Joel Faflak

Sanity, madness, transformation : the psyche in Romanticism

In Sanity, Madness, Transformation, Ross Woodman offers an extended reflection on the relationship between sanity and madness in Romantic literature. Woodman is one of the fields most distinguished authorities on psychoanalysis and romanticism. Engaging with the works of Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, he argues that madness is essential to the writings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley, and that it has been likewise fundamental to the emergence of the modern subject in psychoanalysis and literary theory. For Frye, madness threatens humanism, whereas for Derrida its relationship is more complex, and more productive. Both approaches are informed by Freudian and Jungian responses to the psyche, which, in turn, are drawn from an earlier Romantic ambivalence about madness. This work, which began as a collection of Woodmans essays assembled by colleague Joel Faflak, quickly evolved into a new book that approached Romanticism from an original psychoanalytic perspective by returning madness to its proper place in the creative psyche. Sanity, Madness, Transformation is a provocative hybrid of theory, literary criticism, and autobiography and is yet another decisive step in a distinguished academic career.

Romanticism and the Pornography of Talking

Nicholas Rand begins a short essay on the origins of psychoanalysis by revisiting Jacob Bernays’s 1857 “Outlines of Aristotle’s Lost Treatise on the Effect of Tragedy.” According to Rand, Bernays, an expert in Greek philology and uncle to Freud’s later wife Martha, contended that Aristotle’s katharsis ton pathematon (“purgation of emotions”) was not the transformation of passion into virtue or social amelioration but rather a form of “verbal psychotherapy” (181). Bernays writes:

Right to Romanticism

ABSTRACT This essay asks two questions: “What right do we have to Romanticism?” and “What right to itself does Romanticism grant us?” To answer these questions, I address the historical situation of Romanticism as it generated a Victorian response that thereafter set the tone for how we view Romanticism itself. This need to make sense of Romanticism speaks to the current crisis of legitimacy faced by Romantic studies as it, like most fields of critical inquiry within the humanities, comes under increasing pressure from what we generally refer to as a neoliberal pressure to make ourselves and the period we study relevant and thus useful. That Romanticism often resists this utility becomes the essay’s key theme, which I explore by addressing P. B. Shelley’s The Triumph of Life in terms of what I call the psychopathology of the visual. In his final, unfinished poem Shelley questions our ability to see and thus comprehend our world, which is ultimately to ask what right we have to our lives and to life itself. The poem casts upon our present the shadows of futurity’s glaring light by reminding us of a life we perpetually risk in the name of making sense.

“Was it for This?”: Romantic Psychiatry and the Addictive Pleasures of Moral Management

In 1990, Andrew Scull noted the still-prevalent tendency of psychiatric history to stay on the “firm and neutral ground of value-free natural science” (“Psychiatry and Its Historians” 239).1 More often than not, Scull argued, this scholarship traced psychiatry’s moral and ethical path toward curing souls in the name of public good and scientific fact, a progressive development that was in bad faith if one felt that this narrative of well-being was not always well-intentioned.2 Just because psychiatry emerges in the late eighteenth century with the singular intention of curing madness does not mean that it missed the opportunity to capitalize upon its own invention in other ways. Scull thus points to a tension between psychiatric history and psychiatric historiography, between the apparent facts of psychiatry’s invention and the cultural articulation of this reality. My aim in this essay, following the work of scholars like Michelle Faubert who have traced the relationship between psychiatry and literature in poet-psychologists of the early British Romantic period, is to examine psychiatric invention and reinvention in William Wordsworth’s early writings for The Prelude and The Recluse. These texts address the incipient madness of individuals isolated from social consolation as if to grant their depressed states autonomous cognitive and affective dignity.

The inoperative community of Romantic psychiatry

This paper reads Mary Shelley’s Matilda within the context of the rise of psychiatry, or what was termed “moral management,” in England in the Romantic period. The paper traces some of historical and social parameters of this Romantic psychiatry in terms of the desire for community and communal well‐being. On one hand, this desire reflects early psychiatry’s democratic and empathic spirit. On the other, it reflects a way of foisting well‐being upon populations in order better to manage their unwieldy psychological life. Romantic literature stages these two poles as a psychiatric consciousness whose two halves are at once in conflict with and uncannily related to one another. The paper briefly examines Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage as an early case history of how this divided consciousness plays itself out in the 1790s, commensurate with the first emergence of psychiatry. It then ends with a reading of Shelley’s novella as a response to the kind of social efficiencies psychiatry had come to represent by the time of the Regency. In the figure of Matilda Shelley writes a character who is aware of the demands for transparent happiness necessary to form well‐developed and self‐fulfilled citizens required to run the Empire. By remaining resistant to such cures, Matilda’s “depression” thus refuses to fit itself back into society, an alternate state of (not) belonging that the paper reads in terms of Jean‐Luc Nancy’s idea of “community.”

Philosophy’s Debatable Land in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

From the hindsight of On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829) we know that Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) acts as a guidebook for how the philosopher’s work is a necessary prelude to the building of the nation. But Coleridge complains of having suffered the ‘mental disease’ of his speculative nature, of getting lost in the ‘unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths’.1 Such symptoms ask us also to read the guidebook as a case history with a diagnosis but no cure. Biographia Literaria maps the work of philosophy as a psychic space which makes one wonder how the nation might at the very least cohere as an idealist or ‘imagined community’, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, not to mention as a political reality.2 Moreover, the community of this nationalist fantasy coheres through a power of imagination that is at once unifying and excessive. Coleridge argues that certain ‘disturbing forces’ are necessary to the State’s ‘realization of every great idea or principle’ within its constitution in that they call upon its power to overcome these forces.3 One such disturbance is Mesmerism, whose ‘crisis’, as rapport or clairvoyance, evokes the mind’s ability to internalize ideas, like Church and State, at a profound psychic level. Yet Mesmerism also thwarts this intuition’s political efficiency. If one is compelled to read the later Coleridge as an eminent proto-Victorian whose theory of imagination would seem to prepare the Romantic psyche for its later usefulness within the Victorian public sphere, Mesmerism indicates this psyche’s resistance to domestication, the symptom of a radicalism that Coleridge cannot, perhaps does not want to, leave behind.

Introduction: Deviance and Defiance

Taylor and Francis Ltd GERR_A_168714.sgm 10.1080/10509580600687442 Europe Romantic Review 50-9585 (pri t)/1740-4657 (online) Original Article 2 06 & Francis 7 0 00 p il 2006 D vidL mkin d vid.l mk n@tandf.co.uk The thirteenth annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism took place August 13–16, 2005 in Montreal, Canada, sponsored by Université de Montréal. The conference was held in conjunction with the seventh biennial meeting of the International Gothic Association (August 11–14) and was the first major collaborative effort between NASSR and IGA. The theme for both conferences was “Deviance and Defiance,” to underscore the fact that in recent years the interrelation of Gothic and Romantic studies has emerged as a central topic of scholarly study. This interest reflects both fields’ reclamation of the often transgressive texts and authors who articulate the epoch-making intersection of Gothic and Romantic literatures in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “Deviance and Defiance” was thus the first major international and interdisciplinary meeting to assess how the convergence of the Gothic and the Romantic produced historical forces whose cultural resonance persists to the present and, by the evidence of the presentations at both conferences, survives in ways that make our critical practice more than just a theoretical exercise.