Understanding ‘Insanity’ in Literature as a Case Study and Philosophical Counseling as Emerging Therapy

Abstract

This article is an attempt is to understand insanity, melancholy, madness, sorrow as the offshoots of gender discrimination and stereotype roles prevailing in the society. Such issues, being claimed as the subject of clinical psychology, have been analyzed popularly from the Freudian point of view, but in this paper, the researcher endeavors to philosophize the issue of insanity and attempts to offer a kind of solution to the problem which seems more ethical and moral in nature. The researcher proposes ‘philosophical counseling’ as an active practice to avoid such mental conditions. Since the study focuses on the gender-biased understanding of insanity, researcher will choose only women as the case of study. It is usually suggested by the scholars such as Terry Eagleton (in Literary Theory: An Introduction) and Edward Said (in his seminal work, Orientalism) that any literary work has to be studied and interpreted in its appropriate socio-cultural and intellectual background.