Neuro-Gothic: a new history of madness

在《疯狂与文明》一书中，米歇尔·福柯从知识和权力体系的变化角度探讨了疯狂的历史，这些体系塑造了对精神病患者的诊断、控制和治疗。从18世纪末开始，哥特小说将疯狂构建为对理性的过度，对自我和身体的干扰或对社会的威胁，参与了塑造和争论科学和流行的知识形式的过程，并有助于疯狂的话语形成：它使道德和性关系复杂化（在美德，邪恶和歇斯底里的表现中）；美学和神经衰弱模式交织在一起（在坡的病态想象中）；为可兴奋的无意识的黑暗、病理内容提供了形式（在弗洛伊德以及19世纪晚期的小说中）。哥特文学揭示了自己是一种神经小说（“神经哥特”）。创伤、精神病、精神分裂症的概念源于19世纪晚期的研究（尤其是弗洛伊德和克拉夫特-埃宾的研究），这些概念被医学精神病学和反精神病学从神经化学或存在主义的角度重新定义：（社会）制度化的问题与自我形成的问题相互竞争，并在新的哥特式作品中有所体现（比如帕特里克·麦格拉思的作品）。目前的发展看到了神经学焦点的扩展，其中旧的创伤概念被重新配置为认知术语（PTSD），脑损伤类型有助于精心设计一个独特的神经科学框架，改变了对疯狂的技术和概念方法。哲学家凯瑟琳·马拉布（Catherine Malabou）概述了神经可塑性在识别改变的意识模型中的作用：新的伤者——被弗洛伊德分析所观察到的主体性、性和无意识的心理结构剥夺了——通过神经损伤的类型来命名生命。此外，这些生物在很大程度上是20世纪末和21世纪初媒介和技术创新环境中的生物。他们也是一种新的、但仍然是神经哥特文化的重要人物，在这种文化中，旧形式的恐怖转移到改变日常生活和意识的新媒体中：“神经浪漫主义”鬼魂（在赛博朋克小说中），游戏和屏幕上的行尸走肉，以及幽灵般的自我困扰主导着痴呆症的描述，标志着哥特式修辞的重大而广泛的发展。

In Madness and Civilisation, Michel Foucault explores the history of madness in terms of the changing systems of knowledge and power which shape the diagnoses, containment and treatment of mentally ill people. From the end of the eighteenth-century, Gothic fiction's constructions of madness as an excess to reason, a disturbance of self and body or a threat to society participates in a process of shaping and contesting the scientific and popular forms of knowledge and contributing to discursive formations of madness: it complicates moral and sexual relations (in representations of virtue, vice and hysteria); entwines aesthetic and neurasthenic modes (in Poe's diseased imaginings); gives form to the dark, pathological contents of the excitable unconscious (in Freud as well as in the fiction of the late nineteenth century). Gothic writing discloses itself to be a fiction of the nerves ('neuro-gothic'). Notions of trauma, psychosis, schizophrenia that arise from late nineteenth-century studies (in Freud and Krafft-Ebing notably) are reframed by medical psychiatry and anti-psychiatry in neurochemical or existential terms: issues of (social) institutionalisation vie with questions of self-formation and are refracted in new Gothic writing (like that of Patrick McGrath). Current developments see an extension of neurological focus in which older notions of trauma are reconfigured in cognitive terms (PTSD) and types of brain damage serve to elaborate a distinctly neuroscientific framework that alters technical and conceptual approaches to madness. The philosopher Catherine Malabou outlines the role of neural plasticity in the identification of altered models of consciousness: the new wounded - divested of the subjectivity, sexuality and unconscious mental structures observed by Freudian analysis - names beings defined by types of neurological damage. These beings, moreover, are very much creatures of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century environment of mediated and technoscientific innovation. They are also significant figures in a new yet still neuro-gothic cultural alignment in which older forms of horror migrate into the new media transforming daily life and consciousness: 'neuromantic' ghosts (in cyberpunk fiction), walking dead in games and on screen and the spectral self-haunting dominating accounts of dementia signal a significant and extensive development of gothic tropes.