Phylogenesis and Madness

Abstract

We have conceptualized individual pathology as a process that is initiated by the way in which infants’ hatching or entering the linguistic dimension is usually dealt with in our culture, so cultural pathology has played a central role in creating individuals’ madness from the start. It seems impossible to think of a mad culture without thinking of it as made up of mad individuals. So individual madness has likewise played a central role in cultural madness from its start. As shown in Chapter 5, the two pathologies are two sides of a coin. Nevertheless, we saw that looking at individual pathology separately was useful, as long as we did not take it literally, as truly autonomous, and remembered to introduce cultural considerations when necessary. This chapter reverses the process. We will focus on cultural madness, and the same caveats apply. The problems raised by that concept are the mirror image of those raised by the idea of individual ‘mental disorders’.¹ We need to remember that there can be no autonomous, self-sufficient cultural pathology any more than there can be an autonomous individual pathology. We will criss-cross the field once again, adding considerations pertaining to individual pathology as needed.