The Discussion of Madness in Henry IV

The question of reversibility lingers around through the whole play. Is Henry IV really insane or he is simply fooling everybody? Does Henry IV fall for Matilda or Matilda's daughter, Frida? In act II, Henry IV claimed emotionally that "Those people expect others to behave as they wish all the time" while ironically he is the one who expect others to behave the way he designed and wished them to all the time. This is another example of reversibility.

Other than the question of reversibility, I am very compelled to the description of madman that is mentioned and phrased in monologues of Henry IV when he swung back and forth between his "Henry IV state" and "normal state".

He announced at P127(for my book) that "but those others take advantage of this (miserable, feeble, uncertain minds) and make you accept their way of thinking" and "that's they way public opinion is formed". This claim really drew attention to me for that we all feel the need to change our own set of mind at times to better cater to the mainstream state of mind of the society, for the purpose of, ultimately, survival. From an evolutionary standpoint, as humans are social animals, the ability to social and fit in becomes crucial because those who know how to work with others usually have more access to various resources. Essentially because of how we can be fundamentally unique and different, being able to adapt ourselves to the society and at the same time, stay sane, somewhat makes us all "heroes", which is defined as somebody who recognizes the cruel nature of the reality of life but creates a imaginative second world for his soul to dwell in, in Emily Becker's The Denial of Death. In the text, Henry IV refers to the general public as "those others" and each individual as "you", who needs to take in information about how to think in ways that benefit the general society to obtain resources the society owns.

I also found it fascinating when Henry IV said at P128 "do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman--with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of constructions". For madman, they are the ones that "construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather". In Emily Becker's The Denial of Death, she defined the neurotic as those who are "unable to maintain the "lies" needed to remain normal, have created dreams, fantasies and other escape mechanisms to protect themselves from the threat of reality, which would other wise destroy them". They are even closer to the bare truth, for there are no constructions needed in their mental world, while in any sane person's world a certain extent of lies are essential so that the mental construction does not simply collapse. The “just world” would be a very good example in this case, the ideology that doing good would be awarded while doing evil would be punished eventually. We tend to set this ideology as the default setting of our belief system and wishfully think that the world will somehow work the way as we expect it to.

Even though psychology has tried to define disorders as mental states that make us malfunction, the line drawn between sane and insane is very vague and can never be, in my opinion, generalized into a scale or principle.