The Carnival of the Mad: Foucault’s Window into the Origin of Psychology

Abstract

Foucault’s participation in the 1954 carnival of the mad at an asylum in Switzerland marked the beginning of his critical reflections on the origins of psychology. The event revealed a paradox at the heart of psychology to Foucault, for here was an asylum known for its progressive method and groundbreaking scientific research that was somehow still exhibiting traces of a medieval conception of madness. Using the cultural expression of this carnival as a starting place, this paper goes beyond carnival costumes to uncover the historical structures underneath the discipline of modern psychology. Drawing on Foucault’s earliest works in psychology, his 1954 Mental Illness and Personality, his 1954 “Dream, Existence and Imagination,” his 1957 “Scientific Research and Psychology” and briefly his 1961 History of Madness, I will describe the discrepancy between the theory of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the methods of modern science, and the practice of modern psychology, which finds its heritage in the classical age. I will argue that this division helps make sense of unexplained psychological phenomena, as seen in general practices related to artistic expression, and individual experiences, as seen in the presence of guilt and the resistance to medical diagnosis in patients.

Contrary to reason: Documentary film-making and alternative psychotherapies

“…While visiting a Swiss asylum in the mid 1950s (as part of his research on Ludwig Binswanger), Foucault was struck by the highly theatrical, performative, and communal nature of such activities, concluding that they revealed a paradox at the heart of psychology itself (i.e. that while its theories may be to all intents and purposes scientific and modern, its therapeutic practices still rely on pre-modern rituals and traditions to make sense of madness): ‘And by a strange paradox, by a strange return, we organise for [the patients], around them, with them, a whole parade, with dance and mask, a whole carnival, which is in the strict sense of the term a new feast of fools’ (quoted in Robcis, 2021: 114–15; see also Venable, 2021: 60–1). This is an attractive argument but not entirely applicable to everyday life at Saint-Alban, which embodied a willingness to acknowledge and explore such paradoxes: unlike other psychiatric hospitals or asylums, the creative activities and theatrical performances organized by the patients’ co-operative or the Club Paul Balvet, for example, were not simply extramural or supplementary social events – occasioning the return of a repressed history of madness – but rather they were understood as intrinsic to the therapeutic environment, organized around collective, democratic procedures.…”