Madness and the Social Link

In this paper, I contend the necessity of a feminine agency in order to survive deshumanization. Examples are taken from Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen, anthropologist and psychoanalyst William Rivers in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, who was called a male mother by traumatized officers returning from the front, Diotima for Socrates in the Symposium, Dulcinea for Don Quixote, and my experience in a psychiatric hospital situated on the battle fields of the previous war in the north of France.