Offstage: madness, the obscene, and common sense

Abstract

Throughout European history, madness has been associated with two states: movement and confinement. These apparently contradictory states converge in an obscene state, in the etymological sense of the word: offstage. In this article, based on data from ethnographic work in the Barcelona mental health care network, it is argued that "being ob-scene" results when madness challenges hegemonic social processes of inculcation and persuasion that induce acceptance of behavioral patterns considered appropriate, and lead patients to identify with the interests of therapists. Madness defies not reason, as it is widely supposed, but common sense understood as a cultural system. Its refractory nature leads to the stigmatizing management of madness in expert systems that seeks to subsume the experience of affected persons in predictable nosological categories.