Rubbing Shoulders with Unreason 
Peter Barham
- History of Madness by Michel Foucault, edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa Buy this book
In the 1950s, three individuals, unknown to one another and from different countries, were engaged in what seem, looking back, to have been remarkably similar projects vis-ŕ-vis those whom society designates as mad. One was a philosophy student: ‘I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role . . . I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients.’
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Peter Barham’s most recent book, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, is out in paperback from Yale.
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