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Kerstin Kempker
Dear/Expensive Lack of Understanding: The Language of Madness
and the Response of Psychiatry
(= Teure Verständnislosigkeit—Die Sprache der Verrücktheit
und die Entgegnung der Psychiatrie)
Post-script by Thilo von Trotha, 128 pages, 18 illustrations,
15 x 21 cm, ISBN 978-3-925931-04-8. Berlin: Peter Lehmann Publishing
1991. Published only in the German language!
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"What drives people mad? What is the reason,
that people don't go mad? I am particularly interested in the second
question, less frequently asked." At their spots of touch Kerstin
Kempker brings to speak the psychiatry, that ist setting limits,
and the border-crossing world of madness. She uses the art of the
collage, to let clash literary, philosophical, psychiatric as well
as antipsychiatric discussions, which usually are held separately.
Just the literary voices—such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Antonin
Artaud, Sylvia Plath, Unica Zuern, Robert Walser—show: the
anachronistic and non-mitigated observations, perceptions and manifestations
can be a skill, which, indeed, has its price, but has nothing to
do with illness. Price of madness is the risk of psychiatrisation
and the loss of the mutual language; price of adaption nevertheless
would be the abandonment of one's identity.
In part 1, "Language and Power", Kerstin Kempker (see
photo on the left side) lets describe psychiatrists the functions
of their labelings; in part 2, "Language in No Man's Land",
she is searching for other sides of reality. She uses literary and
philosophical quotations and statements from people which are labeled
psychiatrically. In a frightening way it becomes clear how strange
and uncomprehending the psychiatric thinking is opposed to the world
of madness, and how unfounded it presumes to judge its object and
›heals‹ it even with chemicals. The opponents in this
book are not ›the bad psychiatrists‹ and ›the poor
socially damaged victims‹, but—much more exciting—the
psychiatric logic and the mad obstinacy. "Dear incomprehension,
to you finally I shall owe being myself." This quotation of
Samuel Beckett's "The Nameless" provided the title of
the carefully designed book, and Kerstin Kempker recapitulates:
As a dear good and a great value—the mad, the folly, the misunderstood
doesn't want to be understood by everyone, at all costs. For proper
reasons it is on its guard. The text includes statements of inmates
of madhouses and of Franca Basaglia-Ongaro, David Cooper, Michel
Foucault, Erving Goffman, Ronald D. Laing, Thomas S. Szasz and Paul
Watzlawick, among others. It provokes thinking lateral, for questioning
the matter of course; it doesn't want to deliver answers.
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