After re-reading section #4 and reading section #5, please respond to the following questions in SEPARATE posts, beginning with the number. Post each post IN REPLY to the previous post on that number. In each post, respond to another's post.
#1: In section 4, which we read in class, Foucault describes madmen—now seen as animals rather than sinful humans—enduring freezing temperatures with apparent ease. But the novel should remind you that in modern times most insane people understood to be particularly weak and fragile. How could madmen two hundred years ago be so different, so superhuman in their strength? Here is his explanation: "Animality, in fact, protected the lunatic from whatever might be fragile, precarious, or sickly in man. The Animal solidity of madness, and that density it borrows from the blind world of beasts, inured the madman to hunger, heat, cold, pain" (74). How is Foucault explaining the changed physical strength of the insane? Extrapolating from this example, how, for Foucault, do the subjective and the objective, the mental and the physical—our perception and understanding of things and the things themselves—interact?
#2: In excerpt 5, Foucault is explaining the origins of the modern asylum and the modern treatment of insanity (psychoanalysis). On the bottom of page 250, Foucault's historical argument seems to face a challenge. He needs to explain how the 19th century practice of keeping the insane in an obedient silence led to the 20th century practice of psychoanalysis, where the mentally ill patient does almost all the talking and the therapist listens in silence. How does he explain this connection? (Look at the bottom of 250 and top of 251.) And how is the increasingly humane treatment of the insane in some sense a bad sign? (Look from 250 to the top of 252.)
#3: Just to help your reading, on p 252 "minority" is used in the legal sense, meaning not a legal adult. And on p 253 and the top of 254, he is referring to the myth at the core of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus theory. The Oedipus complex is the child's desires to sleep with the mother and to kill the father (who stands in the way of sleeping with the mother). The relationship with the mother represents and determines all sexual relationships, and the relationship with the father represents and determines all relationships to authority (from your teachers to God to your inner conscience—think of "The Law" from Kafka). By explaining insanity in terms of the Oedipal complex, what role does the family acquire in causing and curing insanity? How, according to Foucault, is this 20th century vision of the traditional family part of the same trend that he identifies in the 19th century with Tuke's asylum?
