Madness and Civilization Essay Questions

What is the relation between leprosy and madness?

In the Middle Ages, Western societies developed leper colonies and houses to confine the outbreak of leprosy. In the Renaissance, Foucault notes that these houses of confinement persisted even though the threat of leprosy did not. The houses came to confine those who were considered mad instead. Thus, a structure of confinement continued, but the people confined changed.

What is the significance of the General Hospital?

The General Hospital of Paris, which was founded in 1657, marks the beginning of Foucault’s story about the “classical age.” The Hospital was more of a judicial institution than a medical one, meant to confine the poor, vagabonds, and mad. It thus begins the “age of confinement,” in which Western societies develop institutions and procedures for separating “undesirable” members of society from the general public.

What was the primary purpose of confinement at the beginning of the classical period?

Institutions like the General Hospital got started as a means of housing the poor. Poverty was considered an ethical failure rather than an economic consequence of unemployment or financial crisis. The poor thus needed to be confined away from the more productive members of society. Foucault says that a bunch of other people also got swept up in this confinement of the poor, including people that would later come to be thought of as mentally ill.

What is the significance of the liberation of prisoners from Bicêtre?

If the General Hospital in 1657 marks the beginning of Foucault’s history, the liberation of prisoners from Bicêtre in 1794 marks a sort of conclusion. Remember that, at first, criminals, the poor, and the mad all got confined together. By the end of the 18th century, however, people began to fear the mad were a threat to the “merely” criminal or poor. The prisoners then needed to be set apart, or liberated, from the mad. For Foucault, this marks the point at which madness is seen as its own unique condition, requiring its own unique means of confinement.

What do Tuke and Pinel share in their innovations?

Tuke and Pinel were both founders of asylums to reform or cure the mad. They varied in their techniques as well as their national contexts, Tuke in England and Pinel in France. But they both shared an investment in the figure of the “medical personage,” or the idea that asylums should be run by doctors rather than, say, prison wardens or judicial administrators. This completes, for Foucault, the development of madness as a matter of psychological medicine, requiring the intervention of medical authority.

What was the significance of animal imagery in relation to madness?

Animal imagery was widespread in early Renaissance depictions of madness. It made the mad seem less like unethical humans who needed to be reformed, like the poor or criminals, and more like beasts that needed to be tamed, leading to more brutal punishment and caging of the mad. It also made madness into something to be displayed, like animals in a zoo, rather than hid away, like a shameful secret. The mad were disciplined and displayed as beasts rather than flawed humans.

In “Aspects of Madness,” what is the transformation Foucault notes in how four kinds of madness were understood?

The four kinds of madness Foucault discusses in this chapter are mania, melancholia, hysteria, and hypochondria. They are each different in terms of symptoms and the theories used to describe them. But over the course of the classical age, they each went from being thought of as caused by physical things to being caused by psychological things. Rather than caused by a build-up of blood and bile in a person’s veins, for instance, madness began to be thought of as caused by feelings of guilt, innocence, and shame.

How are hysteria and hypochondria connected to morality?

Both hysteria and hypochondria were at first diagnosed as symptoms of nerve damage before they were understood as mental damage. What is interesting in this development is that people conceived of the mental damage as an effect of an innocent or guilty consciousness. In turn, mental illness starts to look like a punishment for something bad that someone has done: they feel guilty and then become nervous as a result, either through hysteria or hypochondria. This means that understandings of madness start to have meanings that are moral as well, and madness might be an effect of moral failure rather than physical disease.

How is madness related to the “oneiric and the erroneous”?

In the classical age, madness was thought of as related to but distinct from dreams (the oneiric) and mere human mistake (the erroneous). Madness is like a dream, in that it hallucinates something that is not real, but it occurs while waking instead of while sleeping. And madness is like an error, because it has a mistaken understanding of the truth, but madness does not correct its error, instead filling in the void with more and more images to make the error seem true.

How does Foucault discuss secrecy in relation to madness?

In the great confinement, madness was confined along with poverty, vagrancy, and other perceived social ills. But unlike others, madness was not thought of as a shameful secret to be made invisible or repressed. Instead, madness was treated more like a public scandal, and people delighted in the pleasure of being scandalized by it. For instance, mad people were displayed like animals in a zoo, for others to watch like an exhibit rather than shun like a sin.