[Theory of mass madness. Epilogue of the Research Program on Psychiatric Epidemiology of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research].

This "Metaphysics of Madness" appears as a "sinister mirror of madness", and the madman as a victim of the violence of his conflicts. This has come to reinforce the "tragic" anthropology which was already latent in the ancient pests, in the battles, in the mass suicides. An effort was made to determine the space where madness operates in our cultural context by means of an internationally guaranteed survey of symptoms. The analysis of madness lays out hermeneutics of multiple levels through which the most profound and conflictive structures of our culture become visible. Even if madness is principally entered upon as a psychiatric category, it presents a similar incidence as a category of cultural anthropology, it being necessary to add besides its importance as a literary category, the deciphering of the psychotic discourse as a linguistic category, the necessity of a sociological contextualization and its foundation on philosophic and even theological categories. Madness as a category of the spirit is the daring effort of understanding its liberation "in this deceit of destiny which fools it as to a liberty it has not conquered". After a consideration of texts of two decisive figures related to the philosophic history of madness--Kant and Hegel--the important position of Ludwig Binswanger and his conception of the Ideenflucht (flight of ideas) in the history of psychiatry is brought out. Finally, the theory of the madness of the masses (Massenwahntheorie) stated by Broch--a double madness, of fragmentation, on the one hand, and of aberration and paranoia of power, on the other--shows a universally valid analysis in which the particular, recurrent tragic model of our culture inscribes itself. This model is to be identified with Massenwahntheorie VII, i.e., as a prolongation of the prodigious work carried out by Broch.