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Article: MADNESS AND NEUROMYTHOLOGY.
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- September 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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MADNESS is a flower of evil. The more ghastly any behaviour is, the more likely it is to be explained as madness. We like to think of great works of genius as the products of people much like us, as belonging to the continuum of normality. At the same time, we reject these possibilities for transcendent works of evil. Accepting them as normal in any respect exposes our vulnerability, even complicity. Madness, with its assumption of discontinuity, is a much more comfortable explanation. Marginalising troublesome behaviour by calling it madness is made easy by the existence of so many and such loosely defined categories. The current official list runs to over 300 varieties ...