Rubbing Shoulders with Unreason

Peter Barham

  • History of Madness by Michel Foucault, edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
    Routledge, 725 pp, £35.00, April 2006, ISBN 0 415 27701 9

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-à-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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Vol. 29 No. 5 · 8 March 2007 » Peter Barham » Rubbing Shoulders with Unreason (print version)
Pages 34-36 | 4073 words