About Madness

"Crazy people who live up to their madness are very rare."
(Henri Michaux)

Gianni Berengo Gardin. 
Provincial psychiatric hospital.
Florence, 1968

 

Madness is a theme that has always been close to my heart, ever since I was in school.

Many times I have written about it, with poems and short stories.

Perhaps because I am fascinated by the psychology and labyrinths of the human mind, and when those labyrinth paths are darker and narrower, my interest is intensified.

Then loving art, one more reason since not infrequently madness and creativity have courted each other and have drawn on one another.

I still remember how excited and euphoric I was when, a fresh first year university student (I still had the intelligent habit of noting the date I bought the books: 14 \ 9 \ 1993), I found the book by the psychiatrist Edward Podvoll, “The Seduction of Madness”, hiding it as if I had stolen the forbidden apple in the garden of Eden.

“The splendor and chaos of the psychotic mind in four extraordinary profiles of people who have traveled the entire spiral of madness leaving a compelling and tremendous autobiographical report,” reported the subtitle.

His point of view was incredibly human, pointing out how the “medical” view of madness, as a simple rare event, a brain failure that is feared and tends to isolate, is a false view of the problem while in reality each of us, in every moment and phase of our existence, can fall into madness – it is a human tragedy that also affects the emotional aspect and not only the physiological, cerebral one.

But – most importantly – that madness can be cured. It's an existential path, which is able to illuminate our lives, give them a different meaning. Also artistic.

“Psychosis is a boundless dark corner of the mind which, once illuminated, could change the view you have of the entire room”.

Words that hit me deeply.

Coming to that book from the classical Greek vision of madness that Plato described as follows:

    “The madman is like a bird that flutters and looks up, heedless of the world below.”

That book was the door that instead opened onto that world of the “underground”, as Dostoevsky called it, not at all light and fluttering.

Then came the psychology studies and the degree, but until now, the interest in that mental underground has never left me.

Indeed, these harsh months of forced lockdown, uncertainty about the future, anxiety and depression, pushed me back down. In my underground of “uncontrolled thoughts and altered sensations”, although not yet dialoguing with them, which is the true mark of madness, as Podvoll writes.

 

Luciano D'Alessandro. 
Materdomini Asylum.
Nocera Superiore (Salerno), 1965-68

I went back to this theme because a few days ago I bought a beautiful photographic book, which I had been wooing for a long time but too expensive, only to find it finally discounted at half price, “The face of madness – A hundred years of images of pain.”

The book is the 430-page catalog of an exhibition held in Reggio Emilia in 2006, and collects hundreds of images by historical and famous photographers, from Scianna to Berengo Gardin, Alex Majoli, Anders Petersen.

In asylums in Italy, Brazil, France, Taiwan, Cuba...

The book also features a valuable historical introduction by Sandro Parmiggiani.

It all begins with the infamous “Stultifera Navis”, The Ship of Fools, the satirical book in Alsatian German by Sebastian Brant, published in 1494, in which he told of this sort of Ark of the Fools put into the sea to remove madness from virtue of the people, even if it was a criticism of the vices of the society of the time. But, five hundred years later, Michel Foucault, entitled “Stultifera Navis” the first chapter of his famous essay “History of madness in the classical age”, will write as if it were a common practice to remove the “madmen” from the community of “normal”, entrusting them to seafarers:

“It often happened that they were entrusted to boatmen: in Frankfurt, in 1399, some sailors were commissioned to rid the city of a madman who was walking naked; in the early 15th century a criminal madman is sent to Mainz in the same way. Sometimes the sailors throw these uncomfortable passengers ashore even earlier than they promised; this was witnessed by that blacksmith from Frankfurt, who left twice and returned twice before being brought back to Kreuznach for good. European cities have often had to see these ships of madmen land.” (Michel Foucault)

That ship, hypothetical or real it was, landed in Reggio Emilia, where in 1536 the San Lazzaro Institute, born as a leper hospital in 1217, became in effect the first asylum.

The island Narragonia, invented by the writer Brant, where the madmen of the ship should have lived, became a real place, in which to lock up the “disabled, decrepit, crippled, epileptic, deaf, dumb, blind, paralytic”, or those who disturb the decorum of civil society.

The art critic and curator of the exhibition Parmiggiani, born in that same place, still remembers the not accidental location of San Lazzaro, far from the city and in a sort of no-man's land, which reminded him of the black ghettos in the southern states United. Racist-permeated places out of sight of decent people.

In 1821 it was officially called the “General Establishment of the Casa de'Pazzi degli Estensi States”.

 

Carla Cerati. 
Provincial psychiatric hospital.
Gorizia, 1968

Everyone can have their own opinion on asylums and their usefulness.

I consider Mario Tobino one of my favorite Italian writers, and I advise those who do not know him to read the series of his novels on Magliano, the asylum he directed in Lucca, until the forced closure for the famous Basaglia Law n. 180 of May 1978.

In his novels and short stories there is all the love and empathy for those “different” that he never stopped considering as human beings. Especially in the novel “The last days of Magliano”, from 1982, in which he bitterly describes the end of that journey that lasted over forty years, recalling how that law caused, just in Lucca, over one hundred deaths between homicides and suicides, as soon as the doors of the asylum were closed forever, freeing the “madmen” in a society that never accepted them, much less wanted them.

It is undeniable that the idea of segregation and concealment of the “different” and disturbing is a topos that crosses various spheres of Western society, and it would not be easy to stem the flood of issues that would emerge. But the point of view of those who have cared for and loved patients is also not irrelevant. Where children need to walk accompanied, a loving hand that supports them is a thousand times better than emptiness and looking after themselves.

Sure, many of the photographs in the book are punched in the face, and some are truly terrible. But there are also some soft, in which love and tenderness can be read.

 

Ferdinando Scianna. 
“The Carnival Ball”.
Udine psychiatric hospital. 1968

 

What interests me here, however, is precisely the visual aspect, as a photographer.

Because if it is true that every face is a question mark for the beholder, what relationship is created between our eyes and these crazy faces?

The Egyptian writer and painter Carole Naggar tries to answer this first question in her introductory paper “Through a lens, obscurely”.

Naggar underlines how, from the very beginning, the photograph of the madmen of San Lazzaro was a cold and prejudicial distancing of the poor sick. It was called “photography of the insane”, in which any person who showed physical or mental signs different from the norm was portrayed with the same intention as the “exotic types of colonial postcards”.

Photographers portrayed madmen with the same horror with which peasants looked at witches in the Middle Ages.

Photographs in which there was no intention of trying to penetrate those masks of pain, but which on the contrary strengthened that typification, exalted it, as if to put a sidereal distance between photographers, doctors, and the sick.

“The photo is the shield that protects the doctor and the public, as if madness were a contagious disease that the viewer could inadvertently catch himself if these representations were not contained, framed by the frame of prejudices and the distance of a pseudoscience.” Naggar writes.

Let's not forget that the first photographic experiments also coincide with these photographs applied to psychiatry.

The first representations of the mad are found in the etchings by Alexander Morison (1826) and then in the photographs collected in the three volumes of La Salpetrière (1877-80) and Augusto Tebaldi (1884), forty years after the invention of the daguerreotype.

The Parisian hospital of La Salpetrière will be the main place of the first photographs related to mental illness, where the representation of the sick was experimented with the use of electrodes applied to the facial muscles and then photographed those expressions, constituting a “catalog of the various types of mental disorder”.

This is precisely what the Egyptian writer reproached these early images for being a sample of “freaks”, without any emotional empathy or intention of knowing their intimate pain, linking them strongly to photos of the naked and skeletal bodies of Jews in the concentration camps of Nazi.

 

Here comes the controversial Lombroso, called Cesare (Verona, November 6, 1835 – Turin, October 19, 1909), a famous Italian doctor, anthropologist, academic philosopher and jurist, defined by some scholars as the father of modern criminology, exponent of positivism and founder of criminal anthropology.

“His theories were based on the concept of the criminal by birth, according to which the origin of criminal behavior was inherent in the anatomical characteristics of the criminal, a person physically different from the normal man as endowed with anomalies and atavisms, which determined his social behavior deviant. Consequently, according to him the inclination to crime was a hereditary pathology and the only useful approach towards the criminal was the clinical-therapeutic one. Only in the last part of his life did Lombroso also take into consideration environmental, educational and social factors as competitors to the physical ones in determining criminal behavior.” So it is written about him.

In 1898 he inaugurated a museum of psychiatry and criminology in Turin (later called “Criminal Anthropology”).

“The criminal is an atavistic being who reproduces on his own person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and lower animals”.

 

Lombroso has gone down in history, in a strongly criticized way, precisely because of this association between physical peculiarities and mental states, not forgetting the association between genius and madness. And crime.

We read again:

“From 1876 he divulged his anthropological theory of delinquency in the five successive editions of ‘The Delinquent Man’, which he later expanded into a work in several volumes. Among the leading physiognomy scholars, Lombroso measured the shape and size of the skulls of many brigands killed and brought from Southern Italy to Piedmont, concluding that the atavistic traits present brought back to primitive man. Indeed, what developed was a new pseudoscience dealing with forensic phrenology. He deduced that criminals carried anti-social traits from birth, by inheritance, which today is considered completely unfounded. It should be noted that Lombroso had developed the theory of atavism a year before the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species.

The characters that manifest atavism and degeneration would be physically explained by the presence of characteristics such as the large mandibles, the strong canines, the very developed median incisors to the detriment of the lateral ones, the supernumerary or double-row teeth (as in snakes), the protruding cheekbones, the prominent superciliary arches, the opening of the upper limbs longer than the individual's stature, the prehensile feet, the cheek pouch, the flattened nose, the prognathism, the bones of the skull in excess (as in the Incas, in the Peruvians and Papuans) and other physical and skeletal anomalies as well as functional characters different from those of advanced man; for example, less sensitivity to pain, faster healing, greater visual accuracy and dichromatopsia and also tattoos and accentuated laziness.”

 

Tables by A. Tebaldi. 
Physiognomies and expressions studied in their deviations, 1884

Lombroso was perhaps among the most famous and criticized in this area, accused of naive positivism, capable of doing more damage than improvements in that scientific area.

But he was certainly not the only one, indeed.

“Psychiatric photography” has always been, since the very invention of photography, a powerful way to endorse the theories of psychiatrists, in deep connection with physiognomy.

Precisely on the wave of positivism and the irrefutable accuracy of science, psychiatrists used the new invention to bring soul disorders to the surface of the faces, which otherwise would have remained unknown and invisible: the portrait face of a patient became an “example” of his diagnostic category.

The “domination of the gaze” sanctioned by scientific power.

Diamond was among the first to set up a photographic laboratory in his asylum in Springfield in 1851, improving the calotype invented by Talbot in 1839. He was the first to theorize the usefulness of introducing “photographic diagnosis”. Thus he stated:

“The photographer captures with irrefutable precision the external manifestations of every passion, as an authentic indication of the well-known correspondence that binds the sick mind to the organs and features of the body.”

Because the problem with psychiatry was that, unlike the other sciences, it was unable to “show” what it was talking about, it did not have the material evidence that confirmed it as a real science.

He needed an organ that “spoke”, since the mind remained “mute” in its inner abyss: the face became that organ.

Before, and with much more vigor than Lombroso, Johann Kaspar Lavater in the eighteenth century carried on these theories taken up in the future also by our Lombroso. 

“The face is the summary and the result of the human form in general; and in it the flesh is none other than the coloring that highlights the design.”

These were the bases on which the photography of madmen was founded, with all its prejudicial anomalies, since as Susan Sontag wrote so well: “What Wittgenstein said about words is valid for every photograph, that its meaning is the use,” that is photographs have their own weight according to the discourse in which they are inserted.

 

That said, I challenge each of you, honestly, to deny that you have at least once in your life judged someone by the face or body features. Were it not just that changed sidewalk to see someone with a low forehead, teeth out, disheveled coming towards us. Or to pray the elevator to open quickly because the man or woman with us has wild, overly intense eyes.

The faces that we see in the photographs, of children and smiling, docile people with sparkling eyes, make us feel good. They reassure us. We never doubt their soul or sanity.

The different “ugly” faces, on the other hand, suggest evil of the soul.

Looking at the faces of many serial killers, rapists, pedophiles on television, how many of us exclaimed: “I believe it, with that face!”

 

Portraits of the patients at San Lazzaro, shot by Emilio Poli at the end of the 19th century and later by Giovanni Morini, collected in two albums in 1904 and 1905-06. Each portrait is placed in the album in order Input date and includes the name of the patient, the day of admission and diagnosis.

But as reported in these splendid introductions to the book, the faces of the first inmates in asylums were often rude peasants, women and men, most of the time illiterate, ignorant, hard workers of the land, who had only the misfortune of not being beautiful, like bourgeois society and scientists.

They could easily have been our village great-grandparents and great-grandmothers.

We carry the atavism at the base of Lombroso's criminal theories still within us, in the primitive and deep layers of our fears and prejudices.

The photographs closest to us are quite another thing, those of Scianna Berengo Gardin, Petersen...

In those who use photography to communicate and know, in a different way than the scientists of the last century, there is a desire to try to understand and never judge.

It also looking for moments of tenderness, play, art, respect.

The camera is no longer a microscope that divides and distances the “healthy” from the “crazy”, but rather brings us closer to them, suggesting that madness is truly a tragedy of existence that can happen to each of us, even to who has normal faces.

“The flesh of the face is none other than the color that highlights the drawing,” wrote Lavater.

Stripped of its dominant and scientific intentions, as well as racist, this sentence could also be read as a poetic way of narrating the photographic portrait.

Because the meaning of the words is in their use.

Petersen's blurry faces truly become the color of the mind's drawings. The contrasts of blacks and whites the narration of the inner darkness.

Enzo Cei. 
Art exhibition in the former asylum
of the work of the patients.
Asylum of Maggiano (Lucca). 1999

Seeing these photographs, one after the other, from the last century to the present day, becomes a journey into our souls, who we are as human beings, how we “look”, and too often “judge”.

Therefore I like to conclude this long reflection with the magnificent words of Vittorino Andreoli, professor, doctor and famous psychologist and psychiatrist, on his over forty-five years of observation of madness, especially of the faces of madmen, because as Andreoli writes:

“A dazzling light and sometimes thick fog envelops that face, the face of madness.

The rest makes no sense, as if the fool had no body or became thin like a spider's antennae, thin like a spider's thread. [...]

Getting lost in the depths of the pupils that fall into the infinity of madness, among the secrets of man, down, far from that surface on which time flows, while there everything becomes slow and perhaps eternal.

And it is difficult to emerge from the darkness. There is darkness in the background, the immensity of darkness. There is silence and silence is dark, darker than darkness. And a psychiatrist also becomes dark and erases everything that lights up on the blackboard of knowledge that disappears down there.”

 

Like Photography. Camera obscura, which develops its light from the shadow.

It dazzles, stuns with beauty. It brings to the surface the intimate design of our emotions, making it emerge from our immensity of darkness.

Anders Petersen. 
ESPS, special section of the hospital
for people with mental disorders.
Stockholm, 1995

READ ALSO:

• When the Sun Goes Down.. 
• On Self Portrait 

Edward M. Podvoll: “The Seduction of Madness – Revolutionary insights into the world of psychosis and a compassionate approach to recovery at home” (Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1990)
Michel Foucault: “History of Madness in the Classical Age” (BUR, 1992)
Mario Tobino: “For the ancient stairs” (Mondadori, 1992)
Mario Tobino: “The last days of Magliano” (Mondadori, 1983)
“The face of madness – One hundred years of images of pain” (SKIRA, 2006)

 

Italian version