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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