Session 3: In the Folds of Institutions

Session 3: In the Folds of Institutions
Chair: Loren Broc
Institution Defining Madness: A Place for the Individual
Emmanuelle Rozier
Laboratoire : Philosophie, Langages & Cognition, Université Pierre Mendès France, Grenoble II, Fontaine, France

The type of psychiatric institution we dedicate to people change totaly the way they experienced their madness. In a pragmatist perspective, we will try to show how the organization is a part of the definition of person involved in madness approaches. To introduce this question – widely inspired by our fieldwork experienced at « La Borde » during 5 years, a psychiatric clinic developing a collective philosophy – we will present the study of Alfred H. Stanton, and Morris S. Schwartz, both americans researchers who spent three years inside the institution of Chestnut Lodge (Maryland, USA). Our question will be then : how the institution organization type defines the concept of person involved in the perception and experience of madness?

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In 1966, a young Australian factory worker, Peter Kocan, became infamous after attempting to assassinate his country’s then opposition leader, Arthur Calwell.
During his subsequent incarceration in the maximum security criminal ward of Morisset Mental Hospital, and in his outside life post-hospitalisation, Kocan went on – with much critical acclaim – to document institutional existence in both his poetry and his prose.
A study of his autobiographical prose works, Fresh Fields and The Treatment and The Cure, reveals a heavy reliance on images of War to explain the self as a loner.
The enemy, whether it is the self or the institution, is always seen as the embodiment of all evil. The undiagnosed, unnamed, schizophrenic character of The Youth, in Fresh Fields, is portrayed as being under the influence of a fictitious Nazi soldier, and it is this influence that spurs on ‘The Youth’ to carry out the assassination attempt.
Conversely, after the completion of the criminally insane act and the subsequent diagnosis, Len Tarbutt (the adult version of The Youth from Fresh Fields) is rehabilitated in The Treatment and The Cure and renounces his imaginary Nazi past by establishing yet another fantasy relationship, this time with a British infantryman from a World War I novel.
Thus, in Kocan’s hands, madness is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the mind after drug usage, a hereditary predisposition towards mental illness, or by years of post-traumatic stress. Madness is instead all about political allegiances; sanity is on the side of good and insanity on the side of evil.
Such an ideology can only be understood through decoding the war imagery used in the texts, as The Youth and Len Tarbutt (while both being outsiders) are presented as logical, thoughtful characters – with a clear idea of their life’s mission.

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