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Cinema Journal (2006) - "Have You Ever Seen the Inside of One of Those Places?": Psycho, Foucault, and the Postwar Context of Madness

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This essay situates Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization within the postwar context of deinstitutionalization, as well as a modernist tradition of overvaluing madness known as schizophilia. Although Hitchcock and Foucault participated in the tradition of schizophilia, their appeals to both history and the avant-garde enabled them to produce works that broke with traditional ways of conceiving madness. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

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This essay situates Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization within the postwar context of deinstitutionalization, as well as a modernist tradition of overvaluing madness known as schizophilia. Although Hitchcock and Foucault participated in the tradition of schizophilia, their appeals to both history and the avant-garde enabled them to produce works that broke with traditional ways of conceiving madness.

Introduction. Toward the end of the parlor scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Marion suggests to Norman that he consider putting Mother in a mental institution. Heretofore deferential toward Marion, Norman answers with a rage that is startling:

You mean an institution? A madhouse? People always call a madhouse someplace, don't they? Put her someplace. . . . Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughter and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you? My mother there? . . . It's not as if she were a maniac. A raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

This moment breaks Norman's façade of politeness audit is ill-signed to complicate the character for the spectator. In addition, the speech forms a cultural reference to a postwar phenomenon known as deinstitutionalization. Following World War II, a series of scandals involving conditions in state mental hospitals played out in the media. Hollywood films about mental institutions such as The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948) directly reflected this social scandal. Psycho, which culminates in an image of Norman's confinement, was also part of this discursive context.

As public policy, deinstitutionalization emerged in force around 1955 and continued through the 1960s. Deinstitutionalization featured both material and philosophical dimensions. On the one hand, changes in federal and state policies and funding were designed to reform the care and housing situation of the seriously mentally ill. On the other, confronted with detailed reports of abuses suffered by inmates of the hospitals, commentators began to frame questions pertaining to the definition of serious mental illness, as well as what the treatment of the insane communicated about the culture as a whole. The philosophical ramifications of deinstitutionalization have earned it a place as a key chapter in the history of the disability rights movement.

In this essay, I want to revisit the issue of Psycho's mapping of concepts of madness by situating the film within the postwar context of deinstitutionalization. In addition, I draw upon the early work of Michel Foucault, especially his influential book, Madness and Civilization.1 Madness and Civilization is a complex work, chiefly known for its argument that history unfolds in a series of epistemes, or eras, each defined by discrete practices and "ways of knowing." According to Foucault, both the Middle Ages and Renaissance were marked by organic approaches to mental illness, the mad moving about and functioning in the mainstream of culture. But with the Enlightenment came an epochal shift; in the Age of Reason (1650-1800), the mad could be known only as creatures of unreason, to be shut away in prisons and chained like animals. This age of confinement then gave way to the Modern Era (1800-present), during which psychology was invented and madness medicalized. Foucault was harshly critical of psychiatry, a scientific endeavor he viewed as both moralistic and authoritarian. His remarks about Freud's discoveries were more measured, yet he maintained that in the end, psychoanalysis does not escape this authoritarianism. He concluded the book with a contention that the only way to "hear" madness is through the practices of unreason found in such avant-garde writers and artists as Vincent Van Gogh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Antonin Artaud.2

Foucault later commented that Madness and Civilization had taken root in the fifties, when he worked briefly in a psychiatric hospital. He noted that it was "the time of the blooming of neurosurgery [and] the beginning of psychopharmacology."3 Referring to his earlier studies in philosophy, Foucault added. "I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study mildness."4

Histoire de la Folie, the book's title when it was first published in France in 1961, was later published in an abridged English edition, under the title Madness and Civilization in 1965. By this time, deinstitutionalization in the United States had given rise to a series of influential anti-psychiatric publications, such as Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness and Erving Goffman's Asylums, both published in 1961.5 These works challenged psychiatric definitions of mental illness, as well as the concept of the asylum. Prior to his reputation as a postmodernist critic. Foucault was received in the United States as a commentator on social conceptions of madness. In this essay, I will be applying insights from Madness and Civilization to Psycho, and yet both texts should be seen as circumscribed by roughly the same contextual conditions. As we shall see, both Hitchcock and Foucault designed projects on madness in terms that were both realist and experimental, both historical and avant-garde.

Psycho has inspired a large volume of critical discourse, much of which is taken up with questions of difference-gender and sexuality in particular. Although I am indebted to this work. I want to focus this essay on the difference posed by madness. To do this, I draw upon disability studies, which provides historical and critical frameworks for considering questions of agency, political positioning, and relations to institutions, such as psychiatry.

There are three models of agency within the mental illness sector of disability studies. First there is the medical model which views mental illness as a disorder issuing from the brain and other organic systems: characteristic of psychiatry and national advocacy groups such us NAMI (National...

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