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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Sigmund Freud

It is with considerable intellectual excitement that we inaugurate this publication, dedicated to the intricate and often unsettling dialogue between the literary arts and the profound depths of the human psyche. Our guiding spirit in this endeavour is none other than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Viennese neurologist whose theorie for better or worse, irrevocably altered the landscape of how we understand ourselves, our societies, and the stories we tell.

The newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism - Sigmund Freud seeks to illuminate the complex interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We shall examine the potent relationship between writing and the formation of identity, and scrutinise the interwoven threads of social, medical, and historical constructions of madness. Our investigation will lead us into the labyrinth of selfhood, asking how it is shaped by language, distorted by gender expectations, and articulated—or shattered—by madness.

Introduction 

To the uninitiated, the application of psychoanalytic theory to a sonnet or a novel might seem an eccentric, even reductive, exercise. However, Freud himself understood that the pathways of the unconscious mind are not dissimilar to the structures of a story. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism is not merely about diagnosing fictional characters; it is a form of criticism that uses the techniques and theories of psychoanalysis as a lens to interpret literature. It proceeds from the foundational premise that the human mind, with its conflicts, desires, and fears, is the primary source of creative expression.

Literature, in this view, becomes a controlled space where the chaotic contents of the unconscious can be safely explored, disguised, and enacted. The writer’s creativity is a form of dreaming while awake, and the literary work itself is a manifestation of deep psychological processes.

Key Concepts:

To navigate this terrain, one must be equipped with the fundamental vocabulary of Freudian thought. Below is a detailed glossary of essential terms.

• The Unconscious

Ø 

Explanation: This is the cornerstone of Freud’s entire edifice. The unconscious is a vast, dynamic region of the psyche lying beneath the conscious mind. It is a repository for thoughts, memories, desires, and fears that are too threatening, painful, or socially unacceptable to be admitted into conscious awareness. It is not passive; it exerts a constant and powerful influence on our conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. In literary terms, a character’s overt motives (conscious) may be driven by hidden, repressed forces (unconscious), creating depth, tension, and tragedy.

• Repression

Ø  Explanation: This is the primary defence mechanism of the psyche. It is the process of actively forgetting, ignoring, or pushing unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events out of conscious awareness and into the dungeon of the unconscious. The underlying assumption is that when a wish, fear, or memory is too difficult to face, we repress it. However, this does not eliminate it. The repressed material remains alive and active, perpetually seeking a return, often in disguised forms—through dreams, slips of the tongue (parapraxes, or "Freudian slips"), and, crucially, through creative writing and artistic expression.

• The Oedipus Complex

Ø  Explanation: Perhaps Freud's most (in)famous concept, and one central to understanding identity formation. Freud proposed that during the phallic stage of development (around ages 3-5), a male child conceives a deep-seated sexual desire for his mother and a concomitant wish to eliminate his father, who is seen as a rival. This creates immense psychic conflict, fuelled by love for the father and fear of his retaliation (castration anxiety). The complex is eventually resolved when the child identifies with the father and internalises societal norms. Freudian critics, like Ernest Jones, have used this to interpret literary works, most famously Hamlet, arguing that Hamlet’s paralysis stems from his unconscious identification with his uncle Claudius, who has actually done what Hamlet himself (burdened by an Oedipus complex) had secretly desired: killed the father and possessed the mother.

• Libido, Eros, and Thanatos

Ø  Explanation: The libido is the psychic energy associated with the sexual drive, the force behind our desires. Freud later expanded this into a more generalised concept of life instincts, which he termed Eros (from the Greek god of love). Eros represents the drive toward life, creation, propagation, and unity. Its opposite is Thanatos (from the Greek personification of death), the death instinct. Thanatos is the drive towards aggression, destruction, and a return to an inorganic state. This fundamental tension between creation and destruction, love and aggression, is a powerful engine for drama and conflict in literature.

• The Psychic Apparatus: Id, Ego, Superego

Ø  Explanation: Freud later proposed a tripartite model of the psyche:

§  The Id: The completely unconscious, primitive part of the mind. It is the seat of our basic biological drives and instincts (sex, hunger, aggression). It operates on the pleasure principle—it seeks immediate gratification without any regard for reality, consequences, or morality. A character wholly consumed by the id would be a monstrous, impulsive creature.

§  The Ego: The largely conscious part that mediates between the demands of the id, the constraints of the real world, and the morals of the superego. It operates on the reality principle, employing reason and strategy to satisfy the id's desires in socially acceptable ways. The ego is the hero navigating a difficult world.

§  The Superego: The internalised representative of societal and parental values, our conscience. It strives for perfection, judges our actions, and produces feelings of pride or, more often, guilt. A character dominated by a harsh superego might be crippled by anxiety or act with rigid, unforgiving morality.

• Dream Work: Condensation and Displacement

Ø  Explanation: Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." However, the unconscious wish cannot appear directly; it is censored by the ego. Therefore, it undergoes a process of transformation called dream work.

§  Condensation: Multiple dream thoughts, figures, or anxieties are combined and compressed into a single dream image. For example, a dream character might have the face of a teacher, the job of your father, and the voice of a film star, representing a composite of authority figures.

§  Displacement: The psychic intensity or importance of a subject is detached from its real object and transferred onto a seemingly unimportant one. A deep anxiety about one’s career might be displaced into a dream about misplacing your car keys. In literature, this operates through symbolism and metaphor.

Writing the Self: Literature, Madness, and Identity Formation

The act of writing is, in itself, a profound engagement with identity. One constructs a self on the page, a process that can either shore up a fragile ego or expose its fractures. Freudian theory provides a framework for understanding this process.

The Author's Unconscious: A traditional Freudian approach might treat the literary text as a symptom of the author’s own psychology. The work becomes a playground for the author’s repressed desires and unresolved conflicts. The famous application of this is Freud’s own reading of Hamlet, which he linked to Shakespeare’s own experience of grieving his father and the death of his son, Hamnet. The play, in this view, is a disguised working-through of the author’s Oedipal anxieties.

The Character's Psyche: More commonly, the critic analyses the fictional characters as if they were real patients, mapping their motivations and conflicts onto Freudian models. Why does a character self-sabotage? It may be a superego punishing an ego that has entertained an id-driven desire. Why the obsession with a particular object? It may be a symbolically displaced desire. This reading excavates the hidden psychological depths beneath the plot.

The Discourses of Insanity: Social, Medical, and Historical Constructions

Madness is never just a medical condition. It is a cultural construct, its definition shifting across history and society. Literature both reflects and shapes these discourses.

• Social Construction: Societies define madness by what they deem irrational, immoral, or disruptive. The "mad" individual is often the one who violates social norms—particularly around gender, as we shall see. Literature can reinforce these constructions (the raving, dangerous lunatic) or challenge them, presenting the "mad" character as a truth-teller whose vision sees through the hypocrisy of society (e.g., the Fool in King Lear).
• Medical Construction: The 19th century, Freud’s formative period, saw madness increasingly medicalised, moved from the realm of morality or superstition to that of science and pathology. Freud was a product of this, yet his "talking cure" also represented a move away from purely biological explanations, focusing instead on life history and repressed trauma. Literature of the period, from Charlotte Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the works of Dostoevsky, engages directly with the medical treatment of "hysteria" and "nervous disorders," often criticising its oppressive practices.
• Historical Construction: What was considered melancholia in the Renaissance is not identical to modern depression. The hysterical woman of the Victorian era is a specific historical figure. Psychoanalytic criticism must be historically aware, understanding that the forms madness takes are contingent on the time and place of their emergence.

The Gendered Self: Language, Hysteria, and the Female Voice

Nowhere is the interconnection between writing, identity, and madness more stark than in the context of gender. Freud’s theories, often criticised as deeply masculinist, were developed primarily through the study of female patients diagnosed with "hysteria"—a catch-all term for a suite of symptoms (anxiety, paralysis, hallucinations) that had no apparent physical cause.

Sigmund Freud listened to these women and concluded that their symptoms were not lies or biological flaws but the body’s language for expressing a psychic trauma that could not be spoken directly—a classic case of conversion, where a repressed psychological conflict is converted into a physical symptom. The hysteric’s body writes her distress where her voice cannot speak it.

For the female writer, then, writing could become a means to reclaim this voice. To write was to translate the silent, somatic language of hysteria into a shared, public discourse. It was a way to forge an identity against social and medical definitions that sought to silence her. Writers like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf (who was intimately familiar with the medical discourse of her own "madness") explore this territory relentlessly. Their work demonstrates the struggle to articulate a self within a language and a society that often pathologises female passion, intelligence, and ambition as forms of insanity.

Beyond Freud - Jung and Lacan

While Freud is our focus, any student must be aware of the theorists who built upon and diverged from his work.

• Carl Jung: Freud’s protégé, Jung, broke away to develop Archetypal Criticism. He moved the focus from the personal unconscious to the collective unconscious—a psychic inheritance of universal, primordial patterns and images called archetypes (e.g., The Hero, The Mother, The Trickster). For Jung, literature is not a personal wish-fulfilment but a tapping into these shared archetypes, which evoke a powerful, universal response.
• Jacques Lacan: The most influential post-Freudian for literary theory, Lacan famously declared that "the unconscious is structured like a language." He fused psychoanalysis with linguistics. Key concepts include:

Ø  The Symbolic Order: The realm of language, law, and social structure, associated with the Name-of-the-Father.

Ø  The Imaginary: The pre-linguistic stage of identification with the mother, a realm of illusion and dyadic unity.

Ø  The Mirror Stage: The moment a child recognises its own image and begins to form an ego, though this ego is based on a misrecognition—an ideal-I that is forever alienated from the fragmented self within.

Ø  For Lacan, we are born into lack and desire, which language perpetually attempts to fill. Meaning is always deferred; the signifier (the word) never perfectly captures the signified (the concept). A Lacanian critic would thus look at a text not for hidden authorial desires, but for its gaps, slips, and contradictions—the points where language fails and the unconscious speaks. Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter" is a classic Lacanian text, where the letter itself becomes an unknowable signifier whose content is less important than the position it holds for each character, dictating their actions and desires.

Conclusion

The Freudian exploration of literature reveals it to be far more than mere entertainment. It is a crucial arena where the most fundamental struggles of the human condition are staged: the conflict between desire and prohibition, the construction of a self from the raw material of biology and society, and the constant, fraught negotiation between our conscious lives and the unseen depths of the unconscious. By examining the inter-relationships between writing, identity, and the historically constructed discourse of madness, we learn not only how to read texts more deeply, but also how to read the most complex text of all: ourselves.

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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Michel Foucault

In this Newsletter, we turn our attention to one of the most formidable and influential thinkers of the twentieth century: Michel Foucault (1926-1984). A French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, Foucault’s work relentlessly questioned the very foundations of our society—our institutions, our knowledge, and our identities.

Our specific focus will be on his seminal work, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (History of Madness), first published in 1961. We will use this text as a keystone to explore the profound and often unsettling interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We will examine how writing becomes a site for identity formation and dissolution, and how what we call ‘madness’ is not a timeless medical fact but a construct woven from social, medical, and historical threads. We will pay particular attention to the intricate dance between selfhood, language, and gender.

This research will necessitate a deep dive into Foucault’s unique terminology. Fear not; we shall unpack each concept with care, illuminating the path through this challenging but rewarding intellectual landscape.

The Foucauldian Foundation – Key Concepts

To understand Foucault's approach to madness, one must first be equipped with his philosophical set of tools. His methods give a radical new way of seeing the world.

• Archaeology (of Knowledge):

Ø  Explanation: This is Foucault’s method of historical analysis. Unlike a traditional historian who might seek a continuous narrative of progress, Foucault acts as an archaeologist of ideas. He digs down through layers of historical epochs to uncover the unspoken rules that governed what could be said, thought, and known in a particular period. He is less interested in what people thought and more interested in the underlying system that made certain thoughts possible and others unthinkable. He calls this underlying system the épistème.

• Épistème:

Ø  Explanation: A French term meaning a "historical a priori" or the fundamental stratum of knowledge peculiar to a specific time and place. It is the unconscious, foundational structure that defines the conditions of possibility for knowledge. It determines what is accepted as a valid scientific statement, a philosophical proposition, or even a rational thought. The épistème of the Renaissance (c. 15th-16th centuries) was different from that of the Classical Age (c. 17th-18th centuries), which was, in turn, ruptured by the modern épistème. Madness, according to Foucault, was experienced and constituted differently within each.

• Discourse:

Ø  Explanation: This is a crucial term. For Foucault, a discourse is not just a conversation or a speech. It is a socially constructed body of language and practice that systematically forms the objects of which it speaks. Discourse is a form of power. For example, the medical discourse on insanity doesn't just describe madness; it actively creates it as a category of illness, complete with symptoms, treatments, and experts (doctors) who have the authority to diagnose and manage it. Literature is itself a powerful discursive field, one that can reinforce or challenge dominant discourses.

• Power/Knowledge (Pouvoir/Savoir):

Ø  Explanation: Foucault famously argued that power and knowledge are inextricably linked. He condensed this into the term pouvoir/savoir. It is not that knowledge is power in a simple sense. Rather, the exercise of power creates new objects of knowledge (e.g., the "hysterical woman," the "sexual deviant"), while the accumulation of knowledge (e.g., clinical studies, case files) inevitably creates new mechanisms of power and control. There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, and no knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations.

• Genealogy:

Ø  Explanation: A method Foucault adopted later, complementing archaeology. If archaeology examines the conditions of knowledge, genealogy examines its effects and its murky, contested, and often violent origins. It is a history of the present, seeking to show that what we accept as natural, inevitable, or objectively true (like our concepts of justice, madness, or sexuality) is actually the result of historical struggles, accidents, and the will to power. It "greyifies" what was seen as pure history.

A History of Madness -

Foucault’s History of Madness is a genealogical project par excellence. He traces a dramatic shift in how European society perceived and treated the mad.

• The Renaissance (c. 15th-16th Centuries): The Dialogue with Unreason

Ø  The Discourse: In this period, madness (folly) was not yet fully separated from reason. It held an ambiguous, even sacred place. The figure of the Fool could speak truths to power that no sane person would dare utter. Madness was seen as a part of the human condition, a tragic wisdom, a window into the divine or the apocalyptic. It featured prominently in art (e.g., Hieronymus Bosch) and literature (e.g., Shakespeare’s fools in King Lear or Twelfth Night), where it served as a critical commentary on society's follies.

• The Classical Age (c. 17th-18th Centuries): The Great Confinement

Ø  The Discourse: Foucault identifies a profound rupture in the mid-17th century. This was the age of Reason (Le Grand Siècle), and with it came a powerful need to silence what it defined as its opposite: Unreason (déraison). The founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris in 1656 was a seminal event. It was not a medical establishment but a quasi-judicial structure of authority. The mad, along with the poor, the vagrant, the unemployed, and the debauched, were interned—locked away not to be cured, but to be morally condemned and excluded from the social order. Madness was silenced. It was no longer a dialogue with reason but its absolute negation, its shameful secret.

• The Modern Age (c. 19th Century onwards): The Birth of the Asylum & the Medical Gaze

Ø  The Discourse: The figure of Philippe Pinel in France and William Tuke in England are traditionally hailed as humanitarians who "liberated the insane from their chains." Foucault offers a radical reinterpretation. He argues that this was not a liberation but a transformation of power. The chains became psychological. The asylum was born, and with it, the medicalisation of madness. The mad were now constituted as "mental patients" to be studied, classified, and normalised under the "medical gaze"—the authoritative eye of the doctor who objectifies the patient. The key mechanism of control was no longer physical restraint but constant moral judgment and the internalisation of guilt. The patient had to confess their madness and submit to the figure of the Doctor, who became a "father" and a "judge."

Literature, Writing, and the Madness of Selfhood

This historical framing allows us to see literature not merely as reflecting attitudes to madness but as a primary site of discursive struggle.

• Literature as a Counter-Discourse:

Ø  Where the medical and social discourses of the Classical and Modern ages sought to confine and silence unreason, literature became one of the few spaces where the voice of madness could still be heard. From the inside of characters like Ophelia (whose fragmented, floral songs signify a world beyond masculine, political rationality) to the narrators of works like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (a direct critique of the 19th-century "rest cure" for women), literature gives form to the experience of being labelled ‘mad’. It challenges the official story.

• Writing and Identity-Formation:

Ø  Foucault forces us to ask: is the self a stable, coherent entity we discover, or is it constructed through the discourses available to us? The act of writing, particularly confessional writing (diaries, autobiographies, certain forms of fiction), is a key technology of the self. We use language to tell ourselves into being. But what happens when the available discourses are limiting or pathological? A woman in the 19th century, for instance, might only have been able to articulate deep anguish or rebellion through the discourse of "hysteria" or "nervous exhaustion"—the very labels used to control her. Her identity is formed in the tense space between her experience and the limited, often damaging, language society gives her to express it.

• The Inter-relationship of Constructions:

Ø  Foucault shows that you cannot separate the social (poverty idleness as moral failings), the medical (the diagnosis of madness), and the historical (the rise of the work ethic and capitalism). The "Great Confinement" was an economic and social policy as much as a medical one. The "lazy" poor and the "unreasonable" mad were lumped together because both were seen as unproductive and disruptive to the new social order. Their construction was intertwined.

 Gender and Madness – A Foucauldian Perspective

The construction of madness is deeply gendered. Foucault’s work, particularly his History of Sexuality, provides a framework for understanding this.

• Hysteria: The Archetypal Female Malady:

Ø  Explanation: The very term hysteria (from the Greek hystera for womb) pathologises the female body. For centuries, a vast array of women's emotions, desires, and rebellions were diagnosed as symptoms of a "wandering womb." This is a prime example of pouvoir/savoir: the medical profession gained power and authority by creating this category of knowledge, while women were subjected to its controlling effects (from rest cures to forced institutionalisation).

• The Pathologisation of Female Identity:

Ø  Traits associated with femininity—passivity, emotionality, sensitivity—were often medicalised as signs of inherent weakness and a predisposition to nervous disorders. Conversely, traits that deviated from prescribed gender roles—ambition, sexual desire, intellectualism—were also seen as symptoms of madness. The discourse of madness became a powerful tool for policing gender boundaries. A woman’s struggle to form an identity outside of the narrow roles of wife and mother was often interpreted not as a political or social struggle, but as a psychological pathology to be treated.

• Writing as Resistance:

Ø  Many female authors used writing to fight back against this pathologisation. Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a stark narrative of a woman driven mad by the very "cure" imposed upon her. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar explores the suffocating pressure of 1950s feminine ideals and the intimate connection between creative expression and mental fracture. These works do not just describe madness; they perform a counter-discourse, using the master’s tools (language and narrative) to dismantle the master’s house (the patriarchal medical establishment).

Conclusion:

Michel Foucault teaches us that our most cherished concepts—sanity, reason, the self—are not solid, timeless truths. They are historical artefacts, built upon the silent exclusion of their opposites. The mad were not always ‘sick’; they were first made ‘other’, then ‘patient’.

For the student of literature, this is transformative. A text is no longer a simple mirror but a battleground of discourses. When we read a character like Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic" in Jane Eyre, we must ask: who is truly mad? The enslaved colonial subject screaming in rebellion, or the colonial order that locked her away? Foucault gives us the tools to hear the voices from the archive that history has tried to silence.

To study the interconnection of literature and madness is to understand that writing is always an act of identity-formation, always political, and always engaged in a struggle over who gets to define what is real, what is rational, and what it means to be human. 

Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin

Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin

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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin

The Dialogics of Madness: Language, Identity, and the Unravelling Self

Introduction:

The Newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin aims to enlighten the profound and complex ideas of the Russian philosopher and literary theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975), and to demonstrate their enduring relevance to contemporary literary and cultural studies. Our focus in this edition is a particularly resonant one: the complex relationship between literary discourse and the constructions of insanity.

Literature has long been a privileged space for exploring the fragile boundaries of the human mind. From Shakespeare’s tormented Prince of Denmark to the confined narrators of Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Sylvia Plath, the ‘mad’ character or voice challenges our stable notions of self, reason, and society. But how does language itself, the very stuff of literature, participate in constructing what we understand as madness? To examine this, we must turn to Bakhtin, whose revolutionary concepts provide not a diagnostic manual, but a linguistic and philosophical framework for understanding how identities—including those believed ‘insane’—are formed and contested in the dialogic clash of voices.

This newsletter will guide you through key Bakhtinian terms, explaining them in detail, before applying them to the complex interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We will examine the relationship between writing and identity-formation, and investigate the interplay of social, medical, and historical forces that shape our understanding of the ‘mad’ self.

Key Concepts:

To fully grasp Bakhtin’s contribution to this topic, one must first become comfortable with his unique vocabulary. These are not merely jargon; they are precise tools for dissecting the nature of language and narrative.

• Dialogism (The Dialogic Principle)

Ø Explanation: This is the cornerstone of Bakhtin’s entire philosophy. He argued that language is inherently dialogic. This means that no word, utterance, or text exists in isolation. Every utterance is shaped by the words that have come before it and is anticipating a response. It is always addressed to someone and is part of an ongoing, unfinished conversation.

Ø  Example: When a novelist writes a sentence, they are in a dialogue with the entire history of the novel as a genre, with other writers, and with the anticipated responses of their readers. Similarly, an individual’s thought process is not a solitary monologue but an internal dialogue, filled with the voices of parents, teachers, cultural figures, and past selves.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: If a stable self is formed through a harmonious (if complex) dialogue with society, then madness, from a Bakhtinian perspective, might be seen as a breakdown in this dialogue—a situation where the internal voices become cacophonous, where the individual can no longer successfully answer or integrate the external social voices, or where their own voice is silenced or pathologised by powerful authoritative discourses (e.g., medical, patriarchal).

• Heteroglossia

Ø Explanation: Literally meaning “multiple-languagedness,” this term describes the central fact of social language. Any national language (e.g., English) is not a single, monolithic system but a living tapestry of many different ‘languages’ or social dialects. These are stratified according to profession (the language of lawyers, doctors, mechanics), generation (teenage slang), class, region, and ideology.

Ø  Example: A single novel can contain the heteroglot voices of a wealthy industrialist, a socialist revolutionary, a pious vicar, and a cynical journalist. The artistic genius of the novel, for Bakhtin, lies in its ability to orchestrate these diverse social languages without reducing them to a single, authorial viewpoint.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The discourse of insanity itself is a powerful social language, often wielded by medical and institutional authorities. A Bakhtinian analysis would examine how this professional ‘language of psychiatry’ interacts with, labels, and attempts to overwrite the individual’s own social language and personal voice within a literary text.

• Authoritative vs. Internally Persuasive Discourse

Ø  Explanation: Bakhtin distinguishes between two ways in which we internalise external voices.

1. Authoritative Discourse: This is the language of authority, religion, parents, or political dogma that demands to be accepted and incorporated wholesale. It is static, finished, and hierarchical. We recite it; we do not genuinely dialogue with it. It operates as a monologic force—seeking to shut down dialogue.

2.  Internally Persuasive Discourse: This is language that we engage with, wrestle with, and make our own. It is open, dynamic, and enters into a dialogue with our other beliefs and experiences. It is the basis for authentic, organic identity formation.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The process of diagnosis and institutionalisation can be seen as the imposition of an Authoritative Discourse (“You are hysterical,” “You suffer from neurasthenia”) upon a person’s Internally Persuasive Discourse. The literary depiction of madness often revolves around the conflict between these two forces, as the character’s own sense of self is threatened or dismantled by an authoritative medical or social label.

• Polyphony and the Carnivalesque

Ø  Explanation:

1.   Polyphony (“many-voicedness”): Bakhtin used this term specifically to describe Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. He argued that Dostoevsky created a new type of novel where the author’s voice does not dominate those of the characters. Instead, the characters are fully realised, independent "consciousnesses" whose voices interact on a seemingly equal footing with the author's and with each other. The novel becomes a playground of competing ideologies and worldviews.

2.  Carnivalesque: Drawing on the medieval tradition of carnival, Bakhtin identified a literary mode that subverts and liberates. Carnival involves the temporary suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. It is a world of grotesque realism—focusing on the body, its lower strata (defecation, copulation), and its materiality—which debunks high-minded ideals and official culture through humour, chaos, and parody.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The carnivalesque can be a powerful literary strategy for representing madness. The ‘mad’ character often behaves in a carnivalesque manner: they break social taboos, speak the unspeakable, and invert logical hierarchies (the fool becomes the wise one). Their discourse can carnivalise the sober, rational, ‘sane’ world, exposing its hypocrisies. A polyphonic novel allows the ‘mad’ voice to exist with its own integrity and challenge the reader’s assumptions, rather than being neatly contained and explained away by a dominant authorial or narrative voice.

The Dialogic Self: Writing and Identity-Formation in the Shadow of Madness

Bakhtin’s view of the self is not as a fixed, essential core, but as a project that is perpetually under construction through dialogue. The self is a meeting point of myriad social voices. We are who we are through our constantly evolving relationship with the words of others.

This has profound implications for understanding the nexus of writing, identity, and madness.

Ø  Writing as Self-Authorship: The act of writing, particularly in first-person narratives like diaries, confessions, or autobiographies, is a potent tool for identity-formation. It is an attempt to organise the internal dialogue, to take the chaotic multitude of influencing voices and craft them into a coherent narrative of the self. It is a process of making the Internally Persuasive.

Ø  The Fractured Text of the ‘Mad’ Self: When the social dialogue breaks down—when the authoritative discourses of medicine or family become overwhelmingly oppressive and monologic—the project of self-construction can falter. The literary representation of this is often a fractured text: a stream-of-consciousness that jumps between voices, a diary that reveals paranoia and disintegration, or a narrative where the protagonist’s voice is constantly interrupted and re-defined by the diagnostic language of doctors (as seen in The Yellow Wallpaper). The writing does not create a coherent self but documents its unravelling, showcasing a failed dialogue.

The Inter-relationship of Social, Medical, and Historical Constructions

A Bakhtinian approach insists that ‘madness’ is not a transhistorical, biological given. It is a discursive construction—its meaning is created and fought over within language and culture, across different historical periods.

Ø  Social & Historical Constructions: The ‘village idiot’ of the 17th century, the ‘nervous hysteric’ of the Victorian era, and the ‘schizophrenic’ of the 20th century are all products of their specific time and place. Each era has its own heteroglot array of voices (religious, judicial, medical, familial) that compete to define what constitutes unreasonable behaviour. Literature is a key archive of these competing discourses.

Ø  Medical Discourse as Authority: The rise of psychiatry and psychoanalysis saw the medical profession’s language become a supremely authoritative discourse in defining insanity. Literary texts often stage a clash between this clinical, objectifying language and the subjective, experiential language of the sufferer. The question becomes: Whose voice gets to define the reality of the experience? The patient’s internally persuasive, but chaotic, account? Or the doctor’s authoritative, diagnostic label?

Ø  Gender and the Female Malady: This power dynamic is intensely gendered. Historically, medical and social discourses have often pathologised female rebellion, sexuality, and intellectual ambition as forms of madness (‘hysteria’ derives from the Greek for ‘womb’). A Bakhtinian reading of a text like Jane Eyre would not just analyse Bertha Mason as a ‘madwoman in the attic’; it would analyse the authoritative discourses (Mr. Rochester’s patriarchal voice, the medical voice of restraint) that label and confine her, silencing her own voice and rendering her a monstrous, grotesque figure. Her muffled roars and violent acts can be read as a desperate, non-linguistic, carnivalesque attempt to break back into the dialogue from which she has been excluded.

Conclusion:

For Bakhtin, the human being is always unfinalisable. There is no final word that can be said about a person; the dialogue of identity is always open to new responses and reinterpretations. This is a profoundly humane vision.

Applying this to the discourse of insanity in literature allows us to move beyond simplistic readings of ‘madness’ as a plot device or a tragic flaw. Instead, we can see it as:

1. A dialogic breakdown between the individual and the world.
2. A site of struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses.
3. A carnivalesque force that can challenge and expose the limitations of ‘sane’ society.
4. A construct shaped by the heteroglossia of its specific historical and social moment.

Literature, in its highest polyphonic form, does not give us answers about madness. Instead, it preserves the complexity of the dialogue, allowing the myriad voices—the sufferer, the doctor, the family, society—to sound together in all their conflict and confusion. It refuses to let the authoritative discourse have the final word, keeping the conversation, and thus our understanding, provocatively and productively open.

Psychoanalytical Criticism - Michel Foucault