Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

Or, as the philospher Annette Baier writes (in Reflections on How We Live) in a new twist on the perennial theme, ‘Parental love, paternal or maternal, is as dangerous a central concept for ethics as is expert wisdom’; because it leads to the perversion of authority called authoritarianism, morality as moralism.

Thinking of oneself as sane can be infinitely reassuring, but it can also be radically misleading; and, indeed, distracting. Part of the terror about so-called madness is that it represents one of our unlived lives, something that might have happened to us, something we might have done; something that may have been the only solution to the direst of circumstances. Or even a temptation we had to avoid.

each of the so-called heroes of these three very different plays are wanting to be more powerful than they feel themselves to be, or at least sensing a powerlessness in themselves; they are all troubled by being insufficiently regarded, and begin to act strange as a consequence

There is not an original or ur-King Lear, or President of the United States, or mad person. After five hundred years of professionalized classification and treatment of the so-called mad, at least in the West, there is now a culture of the mad; recognized genres or forms of what began to be called, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, ‘insanity’

mad people, as all these plays dramatize, make people jump to conclusions about them (anxiety makes people jump to conclusions); madness tempts people to be more knowing than they are.

Acting madness in these plays means acting a character who becomes increasingly opaque to himself. There is not a cure, but a catastrophe. The plays are something other than therapeutic, something less instrumental in their intent. But these plays dramatize the relationship between the hero’s need and his sociability, as all dramas do. The difference – which is not entirely a difference between the dramas of the mad and the dramas of the normal – or, shall we say, the dramas of the less mad – is that the mad tend to be defined by the obscurity of their need and the threat their sociability entails.

Theatre has been the precursor of, and the parallel text to – and possibly an antidote for – the medicalization of madness, the invention of what Philip Rieff called ‘therapeutic man’,

It is assumed that there is a difference between sanity and madness, and a difference, which the theatrical illusion depends upon, between being mad and acting the part of a mad person. If we began to have the feeling that the people playing, as we say, Lear or the Macbeths were really as mad as they seem to be in their plays, being a member of the audience would become very much more disturbing. Of course there are good reasons why Goneril and Regan, or the Macbeths, are not going to harm us, but what terrorizes us about the mad is their unpredictability;

can’t help but make us wonder what kind of audience the really mad create for themselves, along the lines of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s suggestion that if we want to understand a person and their symptoms we need to see what kind of environment they create for themselves, what sort of world they make (a so-called symptom, for example, might be like a rule other people have to abide by, a love-test or a conversation-stopper). What Winnicott means by the ‘environment’ a person creates around them is what people call up in other people, what versions of other people they induce or preclude, through their symptoms, through the ways they make a nuisance of themselves.

we are all an uneasy mixture of the two, if there are two such states; or even that we make this reassuring distinction because we know somewhere how blurred the boundaries are; that a lot of so-called sanity is crazy, and that there is a lot of sanity in so-called madness.

all those people who no longer believe in an essential self – or, indeed, in an essential anything – people who don’t need the God-terms, who no longer find words like ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ any use, are drawn to more performative accounts of the self; they think of the ‘self’ as a word to cover the repertoire of performances desired by them and demanded of them in a particular culture, at a particular time. This is what Irving Goffman called ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ and Stephen Greenblatt calls ‘self-fashioning’; a presentation is made, there is a fashioning, the language of artefacts replaces the language of nature.

it would be naive to say that many of these questions have now been answered; but there will be people in a contemporary audience who will, to all intents and purposes, believe – that is, be living as if – these issues have been decided, either way. These people, some of us, some of the time, know that whatever else we are, we are also mad;

some people are mad in the sense that some people have cancer, and people who act in real life are ‘as-if personalities’, estranged from their true selves, people who have overadapted to harmful environments at the cost of their own desire.

The mad are people we can’t understand and who do things that are too unacceptable; and so they are people we may be, or feel ourselves to be, endangered by. They expose what an enormous cultural investment we have in understanding people; madness, we could almost say, is what makes us idealize understanding each other, and makes us want to believe that we do.

The dramatizing and the acting of madness has to be sufficiently intelligible and sufficiently unthreatening to engage the audience, so they can avoid doing what they are often inclined to do in so-called real life, which is, in one way or another, to turn away;

Yet because madness is so ultimately disturbing to us, it tends to polarize our responses: either we discipline and punish the mad or we idealize them as oracles; or we aestheticize them, staging them as heroes,

The Fool in Lear can make us wonder whether the mad are oracular or banal or a mockery of both;

If the antipsychiatrists are sometimes guilty, like the mad, of a ‘great refusal of human connection’, of valuing powers ‘not to be qualified or restricted by the co-ordinate existence of any fellow man’, then the theatrical representation of madness would seem to be the opposite. If madness, whatever else it is, is a breakdown in sociability, is a homelessness – madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand you – then the theatre re-presents, re-circulates, the experiences of the mad among their fellow men and women.