5 on Friday | 5 Favorite Quotes From "Madness Network News"
In order of appearance
10.20.23
#1. "The Madwoman on the Streets", by Carol Safer
Vol. 1.4 (1973)
I asked a variety of people their definitions of madness. Some have been in mental hospitals; some have not. Here are some of the definitions:
Douglas: "Madness is craziness"
Errol: "It's foaming at the mouth and being delirious."
Leonard: "There is no such thing as madness."
Gen. Waste-more-land: "Madness is humanity.”
Joan: "Madness is a loss of reality."
Cleo: "Madness is being beyond the pale."
John: "All prejudice is madness."
Bill: "Madness is the inability to function."
Ken: "Madness is a 9 to 5 job and a house in the suburbs."
Leo: "Madness is genius."
Alex: "Madness is fear and trembling."
Roy: "Madness is anti-social behavior."
Kathy: "Madness originally, implied fierce angry insanity, (like when they said the king was mad.) It has evolved to meaning not the mild sweet psychotic thing, but it might be flamboyant and possibly being mean. The contemporary definition is angry to the point of being irrational, not necessarily permanently insane."
Geoffrey: "Madness is a permanent excursion into fantasyland."
A psychiatrist: "Insanity is not being able to
differentiate between right and wrong."
Carol: "Madness is when the highs are too high and the lows are too low.”
Ellen: "Madness is an inability to develop and maintain an inner harmony with yourself and a balance with the outside worlds:"
Former mental patient: "To me madness isn't only crazy and being potty. It's people who are permanently depressed, and I have come to the conclusion that people who are so depressed should have a lobotomy and be turned into a vegetable."
Robert: "Madness is when you need shock
treatments.”
Heidi: "There are good and bad kinds of madness. I'm a nut and a freak and I think it's a good kind of madness. I really get freaked out if someone says I'm normal or average. I like being considered a nut by the establishment.”
Just for the fun of it I looked up the dictionary definition of madness. According to Webster, MAD is: "injured, blunt, dull. Disordered in intellect; deprived of reason; distracted, crazy; insane; beside one's self; frantic, furious; wildly frolicsome; infatuated; furious from disease or otherwise... and so on.
FAMOUS DEFINITIONS OF MADNESS
“Sanity— aptitude to judge things like other men, and regular habits, etc. Insanity— a departure from this.” —Benjamin Rush, "the Father of American Psychiatry"
“The insane are but grown up children, children too, who have received false notions, and a wrong direction.” —Jean Esquirol, 19th cent. French alienist
“The insane person is in a minority of one in his opinion, and so, at first, is the reformer, the difference being that the reformer's belief is an advance on the received system of thought, and so, in time, gets acceptance, while the belief of the former, being opposed to the common sense of mankind, gains no acceptance, but dies out with its possessor, or with the few foolish persons whom it has infected.” —Maudsley, 19th cent. English alienist
“For the nineteenth century, the initial model of madness would be to believe oneself to be God, while for the preceding centuries it had been to deny God.” —Michel Foucault, author of Madness & Civilization.
“The neuroses are without exception disturbances of the sexual function.” —Freud
“All neurosis is vanity.” —Alfred Adler
“In (the Middle Ages) they spoke of the devil, today we call it a neurosis.” —Carl Jung
“A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.” —Anon.
*****
#2. Quote from Wilhelm Reich
Volume 1.4 (1973)
"Ideological struggle against "being good" should be one of the important bases of the proletarian front."
*****
#3. "Neologisms" by Leonard Roy Frank
Volume 1.6 (1973)
Psychiatrists define neologisms as a newly coined and often bizarre word or phrase, or an old one used in a new way. According to psychiatrists, making up neologisms is a common symptom among schizophrenics.
CARDIOSCLEROSIS - (Cardia = heart; skleros -
hard. Gr.) Hardening of the heart. Inability to feel sympathy for those who suffer.
FREUDIANITY - A contemporary secular religlon based on the belfef that there is no God and Sigmund Freud is his prophet. Better known as psychoanalysis, its priests see in the psychoanalysation of man the only solution to his unresolved Oedipus complex, their version of "original sin.
IATROMANIA - (latros - physician Gr.) - Mania for doctoring others whether they want it or not.
IN LOCO DEIS - (in place of God. Latin) - A position of divine-like authority assumed by a psychiatrist in his relationship to the designated "crazy" person.
MENINGERITIS - A severe inflammation of the thought processes common among, but not restricted to, psychiatrists. Affected persons imagine their pseudo-medical procedures, called "treatments”, benefit those who are subjected to them.
PSYCHIATRIC INFALLIBILITY - the profession's answer to Papal Infallibility. A major difference between the two is that while the Catholic Church proclaims only one individual's infallibility, the American Psychiatric Association (the Psychiatric Church) ascribes infallibility to all its psychiatrist/members in good standing.
PSYCHIATROPHILIA - love of psychiatrists. Affected persons accept without question all opinions and advice from psychiatrists who in reciprocation and gratitude regard them as the only truly sane members of society.
*****
#4. Quote from Albert Schweitzer (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931, p. 92)
Volume 1.6 (1973)
"A man must not try to force his way into the personality of another.”
*****
Vol. 2.4
May 7, 1969
What are the dreams which so control me?
Sometimes I dream of death
But in my dreams I never die
I linger on the edge of that great abyss
Unable to take the final step
And there are people there
Who are willing to fight for my life
Even though I, myself, have lost all hope
They persist in saving me
And other times I dream of insanity
I dream of the screaming madness
In which I lose my very being
And fall Into the endless pit of non-existence
The people still persist In their efforts
They try to reach out to me
But I remain a careful step away
And I laugh at their foolish attempts
But there is another side
I have a dream there's a house somewhere
In the country, or maybe in the city
And I live there
But I'm not alone
There are people there
Who look up to me and respect me
Because it's my place and I've made it theirs
I've given them a place to be
Where people are allowed to be real
And they can reach out to others
With love
And the games and the pretense are all gone
We are all human beings together
They were all rejected when they came here
The world had hurt them all
But I loved them and let them be free
And they found something
The first two dreams seem too real
And they're going someplace
Down. The streets are all one way
I never speak of these dreams
Yet, they rule my life And the last dream
Sometimes I state it as a purpose in my life
I tell people that it is for this dream that I live.
*****
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