Critiques of Unreason by Chesler and Foucault - Essay Example

Critiques of Unreason: Chesler and Foucault This paper is a summary of readings from books written by Chesler (2005) and Foucault (1965). A critiqueof each author's perspectives is likewise proffered, in particular the ways each writer challenges some of the assumptions of prevailing models of psychopathology. Summary and Critique of Chesler's "Asylums" The second chapter of Chesler's work focuses on mental asylums and their general characteristics seen from a feminist perspective of how women were treated and the types of mental diseases experienced by those confined in them. In the process, she continues to question whether there would be a better way to make these asylums more effective in carrying out what they are supposed to do, which is to provide care and refuge to women abused by society. In the 16th century, most of the women confined in asylums were unfortunates who were shut up by their husbands for what was perceived as mad behavior. A century later, those confined were victims of violence, prostitution, or bad luck, and most of them were women on the poor receiving end of a male-dominated patriarchal society. Chesler points out (p. 94) that by the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, madness became associated with being a woman by both psychiatrists and novelists, painting a skewed reality where the numbers of men confined for madness were equally increasing. What could account for these misguided perceptions is a mistake of masculine logic: just because male psychiatrists and novelists cannot understand women who as medical evidence has now revealed are anatomically and biologically different, does not mean that all women are mad and that all mad people are women. Chesler attempts to correct such monumental mistakes. First, she argues that the social repression of female behavior led to means of psychological control that were inappropriate and brutal. Second, what may have been labeled and characterized as madness by society is nothing but a manifestation of human nature seeking different forms and means of self-expression. Third, by mirroring within the walls of the asylum the inherent 'defects' of outside society - the patriarchal nature, the well-defined gender roles, and expected modes of repressed feminine behavior - the cure may have made the 'sickness' worse. And fourth, given these mismatches between diagnoses and prescriptions, asylums did not offer asylum and need to be run differently if these are to cure women patients. Chesler provides details of her arguments by looking through the window of three psychopathological symptoms of how the female social role clashed in and with the outside world. Clinical depression (p. 102-104) is associated with women's emotional makeup and their propensity to search for meaning in daily reality and in everything. As scientific findings point out, most symptoms of depression may be the result of biochemical reactions taking place from hormonal changes that wreak havoc on the mind. What this leads to is frightening, because it is possible that several women were characterized as mad in the past and locked up in asylums because they were classified as mad and depressed, when it could be possible that a weekend walk in the park, a good conversation, or maybe even just a few more hours of rest or sleep would have been enough to cure them. Frigidity (p. 105-108) is a reaction to the masculine worldview of women as sex objects whose self-worth is determined by the presence or intensity of orgasmic experience. She reflects the feminist view that by giving women power over their bodies, birth control pills helped them overcome their insecurities by seemingly gaining the upper hand. Although it made casual sex more guilt-free and opened the door to excesses of irresponsibility by both the woman and her partner, sexual liberation may have even enhanced the male view of women as sex objects and piled up another layer of sex-centered insecurity on what already is a social burden. Suicide (p. 108-109) is the end result of personal frustration, both of the subjects who attempt it and those who seem unable to find out what may be wrong with them, when in fact there may not be any. Chesler pointed out an interesting fact: that more women attempt suicide but more men succeed in doing so (p. 109). Using three studies (p. 109-115), the author shows that cases of schizophrenia or madness arise from sex role alienation among both men and women and warned that when women show 'masculine protests', "these are both ineffective and effectively punished and are ultimately self-destructive" (p. 115), and for this reason short-term hospitalization, provided this is not abusive, would be necessary to adjust or change medication or for detoxification purposes. Chesler concludes by stating that those suffering from madness are socially powerless, that their madness is the result of a disunited body and feeling, and that in view of the psychopathological biases (according to gender, race, and class) shown by society, both the patients and the clinicians supposed to help and treat them are conditioned accordingly. It would be important to know how clinicians view their patients, the theories that guide their treatment, and the type of clinical treatment that these patients receive if the treatment is to be effective. As her work has been updated since she first wrote it (in 1972), Chesler sheds clearer lights into what past societies may have misinterpreted as signs of madness, while inserting a feminist perspective of gendered psychopathology and homophobia by pointing out that most clinicians are males with anti-female biases (p. 99). Nevertheless, in the same breath, she opens a crack by asking whether these problems of the feminine psyche proceed from too much tampering with female psychology and physiognomy. What this means is that in the contemporary world, thanks to the efforts of feminists, women have discovered the important role they play in making our existence in the world more human. However, in their efforts to equate themselves (perhaps wrongly) with men in all things, even in those aspects of life and existence where women are better than men (such as the unique way women see reality which, in the end, makes the world richer and better), women may have caused to themselves the unnecessary suffering they do not deserve. The social roles thrust on women in the past may have driven them to seek equality and go to the other extreme, so that from being women who developed mental problems because they were oppressed by male-dominated society, women now develop a similar (perhaps even worse) set of mental problems because they have lost much of what made them special and unique. This seems to be what Chesler warns about when women (and also men) "act out of the devalued female (or male) role or the total or partial rejection of one's sex-role stereotype" (p. 116). Such would lead to patriarchal misogynistic behavior, a prediction where Chesler was proven right, because in the run towards equality, women would start acting like men and men would start acting like women, in the process both ending up losing their unique identities. Chesler's factoid on female suicide - those who succeed are tragically outwitting or rejecting their feminine role at the only price possible: death - also brings to mind an aspect of modern female behavior that needs more attention: the need to treat women with the respect they deserve. By calling attention to the sorry plight of women in asylums, she reminds that more than asking for special treatment, women need to realize that there are ways to be equal to men without leading women to lose their identities and sacrificing their dignity as persons. In a way, she warns women that in their desire to be equal to men, women may end up surpassing men in cruelty not only to other men and women but, even more tragically, to themselves. Her warning can be viewed from the perspectives presented by the efforts of women today to cope with the insanely escalating social expectations that make them demand easier access to abortion, to comply with the unhealthy obsession of perfect body shapes, and fall prey to the deception that gender equality is equated with dry and boring "me-too" sameness. There are many ways to feel good and beautiful, and being like the others is not the best way to do so. Summary and Critique of Foucault's "The Insane" Foucault takes the reader through madness in the dark dungeons of the post-Renaissance era and imbues it with a religious and philosophical meaning that reflects the social consequences of humanity's rejection of the divine. He begins with a description of how madness and confinement evolved in the middle ages through the cycle of public confessions, the avoidance of scandal, and thence to the public display of insane behavior. In earlier times, "evil was dealt with by bringing it into the open" (p. 66), but sometime after in post-Renaissance Europe, society began to hide evil to guard the family honor and protect it from shame. In the past, demonstrations of madness were seen as the misguided and irrational (or unreasonable) acts of a few, at times even exalted, but which were pardoned and made right by public punishments. However, as the incidence of madness increased, madmen began acting with greater violence, making society see it fit those suffering from madness be protected and hidden from view. It was never this way, as Foucault pointed to evidence that the mad were like beasts who could survive in sub-human conditions, and it is by doing so that they are cured by a form of twisted logic that made people conclude that animality cures the madman from whatever it is that makes him sick. This became a rationale for confinement that "glorified the animality of madness to avoid the scandal inherent in the immorality of the unreasonable" (p. 78). Madness was not linked to medicine or to correction. The only way to master animality was through discipline and brutal treatment. When the madman becomes a beast, in a way he is cured because man himself is abolished. An obsession with animality seen as a natural place of madness created the imagery responsible for confinement. The animal was part of anti-nature, the negativity that endangers the order and reason of nature. Classical practices concerning the insane show that madness was still related to anti-natural animality. Foucault called attention to the irrationality of men in an age that celebrated rationality when the human mind was freed from the shackles of religious dogma in the post-Renaissance period. He highlighted this contradiction by illustrating the practice of exhibiting the madmen as a spectacle to entertain and at the same time to warn society that the insane were in a lower class: human in shape yet beastly in behavior, lacking in spirit and yet able to cross the bridge between reason and unreason. How did the world, and mankind, come to this Foucault attributes this development to the loss of religious madness exemplified by Christ, whose behavior was characterized by his critiques as madness to the point of death. As the Renaissance supposedly rid the world of unreason, Christian beliefs were marginalized and mankind began seeking for other manifestations of the madness that symbolized the divine. This led to the celebration of madness as both social phenomena and public spectacle, and formed the basis for the warning coming from classical rationalists that being mad is abnormally pass. Such arguments point toward the possible root causes of the irrational obsessions that prevail as modern-day signs of madness, a form of sublime sacrifice that allows anyone to unite with the substitute for the divine. Cosmetic surgery, conspicuous consumption, hedonism and the devaluation of life are but tips of the iceberg of madness that continues to float in the sea of mankind, evidentiary spectacles of madness considered indispensable to attain human perfection, no matter how perverse they may seem, reflecting the relationship of madness with unreason. Foucault's thesis that confinement and observation allow further study because these facilitates control and organization reflects a mode of thinking influenced by Nietzsche who viewed man as an animal to other men, and by characterizing the insane as those who have lost the proper use of reason in an Age of Reason, Foucault calls attention to the self-destructive and unconscious sides of humanity. He concludes that madness, by bringing out man's animality, represents the rebellion of mankind against the reason that has kept it suppressed for a long time. Undoubtedly, this view that man is inherently an animal that reason wrongly describes as mad and proposing to associate this madness with the divine perfection that is man's ultimate state, are a rather fantastic description of the human condition. In doing so, Foucault sows doubt as to what normal rational behavior would look like, and to question who would be the normal human - the insane within the asylum or those outside of it. His attempt to explain the history of the world and of mankind by the behavior of the insane who represent but a minority of the world's population reflect an unrealistic stretch of the intellect and imagination. This would be similar, perhaps, to the attempts of archeologists to construct an ancient civilization on the evidence of a few bones and some shards of pottery, nurtured by a fertile mind and a wild memory. Foucault's views are interesting, but they represent only one way, admittedly a wild one, to improve the understanding of psychopathology, much less the march of civilization. Nevertheless, his insights into the manner by which madmen were treated during the period provide hints of the futility of his Nietzschean arguments. Treating the insane as animals turned out to be the worst way to bring them back to normalcy. As we know now, insanity can be treated in humane ways, through therapy, medication, or a combination of both that would not diminish the patient's sense of human dignity. By making people more aware that insanity is a curable sickness, and that the insane although being defective in their rationality do not cease to be human, Foucault contributes to the appreciation of the medical and psychological sciences. Conclusions Each article looks at models of psychopathology from two different but parallel perspectives: Chesler adopts a feminist viewpoint, while Foucault's is socio-philosophical. Chesler argues that the symptoms of madness among women proceeded from their oppression in a male-dominated society and their inadequate manner of coping due to defects in the custodial nature prevailing in asylums of which the anti-female bias of most clinicians is but one manifestation. She proposed that a more objective and appropriate approach, taking into consideration the specific need of each patient - whether man or woman - would be more effective. In a way, her feminist perspective highlights the importance of treating each patient with respect and humanity so as to bring her or him back to living a normal life. On his part, Foucault challenges the idea of madness as a social aberration, and his point on its religious root, though seemingly bordering on the fantastic, deserves some consideration. By calling attention to insanity as an observable and curable state where the cause and cure are rooted in the knowledge of human nature as combined spirit and animal, he reminds those tasked with helping people who suffer from mental illness to perform their work without diminishing the dignity of their patients. In a way, his article reminds us that how we treat the mentally sick among us reflects the way we view ourselves and the age in which we live. Reference List Chesler, P. (2005). "Chapter Two: Asylums". Madness and women. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, M. (1965). "Chapter III: The insane". Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage Books. Read More