19
Madness represents the freedom and creativity of individuality, which if exposed could continue
to be available to society. At the end of the second edition of Mental Illness and Psychology,
Foucault claimed that psychology, however, provides no access to the freedom that the individual
can experience. He said that psychology had come to limit the possibilities of madness because
psychology became possible in our world only when madness had already been
mastered and excluded from the drama. And when, in lightning flashes and cries,
it reappears, as in Nerval or Artaud, Nietzsche or Roussel, it is psychology that
remains silent, speechless, before this language that borrows a meaning of its own
from that tragic split, from that freedom, that, for contemporary man, only the
existence of “psychologists” allows him to forget.
29
Madness was for Foucault the expression of freedom and unconstrained genius. By using
Nietzsche, Artaud, and Roussel as examples of the mad who escape for moments from the
dominance of scientific meaning, Foucault revealed the extent to which he believed in the truth
of inspired genius struggling to escape the oppressions of modern scientific discourse.
In Madness and Civilization, also published in 1961, Foucault described how the
treatment of the mad changed from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. The main purpose of
this account, like Canguilhem’s accounts of the biological sciences, was to show that the
treatment of the mentally ill, despite becoming more “scientific”, did not develop according to
some logical progress and coherent increase of factual knowledge. Rather the change over four
centuries reflected disconnected and illogical determinations based on popular concerns about
religion, morality and economics and had little to do with direct experience of the mad
themselves. Foucault intended to show that the basic beliefs and methods for treating the
mentally ill in modern times are an unfortunate legacy of these earlier developments.
28
Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 42.
29
Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 87-88.
Convention