Abstract
Lisa M. Hermsen states that the purpose of her book is to tell ‘a rhetorical history of mania, mindful first of the classical Aristotelian “rhetoric” and the loosely translated definition: “to discover all the available means of persuasion”’ (p. 6). She rejects two potential narrative strategies: the progressive history of psychiatry and the narrative of medicalization. Instead she opts for a consideration of ‘mania as an acting living and moving object’, which then begs the question: ‘is it possible to create new types of sentences by which new kinds of mania might be made possible [thereby demonstrating] the ways in which mania is real and then interfere to enact some realities in different – and it is hoped, better – ways’ (p. 7). However, it is not immediately clear about what Hermsen wishes to be persuasive, nor is it obvious in what way her work can interfere to make mania better.
Manic Minds is part memoir, part medical history, part social history, part ontological, aetiological and philosophical enquiry. While each chapter has its own specific focus, they do not immediately add up to a satisfactory whole. The first chapter of the book examines the vocabulary of mania from its classical origins to the present. Successive chapters focus on nineteenth-century state asylum reports and the shaping influence of the architecture upon social perceptions of mania; the relationship of heredity to the making of mania; and memoirs written by those suffering from mania. Concluding with a consideration of neuropsychiatry and imaging technologies, Hermsen suggests that the ability to peer directly into the manic brain with such precision offers the potential to move away from the negative connotations and convoluted histories of both madness and mental illness, particularly as the new technology demands a new kind of language. The coherence of this book is, in places, compromised by the densely packed rhetoric of a work that seeks to be a rhetorical history, with complex sentences that serve to obscure rather than clarify meaning. The more Hermsen tries to disentangle mania from madness and mental illness, the tighter that particular Gordian knot seems to become: ‘“mania” adheres both to general madness and to its special classification of mental illness […] mania is almost interchangeable with madness, and at other times it becomes mental illness […] Madness clings to mania and mania is still very much in the making as a medical illness. The challenge is to look for how mania comes to be made as madness, as mental illness, or both.’ (p. 6).
Hermsen examines a variety of textual materials – asylum reports, memoirs, published studies – in order to discover how the choices of vocabulary from the textbooks of classical medicine to the technologically advanced present shape the experience, or rather experiences, of mania, beginning with her own. Hermsen describes her young self performing as ‘an obvious, almost clichéd figure of madness’ (p. 1) in order to convince the consultant psychiatrist of her inner suffering; she gives a graphic description of how she wore a costume reminiscent of Morticia Adams and fantasized about clawing away at her throat until she could reach her spinal column and ‘wrench [out] the entire system – brain and every connected nerve ending’ (p. 1). It is, she suggests, only the carefully considered inappropriateness of her clothing and the planned ferocity of the imagery that could adequately convey her early experience of mania, but at the same time she attempts to decode the palimpsest that led to these particular choices.
Hermsen states that she did not ‘recognize herself as a mad woman or a maniac’ as her desire to kill her brain, rather than herself, was a perfectly reasonable response to the exhausting bombardment of stimuli that she could do nothing but act upon. She considers the difference that regarding herself as having ‘an abnormal neurotransmitter system’ rather than being bipolar has upon the experience of living with mania, and thus begins the process of disentangling mania from the history of madness and the development of mental illness. Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (1961) is acknowledged as a major influence upon Manic Minds. Hermsen describes it as a ‘wonderful piece of literature, as well as a history and a philosophy […] allowing him to speak the language of madness while leaving mental illness to those of us who would remain imprisoned by insanity’ (p. 6). As she comes from a literary background, this concentration upon the vocabulary of mania certainly makes sense, having rejected the telling of a progressive historical narrative or using a contemporary theoretical narrative. However, in an attempt to separate ‘real’ mania from the history of madness and the development of mental illness, it is not immediately clear how Hermsen plans to detect mania in its pure form, especially while simultaneously acknowledging that mania has multiple realities that co-exist under a single name.
She offers the caveat that ‘no narrative will be able to tell everything there is to tell about the history or the rhetoric of “mania”’, and that she has ‘chosen to sketch those spaces that deal most competently with mania in the making, those in which it is best captured and its coordination with mental illness is most visible’ (p. 8). Manic Minds is clearly modelled on Foucault’s attempt to mirror the history that he describes with the language he uses, and Hermsen’s approach is brave and experimental in trying to grapple with the language of a continuously shifting entity separated from the social, cultural and medical contexts of madness and mental illness. Hermsen describes her work as a narrative that does ‘not travel in only one direction […] it turns back and goes forward alternately at any moment in time […] work[ing] as a map, accumulated layers, and coordinated sites’ (p. 8), but it ultimately leaves the reader somewhat lost and wishing that they had a clearer path to guide them through the maze.