Full Description
How shall we know insanity from sanity?
Making Madness Visible offers a cultural history of the many ways insanity has been visualised, and how such representations have shaped our understanding of mental disorder itself.
From medieval depictions of the fool, to the early modern "stone of folly" and convulsive dances, to the walls of the asylum and modern brain scans, visual tropes have long governed how societies distinguish sanity from insanity. Yet these images do more than illustrate. They define, marginalise, and other. By making madness visible, they mark the insane as aberrant and apart - while at the same time also exposing the instability of those very boundaries.
Tracing this restless history of visualisation, Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia shows how madness has continually troubled borders between reason and unreason, norm and deviance, humanity and inhumanity.
Bringing together visual culture, medical history, and cultural analysis, Making Madness Visible demonstrates that the visualisation of mental disorders has never been neutral. Images have not simply reflected ideas of madness - they have actively shaped its treatment
Contents
PART 1 - THE FOOL AND THE ROOTS OF VISUAL OTHERING
Chapter 1: Fools and Vagrants or How to Visualise the Invisibility of Madness
Chapter 2: The Extraction of Madness
PART 2 - THE BODY OF THE INSANE
Chapter 3: Madness Troubles Borders. Externalising and Containing Mass Madness
Chapter 4: Looking Madness in the Face: Physiognomics
PART 3 - MEDICAL OTHERING / MEDICAL IMAGING
Chapter 5: Madness Through the Lens: Psychiatric Photography
Chapter 6: Madness through the Looking Glass: Visualising Mental Disorders Inside the Body
PART 4 - MADNESS INSIDE-OUT
Chapter 7: 'Anti-Psychiatry' and the Inversion of Visual Tropes
Chapter 8: Psychotic Art, Art Brut, Outsider Art
A Brief Concluding Note—Madness as Visual Otherness and Narratives of Madness Today
