FITLY DISORDERED: Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. By JILL MATUS * War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. By CARL KROCKEL

Abstract

In a wide-ranging essay entitled ‘Insanity: What Is It?’ which opens the 1895 edition of his influential book The Pathology of the Mind, the prominent Victorian psychiatrist Henry Maudsley describes the insane man as ‘alienated from his normal self and from his kind’, and ‘so self-regarding a self as to be incapable of right regard to the notself’. Psychic disorder is presented as a disjunction not only from societal norms but from a presumed authentic self. While it is difficult to generalise the precepts of so capacious and contentious a discourse as pre-Freudian Victorian mental science, Maudsley's formulation strikes two of its common notes, expressing an awareness of, and anxiety about, multiple, alienated, and even opposing selves, while aligning mental dysfunction not only with antisocial behaviour but with disregard of one's responsibilities to others. Even so, Maudsley does not neatly cordon off the insane mind from the sane one. He later observes that the effect of mental ‘disease’, in its ‘dominating delusion’ and ‘corresponding hallucinations’ is ‘very much what the so-called mesmeric or hypnotic operator does for his subject when he puts him into a hypnotic trance’. The mesmerised subject ‘is as effectually severed from full mental contact with things as if he had been educated through life to exercise that tract [of thought] and no other, or as if he were a madman dominated by its morbid growth and function’. Maudsley implies that altered states such as trance have the capacity, at least temporarily, fundamentally to modify the mental abilities and preoccupations of an ordinarily rational individual, producing not only behaviour but cognition indistinguishable from that of a madman.