The Wild, the Unconscious, the Mad

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.