Meeting Details

Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, University of Kent. Making Madness Visible. Ethics of the Gaze and Mental Disorders

Abstract

When the American psychologist David Rosenhan asked the rhetorical question, ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?’, he was questioning the diagnostic criteria of 1970s psychiatry. In my book, I answer neither the question of whether sanity and insanity exist, nor that of whether we can reliably tell them apart. Instead, I trace, across history and cultures, one of the answers humans have repeatedly given to this centuries-old question: we know sanity from insanity by making madness visible. This process of visualisation is, at the same time, a process of othering: the insane are marked as different and thereby identified as outsiders. Drawing on examples from my monograph, this paper traces the history of some of the main tropes through which madness has been visualised and othered, paying particular attention to the reciprocal relationship between visual representation and the practices—of treatment, identification, confinement and marginalisation, among others—that have historically surrounded madness.