Such confusion is conventionally attributed to the mad, but in a political context was attributed also by Burke to the French Revolution, and by Žižek and Lyotard to the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Žižek, paraphrasing Kant, explains that the sublime prompts astonishment, a reasonable enthusiasm, as opposed to the ‘insane visionary delusion that we can immediately see or grasp what lies beyond all bounds of sensibility’. To actually start believing in the possibility of living the sublime was madness. (And, Burke added in his Enquiry, the sublime offers a sort of work-out for the finer fibres of the nervous system). To be alive to the massive possibilities that seem to exist beyond one’s capacity really to grasp them might be an exercise in existential humility. For Ferguson, later Romantic emphases on uncompromised subjectivity obscured this point until recent theory, especially Deconstruction, reduced the arrogant subject back down to size. The eighteenth-century debates around the aesthetics of transporting sensations were, as Frances Ferguson stressed in her book Solitude and the Sublime, conducted precisely in order to define an appropriate place for the sublime in a shared culture. Let us recall that the sublime was essentially healthy. 4īut now their minds, too, would be worked upon with comparable interventions, interventions informed by the categories of eighteenth-century psychology, among them the sublime. Lunatics continued to be bled, vomited and purged according to the ancient tradition of the anti-inflammatory regime which would dilute the damaging excesses of their vital fluids. The élite acceptance of a psychological understanding of madness, underwritten by John Locke’s labelling of lunacy as reasoning from wrong premises, opened the way, in the eighteenth century, to a phase of mental doctoring during which the physician felt bound directly to manipulate the patient’s feelings using all the ingenuity they could muster. It was instead a tale of religious hatred, political conflict, social antagonism, and, at last, intellectual advancement.’ 3 Michael Macdonald concluded his famous book on seventeenth-century English psychiatry, Mystical Bedlam, with this assessment: ‘The rise of psychological medicine has often been represented as a saga of scientific progress. The political, religious and medical élites’ profound aversion to enthusiasm had led to an insistence upon interpretations of mental illnesses that totally eschewed the traditions of demonic possession, and to the rejection of all the astrological and para-magical interventions which were still current in the seventeenth century. That range of treatments had in fact dramatically shrunk since Elizabethan times. Willis’s application of ‘the eye’ to lunatics, and Burke’s assumption that they regularly required ‘terrifying … into obedience’, were standard features of the eighteenth-century mad-doctor’s therapeutic kit. Burke, it seems, was already finding less pleasure than he had once believed there was to be found in the tremors of fear.

The lunacy of text based therapy