Humanizing Madness

The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by the psychiatrist François Tosquelles at the rural hospital of Saint-Alban in France. He developed a critique of psychiatric and literary approaches that pathologized, fetishized, or sublimated madness. This article will study Tosquelles's PhD thesis, which was defended in 1948 at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In “Essai sur le sens du vécu en psychopathologie: le témoignage de Gérard de Nerval,” he argues that, far from being the expression of the Romantic genius, or, conversely a mere symptom of madness itself, the delusion of the end of the world in “Aurélia” is to be understood as the poet's last effort to singularize his existence before committing suicide in 1855. This can be read as Tosquelles's response to the Surrealists’ “othering” of madness exemplified by Paul Éluard in his Souvenirs de la maison des fous written in Saint-Alban during the war.

Delusion · Expression (computer science) · Romance · Romanticism · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · Neurology and Historical Studies