Elizabethan melancholy

The history of psychiatry presents the reader with many contradictions. Beliefs often conflict with practice and different sets of beliefs often coexist during the same period. For example, nineteenth-century writers on insanity advocated enlightened treatment, yet there are numerous denouncements of the care which they provided and accusations of unjust confinement. The problem is no less intractable earlier in history. In particular, we find the recurrence of this double aspect of insanity. On the one hand it is seen from a subjective point of view as a potentially universal affliction. (This is the viewpoint later advocated by the nineteenth-century moral managers who urged abandonment of restraint and advocated appeal to the individual’s conscience. Insanity in their view could be overcome, if not prevented, by the exercise of will-power and the cultivation of character.) On the other hand, insanity is seen as part of a gothic landscape of doom and terror, synonymous with bestiality - it forms a configuration of which confinement is a necessary part.