Abstract: | While the medical science recognises a number of symptoms which point to
a particular mental disease and the methods of diagnosis and treatment are very
advanced, madness still remains a vague and unclear term. This opaqueness
becomes evident when one attempts to position a barrier separating sanity and
insanity, and finds that the two elements of the binary opposition are, in fact,
blended into one another without a precise point of distinction. Instinctively one
feels that such a border must exist, but its location remains unclear. When investigating,
for example, the effects of a horror story, which deals with madness, upon
its reader one cannot resist the impression that the narrative in some way provides
a very close insight into insanity. This insight exists, however, only
in the form of a short-lasting emotional imprint; by no means is it an actual dynamic
process of crossing a supposed barrier between sanity and madness. Madness
stubbornly avoids enclosure into semantic boundaries: attempts at finding the
line which separates the world of the normal and the world of the mentally sick
seem futile. |