Fools, witches, and hysterics
Beginning from the title of the chosen section “Hysteria, Folly and Witchcraft”, the author at first intends to suggest a substantial distinction: the one between Madwomen on one hand and Witches and Hysterical ones on the other hand. This distinction is based mainly on the consideration that folly was never attributed specifically only to the female gender and lately it (both in the male and female version) has not brought humanity to the knowledge of psychic reality as it was judged unknowledgeable and inexplicable, at least until the dawn of post-modern age.
Vice versa, Witches and Hysterical Women, overtly female images, in their respective historical periods and with their respective male partners (inquisitors and psychoanalysts) have managed to establish with the dominant male Reason some kind of relationship even if a violent one. Because of this courageous and suicide aim both have paid a tragic price, but in this way, they have also laid the foundations for a first research on unconscious psychic reality and sexuality.
The author, sharply refusing the cultural resignation that declares that these destructive relationships cannot be modified, proposes the historical necessity of a kind of psychic research intertwined with an inter-human relationship resulting from the essential need to overcome the “normal” detachment between rationality and irrationality.