourgeois society of the 19th century, a visit to the madhouse was like visiting the zoological garden or the museum. The society created what it exhibited and then looked at.
Eulenspiegel
Till Eulenspiegel is a very special fool. Eulenspiegeleien are still the epitome of roguish pranks. The literary figure was created in the early 16th century. Eulenspiegel presents the powerful to the mirror, he commits allegedly insane deeds that unmask those of the rulers.
Eulenspiegel dupes the powerful, but even falls on the flap. His pranks are usually unreflective and a punch line often results from the stupidity and arrogance of the powerful. As in "The Emperor's New Clothes", he lets himself be paid for example as a painter without carrying out the work and tells the duke that only children born in wedlock can see his pictures. The Duke conceals that he sees nothing. Eulenspiegel overrides social constraints and exposes entire stalls of ridicule. It is a kind of half-sense. Situational comedy often arises from the fact that Eulenspiegel does not see through the consequences of his actions himself and thus reveals the narrow-mindedness of the guilds in the early modern period. Even more than his own joke, his pranks show the madness of the society in which he lives. That is why the figure is still popular today. Similar to the genie, whose curse is precisely that he literally carries out every wish, the fascination of owls is that he is not too far from his company at all.
Similar to Klein Fritzchen, who flies out of the swimming pool because he pees in the water, as everyone does, but not from the five-meter board, a fascination with insanity is that he is a common man. But while the "normal" do not utter or secretly do things, the lunatics pronounce or do them. The reality here sometimes looks much worse than the rogue Eulenspiegel. The serial killer Fritz Haarmann said about his victims: "These were Pupenjungs (stick boys). They are no good. "This image corresponded to the bourgeois society in which he lived and is an explanation why he was able to commit his murders undisturbed.
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Enfant terribles and eccentrics "
In modern times, the "enfant terrible" took the place of the fool. This terrible kid, the long-haired hippie, the mohawk punk, Elvis Presley, who "obscenely" moves his pelvis, has his forerunners with Oscar Wilde or Charles Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil." "Foolish" in the Middle Ages also referred to a stubborn child, a child who did not obey, or who did nonsense, did things that were considered insane.
Such "terrible children" are actually almost only known from the cultural industry, from the artist scene, in music or literature. They are provocative, offensive, contrary to the moral concept of their society. Oscar Wilde was such an "enfant terrible" when he cast a glance into the depths of society with "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", Baudelaire as well. Aleister Crowley, still popular among pubescent taboo-breakers, staged himself as such a scared child and bathed himself in the publicity he provoked with his staged scandals.
The "enfant terible" is not a revolutionary, but a terrible child. A child is also called a minor, the "enfant terrible" enjoys the proverbial fool-freedom as well as the child. As a child, he belongs to the society that finds him terrible. Like the trickster in mythology, culture needs its "enfant terrible" to loosen constraints, to look in the mirror, to initiate necessary changes. Socially, however, the "enfant terible" is a pubertal.
He has no alternative to offer, then he would not be a terrible child anymore. The fascination of this "terrible child" is as obvious as the place in which it moves: art, music, literature. For a child does not have to take responsibility for what it does. It does not yet know the "seriousness of life". "Sex and drugs and rock and roll" among musicians approaching the old age home is one of the few ways to maintain adolescent behavior in advanced age. In other areas of life such behavior is considered insane.
Psychiatry and control
The philosopher Michel Foucault developed a theory of delusion. The so-called madness is something very human in Foucault. Bourgeois modernity has accordingly cased the feelings of the people, their feelings and experiences in such a way that the unfolding of the world of experience appears as a threat. Psychiatry is therefore a device to rape this living "non-functioning" so that the initiated become functional again. The insane, the crazy are the same as the unadjusted. This may be a fascination with delusion.
The man who thinks he can upset the world is appealing to the yearning for freedom, the yearning of the "normal" who must function in daily constraints. The psychotic who breaks down the boundaries between inside and outside also breaks out of constraints. The Borderliner, who seeks risky and dangerous situations, is intrigued by "normal" ones who can not break out of their role.
The "normal" as "sick" but all remain trapped in the system of constraints. According to Foucault, there is a fascination with the fact that in the mentally disturbed, there is a freedom that the "normal" had to destroy in order to become "normal" - the lost life.
Insanity and liberation
Shell players, charlatans or magicians lose their fascination when dizziness is detected, when it is recognized how the magic trick works. Even mental illness, insanity in the clinical sense, loses this fascination for those who know the clinical picture and the social conditions that produce it. A form of insanity often diagnosed in Freud's time in women was so-called hysteria.
Keywords such as "The Woman, the Unknown Being," the woman who was considered to be overwhelmed, irrational, and even mistaken, was also a fascination - for the patriarchal society. Those who recognize their mechanisms recognize in these supposedly irrational outbreaks of emotion one of the few forms of resistance that remained for bourgeois women. Hysteria and madness kept them fascinating, unknown and uncontrollable, creating a temporary space in their social cage.
Madness and pop culture
The band Ideal sang in the song "madman": "Today you love me totally and tomorrow you can not see me and the day after tomorrow you do not care. Your madness, that can not understand people ... You make me still completely crazy. "Annette Humpe obviously sings about a lover. But it is precisely this unpredictability that makes his fascination. Anyone who has even heard Elvis Presley in his youth knows terms for the music, the scene, the concerts and clubs that seem to have sprung from psychiatry.
"Crazy", "freaking out", "turning off" is part of a good night. Raver, lovers of electronic music use the word irradiated for their own emotional state. "The pure madness", "insane", "incredibly cool" and similar characterizes one, in sober words, good mood. Punks, a word that means something like garbage or scum, but also crazies, came on the scene when the freaks of the early 1970s became too young for the youth. But the meaning of Freak is similar, a madman, a nut, a madman. Insanity means that the senses have lost their way, of order, of normality. And the members of subcultures themselves see this as extremely positive, in contrast to the norm society from which they have withdrawn into their subculture.
Genius and madness are known to be close together. (Image: DDRockstar / fotolia.com) Genius and madness
The crazy professor is almost a cliché, figure in countless feature films and novels. It is common knowledge that ingenious scientists have a "whimsy", so have fallen for a certain form of lunacy and that genius and madness are close together. This cliché hides a deeper insight that applies to various forms of insanity. Between people whose thoughts are far ahead of their society and the classification of these people as mad there is a fluid transition. And scientists who are actually pursuing a new hypothesis have a hard time communicating with "normal" people.
For artists whose task is to make the unconscious visible, the same applies. Tragic figures who are convinced that they have found the theory that explains what holds the world together at heart and thus avoids long-overdue psychotherapy are known to every university. The recommendation to go to a therapist is then because others have not recognized the genius of the theory or are jealous of the genius. And in Germany, the land of the genius cult, such self-proclaimed misjudged geniuses with massive mental disorders are probably more likely than in other countries. The mentally ill, who considers himself Einstein, should be far more common than the misunderstood Einstein.
The real core, however, is that people who develop revolutionary thoughts are, at least initially, usually outsiders. Anyone who violates the establishment is laughed at quickly, so represented as a lunatic. Adaptation, classification and suitcases pave the way to university careers rather than really new insights. And those who remain alone with their thoughts are in danger of eventually becoming lunatics. To draw a line between ingenious insights and insanity is difficult for the "normal". The one who sees himself as "normal" sees himself as mediocre, ie neither as a genius nor as a madman.
The cliché of genius and madness has a true core: creativity and psychic abnormalities. So Mozart is known to have tended in his private communication to pointless expressions and obscenities, made faces and could not sit still. "Some mental disorders include the ability to think creatively and unconventionally," says psychiatrist Wolfgang Maier. And some mental illnesses are often associated with extraordinary intelligence, such as paranoid schizophrenia, for example, certain mania. Especially creative people are in danger, that the creativity is out of control, that enormous creative power turns into manic megalomania.
Many mental illnesses have their mindsets in outstanding abilities. According to Hagop Akiskal of the University of San Diego, creative qualities such as openness and originality coincide with characteristics of psychotic thinking. However, an equation would be wrong: "Eight percent of the manic-depressives are artists, which is a lot compared to the normal population, but 92 percent are just not." Probably but far more manic will consider artists than just eight percent.
Almost every creative person knows the problem of having to draw a line. Between the Flooting, the process of flowing, in which the artwork succeeds, the novel receives its decisive punch line and the over-fooling, there are no firm barriers. The ability to bring creativity into reality often decides on "genius" and "delusion." A study at Stanford University compared normally gifted people and especially creative people to mentally ill people. The mentally ill were closer to the creatives of their personality than the "normal".
Creative people know about euphoria and self-protection, as well as stagnation and depression. Among well-known artists, mental illnesses accumulate. But whether the artistic talent results from the susceptibility to mental problems, is an open question.
Harvard professor Shelley Carson says a biological context is recognizable: the brain functions of particularly creative people resemble the brains of schizophrenics. In both cases, the brain filters out less information and makes more connections than the average gifted. Unlike creatives, schizophrenics can not filter the information but are swamped by hallucinations.
It also depends on the kind of insanity: Schizophrenics, for example, are unsuitable as a writer, because their language splinters, but sometimes can paint well. However, Hölderlin is said to have suffered from schizophrenia. Depressed people are no longer capable of creative achievements in depression, but they are unfiltered, hard-realistic thinking.
Insanity as a literary motif
Psychic extravaganza fascinated the writers throughout all epochs. The motives were dependent on time and the image of society. The most famous insane people in European literature are Don Quixote and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Don Quixote of Cervantes is a knight in a time when there are no knights left, and mythical creatures from medieval chivalrous romances are no more. He fights against windmills, which he considers giant, until today a metaphor for insane behavior.
Macbeth becomes a murderer on his way to power until he has no one left to trust. Here it is the megalomania, the power of the ruler. And indeed, a frightening investigation revealed that the characteristics of the anti-social character, the classic psyhopathen, are particularly prevalent not only among serial killers, but also among business people, corporate CEOs, and politicians. These features include lack of empathy, satisfaction from the suffering of others and the inability to resolve conflicts on an equal footing. What distinguishes the delusion of the boy murderer Fritz Haarmann from the delusion of a Macbeth is above all its social position. The fascination with this form of lunacy is the fascination with power. And power inevitably leads to delusion in its purest form. Nobody expressed it better than Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. The one ring is the ring of power. Gollum succumbed to him and succumbed to the delusion that Boromir dies as his desire for the ring becomes delusion.
Don Quixote, on the other hand, reflects a particular form of insanity that is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is the last knight in a time when there are no knights left. He appears insane because he uses the interpretive patterns of chivalry at this time. He is very similar to the culture shock that everyone knows who comes to a country where the world's explanations are completely different from the known ones. There is no integration between his ideas and the social reality for Don Quixote. His "fight against the windmills" corresponds to a classic psychosis, comparable to the traumatized woman who thinks she heard a raped woman screaming. But there are reasons for this: The 17th century, the time of Don Quixote, was linked to the decline of the old aristocracy.
This early modernity had the upswing of the bourgeoisie and technical innovations to the mark, which swept away the "God-given" and immutable order of the Middle Ages. In a society where money means status, a "knight without fear and blame" is superfluous. And insanity, including psychosis, arises because people lose their social position. Anyone who wants to pursue politics with the ideas of yesterday ends up fast in psychiatry. Therapists know, for example, SED officials whose world no longer exists and who have not arrived in the new society.
The character of Don Quixote is not negative, but adorable. Don Quixote is not just a nutcase, but also an idealist, and Cervantes lets the reader look in the mirror, what's real, especially what's right or wrong. For when Don Quixote attacks the windmills as a giant, he shows something that is lost to modern society, namely to fight passionately for an idea. The windmills stand for the modern technology, whose functioning has nothing to do with the actions of the individual. In his madness Don Quixote lifts the alienation. He must fail because the new society can not be prevented, but seems sympathetic in his failure. He is not unlike the Native Americans, who fought with bow and arrow against the United States Army and militarily also had no chance of a chance.
Edgar Allan Poe and the desire for perversion
Edgar Allan Poe sketched the madness like hardly any other author of the modern age. The spirit of perversion, the mental disintegration characterizes the characters in "black cat" and "spirit of perversity". In "black cat" a man tells the story of his madness, which turned him into a murderer. He was a solid person, loved his wife and his cat. But then he slid into the abyss of perversion, his "demon." For Poe, perversion is one of the driving forces of human beings, exceeding the limits of their transgression. That's the fascination of the delusion.
The narrator recognizes this and still slides into the delusion, reinforced by his drunkenness. He thrusts out the eye of the once beloved animal, does not withstand the sight of his evil act and hangs the cat. The house burns down, the outlines of the cat show up on the wall and pursue the culprit in his dreams. He takes home a new cat, who turns out to be a doppelganger of the old one. Therefore, he can not bear him, in delusion he lunges at his wife and kills her with the ax, as he actually wants to kill the cat. He walls the body, the police come, he knocks on the wall in a fit of hubris. There is a meowing sound. He walled in the hangover. It is not just a scary story, because the essential element is the fascination with the delusion, the fascination of doing something perverse. Although the mental disintegration of an alcoholic plays a role, a process that Poe knew very well with his own alcohol problem. Delirium, delusions caused by alcohol abuse, the "hangover" afterwards, when one's own insanity becomes aware and yet the addiction can not be stopped, can be read as an example from "black cat".
Alcohol limits the motor skills and mental abilities, it leads to actions that would strongly condemn the actors in the sober state and that is why they seek this state. Without this fascination, there would be less village fights, fewer traffic accidents, less sexual harassment, less liver and heart disease. Everyone knows that, and yet this loss of control fascinates, otherwise the pubs would be empty. And Poe would not be Poe, if not behind this border crossing a principled, even philosophical would stand, namely the crossing of borders as a human urge to perversion. Poes brilliance learns the reader's own body. Perversion, literally the wrong thing, is insanity.
It is because of the fascination of insanity that the narrator knows very well that his actions are wrong, contradictory, insane. Otherwise no one would read this story, the reader himself is captivated by the delusion, accompanies the narrator in his delusion.
Poe outlines psychoanalytically a process for which the devil stands in Christianity. The devil became a kind of powerful counter-deity only in the early modern period. In the Middle Ages, when the power of the Church was consolidated, he played the role of a madman, a fool who copied and failed again and again the deeds of God because he tried to imitate them in insane, absurd ways.
The black romance, and Poe, who belonged to it, bathed in the diabolical, no one dove as deeply into the unconscious as the romantics, no one dissected the lunacy that was rampant there so precisely. Black masses, the witches' Sabbath and the transfer of its symbolism to the human psyche provided the spiritual space for their fantasies. Also with Charles Baudelaire, who admired Poe and his German reflection E.T. A. Hoffmann plays the madness a central role.
But they do not condemn him morally, but show him as a hallmark of a broken, a decadent society. "The Sandman" by Hoffmann is one of the most impressive representations of a mental illness process in which the patient's view becomes clear. Hoffmann's well-known work "The Elixirs of the Devil" uses the term devil as a hallmark for psychic devastation.
No one bathed so much in the artistic preoccupation with conditions that their society regarded as insane, like the romantics, poetry, literature, art were their medium, but also the drugs. What was lunacy for bourgeois society represented a significant pathway to cognition, not unlike the 1960s hippie-consuming hippies. Some of them became obedient, others ended their lives by suicide, some succumbed to alcohol or ended up in religious sects.
Black Romanticism in its present form is called Gothic, Romance Fantasy. The fantasy is always the human unconscious as well. And at least literary it can travel there in the deepest abysses, without automatically land in psychiatry. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)