Cultures of Madness

Duration: 2009 – 2015

Modern societies differ from others in the way they deal with madness: Regardless of wether the modern era with Michel Foucault began with the exclusion of the insane from society for erecting a regime of rationality, or with Philippe Pinel’s liberation of the psychic patients from prison, the historiography of contemporary psychiatry emphasizes a massive increase of psychiatric institutions at the end of the 19th century. Modernity and especially the modern metropolis emerging at the very same time had produced madness at an unprecedented scale.

The DFG research group "Cultures of Madness: Threshold Phenomena of Urban Modernity," which was funded by the German Research Council from 2009 to 2015 investigated the discourses, practices, and techniques surrounded by madness and its emergence of its modern understanding from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives. The team project aimed at exploring the different phenomenon that unfolded madness at a typically urban phenomenon in its discursive institutional, social and media dimensions.

Cornelius Borck collaborated with Armin Schäfer (then FU Hagen, now Ruhr-Universität Bochum) in the subproject "Documents of Madness: Fabulating and Querulating in Literature and Psychiatry," which was based at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, during the second funding period of the research group. In their subproject, Sonja Mählmann, Sophia Könemann, and Novina Göhlsdorf used first-person documents, literary texts, and patient records and psychiatric texts for an exploration of the epistemic and social dynamics of two forms of pathologized behavior: fabulation and querulation. Fabulating and querulating were established, differentiated, debated, and finally discarded in the scientific discourse of psychopathology as two categories of madness between 1870 and 1930. As part of the project, the international workshop "Madness and Method: Note Taking, Ordering and Writing in Psychiatry" took place in Lübeck from March 21-23, 2013 and resulted in the publication Das psychiatrische Aufschreibesystem.

More information about the research project can be found here.