Study Task - Reading and Understanding Texts - Part 2

Summary - What is Madness?

This chapter elaborates on how the human mind deals with traumatic events that we have experienced in our earlier lives, how we have possibly processed them and how this can come out in different ways, such as anxiety and phobias. Darian Leader suggests that we use repression and selective amnesia to process trauma, however, this does mean it can manifest in different forms.   

This is very important to how people with anxiety, especially social anxiety disorder, react to certain situations. Anxiety generally does not appear from thin air, it stems from either one or several traumatic events then the brain tries to analyse this event the best it can, although most of the time the mind contorts the associated memories and creates a defence system formed from fear so that the mind knows to run away from a similarly threatening situation.

As someone who suffers from severe anxiety, it is important to know how it forms and how it affects the human mind in different ways. I will be exploring characters that exhibit the traits and symptoms, as well as creating my own characters suffering from the same mental illnesses. 

Study Task 2 - Reading and Understanding Texts

"What is Madness?" by Darian Leader

What concepts is the author trying to communicate?

Leader is trying to explain the meaning of madness, more in the sense of psychosis; how it affects the mind in different ways and what happens when suffering with it.

What are the KEY QUOTES and/or KEY POINTS?

"[...]we need to introduce some basic psychoanalytic ideas. [...]. The simplest place to start is with the notion of defence. [...] If we have experienced a traumatic situation or had an unpalatable thought, we tend to do something about it. We can't just keep it in consciousness, where it would continue to affect us, so we transform it.[...] We apply an amnesia to what to what is too unbearable for us to remember. [...]"

"[...] To find them, however, there are clues: in place of the forgotten memory, a symptom appears, like a ghost that keeps on coming back. This could be a phobia, a tic, a headache, an obsessive thought, a paralysis or any other form of mental or physical intrusion into our lives. [...]"

page 36

He talks about how psychosis possibly could form over time from childhood trauma and that it can manifest into strong phobias and fears.

What EXAMPLES are used by the author?

"In one of Freud's examples, his patient Emma developed a phobia of going into shops alone. She linked this with a memory from when she was twelve: she had gone into a shop and seen two shop assistants laughing together. She had rushed out in a fright, with the idea that the men had been laughing at her clothes and that one of them had attracted her sexually. A second memory soon inflected the first. Aged eight, she had twice gone into a sweetshop and the shopkeeper [...] Although it had happened on her first visit, she had still returned to the shop the second time. Linking the two scenes together, she realized that the shop assistant's laughter in the most recent memory had evoked for her the shopkeeper's grin in the earlier memory." 

page 37

Can you find real world EXAMPLES that you feel follow this model of thought?

See the answer above.

How can this be related to animation or your theme? 

This chapter talks about how psychosis is shaped through trauma and repressed memory, which can be formed by high functioning anxiety. This is something that I definitely relate to and want to explore and elaborate on in my practical work. 

Context of Practice - Year 2 - Study Task 1

Initial Ideas

I wanted to research and write something that I find interesting and effects me personally; mental illness and how it is represented in cartoons.

I chose the theme 'Society' as I think mental illness has a great effect on people socially (i.e anxiety, depression, etc) and I want to look into how mental disorders are represented in the media towards young minds.