Abstract
Alexander Dunst’s Madness in Cold War America is an engaging and timely examination of how metaphors of madness have suffused Cold War and post-Cold War US politics and culture. Using a wide range of cultural sources, including Cold War historical monographs, films and madness periodicals, Dunst explores how academics, politicians, psychiatrists and patients (as well as ex-patients) pathologized themselves and their opponents using psychiatric/psychological language. Dunst forcefully argues that the current culture of madness in the USA can only be understood through a Cold War lens, when madness metaphors became useful intellectual weapons to wield against those deemed paranoid and irrational.
Against the historical backdrop of communist and capitalist clashes, a rising counterculture and increasing patient activism, Dunst traces the rise of psychology and its use as a way to understand modern life and humanity’s moral failings. While madness metaphors were sometimes used prior to the twentieth century to malign those viewed as politically misguided or ill, it was with the arrival of Freud, Jung and modern psychiatry that entire political parties, historical periods, social movements and groups of people could be denounced as paranoid or schizophrenic.
What makes Dunst’s monograph such an important and welcome study is that, unlike most historians of psychiatry, madness and Cold War America, he goes beyond the perfunctory examination of the usual suspects such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and illustrates that metaphors of madness were used by both the right and left to demonize and discredit opponents. Even more important, he also demonstrates that while counterculture figures and authors like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick at times embraced the idea of madness as liberation, the relationship between leftist politics and madness is better characterized as one of ambivalence. Particularly with the rise of biological science and chemical understandings of the brain, it became more difficult to view madness as simply the free expression of liberated beings. Thus a fissure opened up in discussions of self and other, madness and sanity, that was not easily closed by resorting to simplistic understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
The book reaches its intellectual peak in the penultimate chapter, when Dunst uses the ideas of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and 1970s conspiracy films like Three Days of the Condor to trace the penetration of paranoia into the very fabric of American culture. In the 1950s it was relatively easy to separate enemies and friends, self and other, but by the 1970s and later the idea that uncontrollable conspiracies governed American life caused paranoia to shift from being a mental illness to a fundamental tool for understanding capitalism itself. As witnessed in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, by the end of the twentieth century ‘the extraordinary has turned ordinary: the mystery of conspiracy has sedimented into a paranoia that has become part of everyday reality, one among many defenses against the real of neoliberal capitalism’ (p. 138). The eerie result of such changes was that conspiracy culture splintered ‘from a clearly identifiable structure into a basic sub-atomic particle of US society and remains with us today, long after the Cold War ended’ (p. 138).
Make no mistake – Dunst’s analysis and prose are not for the faint of heart. At times it can be difficult to follow his arguments through the esoteric, labyrinthine language that characterizes depth psychology and figures like Lacan. But you can nonetheless be certain that, if you persist, you will be treated to an incisive and original analysis which brings in a wide swath of normally disparate sources. The book’s strength lies in its erudition, and the use of literature and film sources in particular helps Dunst to demonstrate how madness metaphors moved from the couch and clinic to popular culture.
Madness in Cold War America is full of insights and discussions that cannot be adequately addressed in this short review. Suffice it to say that it is an original and powerful study which will be of interest to historians, literary critics and film scholars seeking to unravel the myriad ways in which madness mutated from metaphor and intellectual weapon to become a fundamental part of American political culture. The use of madness metaphors and pathologizing of social and political opponents continues. With the recent election of Donald Trump, the rise of ‘fake news’ and an increasingly fragmented (and paranoid) American society divided along the lines of ‘us’ and ‘them’, Dunst’s book will almost certainly prove even more timely for understanding how American society has sought to define self and other, us and them, mad and sane.