Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
buy bestselling books in print, audio books
|
 |
List Price: $13.95
Our Price:
$10.46
You Save: $3.49
|
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] |
Book : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason Customer Reviews
|
|
|
|
♥♥♥♥♥ |
exorcised mental clutter and fantasy that deluded my mind!
|
The scope of this book is very broad, and while parts of it were tedious for me to read... the parts that benefited me most are likely to be parts that other people find tedious! Foucault's ambitious attempt to tackle so many aspects of our civilizations relationship with madness makes this a book that is not likely to entertain every reader from front to back, but I highly recommend it because the parts that did appeal to me were extremely insightful and actually had a genuine effect on my life.
Foucault discusses madness as the psychological state of a person who becomes engrossed by fantasy to the point where they cannot function in the everyday world. He cites a beautiful image from medieval European art- a bird with a long and delicate neck, symbolic of the time that thoughts take to get from the heart to the mind during contemplation. To demonstrate his concept of madness Foucault poetically warps this image into a bird with a neck so long that it piles up and weaves into a spaghetti-like mess. He states that madness often occurs because... people think too much!
People can become guided by or preoccupied by ideas that are from removed from everyday experience (e.g. a principle based on a theory informed by an idea extrapolated from another persons idea inspired by a theory derived from a principle that refuted an idea stating a theory hypothesized based on an observation... oh, and can we even trust the tools we use to observe the world through?). What I found most ironic while reading this book is that a good number of intellectuals and academics, going by Foucault's principle outlined above, might be considered mad because the ivory tower can be so far removed from the everyday world that people lose their grounding.
Ultimately, I found this book had a profound book on me because it worked as a sort of exorcism. At the time the book found it's way to me I had been heavily wrapped in metaphysical and occult preoccupations, and reading this book made me reconsider how much I know through first hand experience and how much am fantasy have I generated based on hearsay.
In this excellent and interesting history of madness in Western civilization Foucault examines how powerful institutions have operated in response to the irrational, and how the issue has been approached during different eras. How is madness defined, handled and treated- through the Renaissance theory of humours (surprisingly I found this very interesting, if even only for Foucault's explanation of this mystifying topic), to contemporary psychiatric methods (also, Foucault delves into the ways that these different models evolve from one into another). For people who need a bit of sensational spectacle or disturbing gore, the descriptions of asylums and confinement for patients creates a pretty graphic picture of the conditions people have endured during "treatment". |
|
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason Books In Print, Audio Books.