Madness

Madness is “resistance in coping with impulses from the individual unconscious”.

Introduction, Jose Barchilon, M.D., pviii, author’s footnote

[This statement, in that it implies the individual unconscious requires coping, brings forth the related idea that the individual unconscious rose out of a preceding transpersonal/collective unconscious].

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Madness is manifestation of the “soul”, what became known after Freud as the unconscious.

Introduction, Jose Barchilon, M.D., pviii

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Madness was an “undifferentiated experience” for the person living prior to the Age of Reason.

Preface

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In the Middle Ages, the legions of animals symbolically bear values of humanity.

In the Renaissance, the beast is set free to acquire a fantastic nature of its own.

Animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in man’s hearts.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p21

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…The forbidden limits of knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p22

[There is a great parallel here between Jayne’s Bicameral Man and Foucault’s Fool in that they both have access to an ancient wisdom that becomes inaccessible in the era of matured concsciousness (The Age of Reason)].

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No doubt, madness has to do with strange paths of knowledge.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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Madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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The tragic experience of madness in a critical consciousness [during the Medieval to Renaissance transition] is abolished.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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“I can imagine a man without hands and feet, but not one without thought.”

Pascal, Pansees

Chapter 3: The Insane, p70

[Also resonant with Julian Jaynes, see his thoughts on the misinterpretation of ancient texts, http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2011/07/julian-jaynes-bicameral-breakdown-on_16.html].

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On the insane and physical stamina and disease:

Madness afforded man an invulnerability, similar to that which nature, in its foresight, had provided for animals. Curiously, the disturbance of his reason restored the madman to the immediate kindness of nature by a return to animality.

Chapter 3: The Insane, p75

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[Jesus was ‘mad’, and look at us now…]

Jesus crucified…was the scandal of the world and appeared as nothing but ignorance and madness to the eyes of his time. But the fact that the world has become Christian, and that the Order of God is revealed through the meanderings of history and the madness of man, now suffices to show that Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom.

Boussuet, Panegyrique de Saint Bernard, Preamble

Chapter 3: The Insane, p75

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Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Michel Foucault, 1961.

English Translation Richard Howard, Random House, 1965