The Dark Side of the Moon:

The Subaltern Space between Society as Asylum and “True” Madness

Jazyl Adalia

20416521

Dr. Dag Yngvesson

MLAC2019
 The image of Western psychiatry today is not one of dystopian violence towards the

madman, but of professional service from doctor to patient in consultation. The field has

moved past its dark ages of cruelty, political abuse, and moral judgment to where scientific

benevolence now dominates. Through the invocation of chemical imbalances, madness once

mistreated and ostracized has been “finally recognized and treated according to a truth”

(Foucault, 1998) that can be understood normatively in society. There is consequently greater

advocacy and awareness of mental illness as the psychiatric field leans towards a more

humanistic, scientific model for treating mental conditions (Botha, 2016).

A flipside to this progress, however, is the delivery of every subjective human

experience into psychiatry’s totalizing grasp of mental states, rendering the mental subject

irrelevant. If the 19th century asylum conditioned the madman to chastise his madness out of

himself (Foucault, 1998), modern psychiatry absolves him by erasing him out of his madness

entirely. His insanity, as psychiatric object, is analyzed and sorted into its properly classified

place before he is re-engendered into the new language of his condition. This effectively

changes the subject into “an object-to-be-changed rather than a person-to-be-accepted”

(Laing, 1959), in an era where psychiatry aims to move away from the “containment” of

madmen to the inclusion of them. In the swap of “madman” with “schizophrenic” and

“crazy” with “mentally ill”, can the psychiatric subject truly speak?

Pink Floyd’s 1973 concept album “Dark Side of the Moon” has such significant cult

status within music and broader culture that its widely known for its reputation, even after

fifty years since its release. Besides being synonymous with psychedelic and musical

experimentation, the album is a vivid exploration of mental illness from an insider

perspective. The album is one installment in a series of concept albums about schizophrenia

by other 70s rock and metal bands which discuss mental illness within a larger framework of

anti-establishment commentary that was characteristic of the social climate of that decade
(Kruth, 2023). In true fashion of progressive music, each song in the album takes the listener

on a sonic and philosophical journey of questioning the self, sanity, society, and life from

different perspectives on the spectrum of rationality. The general consensus on the album’s

meaning is that “those labelled madmen are, in fact, enlightened individuals capable of

perceiving the true reality of human existence and experience” (Spelman, 2009). Originally

titled “An Assorted Piece for Lunatics”, it was inspired by the mental health decline of the

band’s founder Syd Barrett who was believed to have developed schizophrenia in the years

before its release (Reisch, 2011). His famed creative prowess and mental health struggles

garnered him the image of a “tortured genius”, which band member David Gilmour warns is

a “romanticized” narrative “made fashionable by people who don’t know anything about it”

(Zaslow, 2023).

The album is relevant to discuss due to the questions it poses about mental illness that

are missing in the increasingly convoluted dialogue between psychiatric power, media and

cultural attitudes in society. At one end is the threat of ignorance, marginalization and social

stigma of mental illness which creates reluctance to seek professional help and treatment

(Hazell et al., 2022). At the opposite end is the 21st century industrial motive for psychiatrists

to “champion” destigmatization and “normalize” diagnosis, influencing the arbitrary

proliferation of diagnostic categories and criteria at the top level and an epidemic of self-

diagnosis at the bottom level (Botha, 2016). At the final junction is the social constructionist

and anti-psychiatric faction of thought that mental disorders are nothing more than culturally

constructed myths (Szasz, 1974). Obscured within this “epistemological tangle” (Yngvesson,

2023) are “situationally indeterminate, heterogenous” (Spivak, 1994) individuals with a range

of mental conditions of certain psychiatric potentialities, producing varying impacts on their

functioning and quality of life, expressed from different social locations (Anthias, 2002),

lived experiences, capacities for self-awareness and reasoning, and cultural attitudes towards
psychiatric intervention.

In this essay, I will argue that the album highlights a significant grey area within these

factors that is deprived of discussion at all ends of mental health denial and psychiatric

optimism; locating the “true” identity and volition of mentally impaired individuals. It

engages with negative tropes and romanticized narratives of schizophrenia to arrive at deeper

epistemological challenges of speaking about mental illness from within and without. On one

hand, the “insanity” the protagonist goes through is used as a “a theatre piece about what it

[is] like to live in the modern world,” (Reisch, 2007), tying mental illness to larger issues of

social conformity, alienation, class division, war and capitalism. These themes reflect the

core tenets in Foucauldian critique of psychiatry and its construction of madness as a tool of

systemic power and social control. The society presented in the album is comparable to the

19th century asylum, operating with the same disciplinary logic and tactics of coercion. This

critique is juxtaposed by a phenomenological account of mental illness and the internal

suffering it causes. While alienated by society’s pressures and its prescriptions of “sanity”,

the protagonist must also face the instability caused by his actual state of madness.

Ultimately, this reveals a paradox of identity and therefore “voice-consciousness” (Spivak,

1994) for the mental patient in relation to oneself and structures of epistemic power. It

presents a first-person account of the impossibility for mentally ill people to be “self-

knowing, politically canny” subjects with easily accessible, “representable” realities (Spivak,

1994).

This is evident, firstly, by the symbolic connotations of the album’s title. Lunacy is

etymologically tied to the moon, deriving from “the Latin word luna (moon), reflecting the

ancient belief that insanity varied with or was caused by the phase of the moon” (Fusar-Poli

and Madini, 2008). The idea that the moon has a “dark side” is a simultaneous myth and

reality. From the human perspective on Earth, only one side of the moon is always visible and
illuminated while the far side remains “dark”, unseen and unknowable. This is false if the

moon is viewed in isolation, removed from its relation to Earth. In reality, the whole surface

of the moon receives light from the Sun at different stages in its orbit and there is no literal

“dark” side. This relative duality of truth is the conceptual foundation of the album as the

protagonist grapples with the construction of “insanity” as society’s Other, an alienating

projection based on the madman’s “identity-in-differentia” to rationality (Spivak, 1994), and

as a real state that causes existential turmoil and self-alienation. Moreland (2014) elucidates

this connection further:

In short, unreason is the opposite of reason; hence, it is a paradoxical viewpoint

that, from reason’s perspective, cannot be directly known through any capacity of

its own. In this regard, the classical era’s conception of madness as unreason is

symbolically akin to a terrestrial notion of the dark side of the moon.

The album’s introduction is an apt musical summary of how it will integrate themes

of time, greed, insanity and social conformity. The first song “Speak to Me” begins with a

cacophony of frantic sounds comprising of a heartbeat, a clock ticking, a repetitive cash

register, a person screaming and a person laughing maniacally. It transitions into the first of

many short monologues in which a man says; “I’ve been mad for fucking years…I’ve always

been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like the most of us…very hard to explain why you’re mad,

even if you’re not mad” (Waters, 1973). His speech evokes the nonsensical ramblings of a

madman but has contextual significance. As he “places the mirror of madness unto himself”,

“despising [himself] before being able to recognize or know [himself]” (Foucault, 1998), he

produces a narrative of madness that is incoherent (as expected of a madman) but one that

also deconstructs the “uneven character” (Spivak, 1994) of madness and the subjective

relativity of defining it.

claiming madness is universal (“like the most of us”) and the unreasonable, unnecessary act

of explaining madness in oneself “even if you’re not mad”. Evidently, madness is stuck in a

somewhat nonsensical, contradictory dialogue with itself and external forces that seek to

define it as such. These contradictions, however, point to the semantic slipperiness between

sanity and insanity. As Spelman (2009) notes, “if behaviour generally believed to be ‘normal’

could be proven insane, then surely conventionally labelled ‘mad’ behaviour could

conceivably be sane”. Regardless of this ambiguity, it highlights the core predicament of

“voice-consciousness” Spivak (1994) discussed when those who are Othered in society are

expected to “know” and “speak for” their own conditions through the essentializing lens of

being an “Other”. If, like in the monologue, the madman speaks of himself in terms of

madness, speaking from madness, with what autonomy can he speak to his madness that will

not get overturned into itself? Sengupta deduces from Kant’s account of reason that “the root

of agency is located in a “will to act” …. which is always connected to reason” (2017). This

makes Spivak’s argument doubly true for mentally ill people who lack the cognitive faculties

necessary for judgment and reasoning, while already at odds with a world that systematically

seeks to govern them with its “reason”. As the album progresses, madness plays a role that

oscillates between evoking total irrationality in the madman and enabling him to produce

sharp, incisive critique on society’s “madness”.

Foucault (1998) highlighted how madness was “endlessly on trial in the asylum” due

to its “transgressions against bourgeois society” which involved a resistance to work and

behavior that disrupted social order and its “moral synthesis” (Foucault, 1998). Parallels can

be drawn to the album’s presentation of society as a system that operates with an insidious

manipulative logic to program obedience into its citizens. In the first song of the album,

“Breathe”, the protagonist denounces the repetitive rat race of society that makes life a
meaningless frantic run. This futile race is associated to labour and work, as evidenced by the

lyrics “run, rabbit run. Dig that hole, Forget the sun. And when at last the work is done, don’t

sit down it’s time to dig another one” (Waters, 1973). The protagonist goes on to highlight

the irony within the supposed promise of living a long life if he conforms and “rides the tide”

when in reality, doing so is a “race towards an early grave” (Waters, 1973).

This critique on materialistic pursuit continues in the following two songs, “Time”

and “Money”. The ideas present in these songs is a dual take on the function of having time

and money. There is a simultaneous desire and recognition of their appeal and value, in

conflict with the “madness” of spending one’s life chasing after material wealth as society

dictates (Spelman, 2009). He laments wasting time as a youth “watching the rain” instead of

“lying in the sunshine” (Waters, 1973). Despite “missing the starting gun”, he runs “to catch

up with the sun but it’s sinking”, “[racing] around to come up behind” him again (Waters,

1973). He finds himself in an endless chase towards fulfillment as prescribed by society and

realizes that “the price to pay for such contentment is a life without meaning or distinction”

(Spelman, 2009). Similar contrasting sentiments towards the subject continue in “Money”:

“Get a job with good pay and you’re okay” but money is “a crime” and “the root of all evil

today” (Waters, 1973). This futile internalization of society’s desires results in the first bind;

an alienation from society that leads to a loss of self and a loosening grip on truth and reality

resulting in a state of “madness”. At the end of the song, he is left “hanging on in quiet

desperation”, feeling he has “something more to say” but he is debilitated (Waters, 1973).

The epistemes of authority and power, disseminated through the establishment of society,

operate like an asylum that ironically causes people to go mad (“like the most of us”) before

cracking down on this constructed madness. Anti-psychiatrists such as David Cooper echo

this view when he argued that “normal” people should “see ourselves as the violently

disturbed inmates of a rather larger bin” (Spelman, 2009).

definition and confusing experience of “insanity”. As the title suggests, the lyrics highlight

the arbitrary nature of an “us” and “them” mentality in the context of war and mental

normalcy: “Us and them. After all, we’re only ordinary men. Me and you…who knows

which is which and who is who. Up and down. But in the end, it’s only round and round”

(Waters, 1973). This assertion of everything turning in on itself is elucidated by the image of

a war general struggling to demarcate lines on the battlefield that “move side to side”

(Waters, 1973). Ultimately, aimless violence against a mythical enemy is decided based on a

“battle of words”, alluding to the ambiguous difference between “good” and “bad”, “normal”

and “insane”. The connection between the arbitrary nature of war and treatment of mental

patients is reinforced by a monologue of a man (presumably a prison/asylum guard)

justifying the use of “a quick, short, sharp, shock” instead of a fatal “thrashing” to instill

“good manners” in an uncooperative subject (Waters, 1973). This is another example of a

Foucauldian reference to a “softer” but damning kind of disciplinary action that is a form of

mental torture meant to “correct” patients.

The theme of mental illness fully materializes in the song “Brain Damage”. Asylum

logic is directly referenced in Brain Damage, each verse employing different perspectives to

analyze the “lunatic”. The first line, “the lunatic is on the grass”, resembles a warning that he

is free and should be apprehended as he is harmlessly “remembering games, daisy chains and

laughs” (Waters, 1973). Reminiscing childhood games and laughing is an action that is

innocent and childlike that, from the asylum’s (or systemic) view, spins into a symptom of

delusion or insanity (Spelman, 2009). This verse and perspective end with the assertion to

“got to keep the loonies on the path”, a critique of the disciplinary and infantilizing rhetoric

used by the asylum to “police the insane” (Spelman, 2009). The next verse calls to the

lunatics “in the hall, in my hall”, whose faces appear on newspapers “and every day, the
paper boy brings more” (Waters, 1973). This might refer to politicians and figureheads of

society, shifting the accusation of insanity again onto society and recalling the dubious nature

of “who is who” as determined by war generals from the previous song (Spelman, 2009).

Finally, the protagonist states that “the lunatic is in my head. You raise the blade, make the

change, re-arrange me till I’m sane…There’s someone in my head but it’s not me” (Waters,

1973). Imagery of a forced lobotomy is evoked to reinforce critique of corrective methods

used by asylums to dispel a madness that is projected onto the subject. Society, like the

asylum, “needs the Other and, if need be, creates him, so that, by invalidating him as evil, he

may confirm himself as good” (Szasz, 1974).

Spivak (1994) used the sentence “white men are saving brown women” to illustrate

the moral justification of the colonizer’s project. From the perspective of psychiatric

benevolence, whether in the form of a lobotomy or modern psychotropic treatment, the

sentence “the madman must be saved from himself” would capture the grounding philosophy

of diagnosis and treatment. Deconstructed, it reveals the predicament of identity and

autonomy of the mentally ill presented in the lyric “the lunatic is in my head” (Waters, 1973).

There is one entity forced to operate as two in these sentences, whereby the madman is both

subject and object, victim and perpetrator. The metaphysical problem of attempting to revoke

agency from the perpetrating madman and granting it to the same victimized madman is self-

explanatory.

This, again, raises the question of “who is who” (Waters, 1973) within the singular

madman whose voice and volition are dislocated and rendered absent between his

neurological insanity and untrained sanity. The only solution to maintain the logic of agency

is to linguistically duplicate the madman, which effectively fragments his voice and identity

into halves. Under society’s gaze, he is hyper-visible as two half-components of being a

“mad-man” but all at once made invisible by this visibility. In all ways that an official
declaration of clinical insanity can take place, whether to help mental sufferers, punish the

socially deviant or defend criminal acts, who is the man who experiences, speaks and acts

from madness? If he is assumed to be found in only his reason, madness is the ultimate

oppressor and denier of agency and choice, justifying the use of coercion and forced

treatment, and the alleviation of moral responsibility. If madness is a part of who “he” is,

treatment would mean silencing and erasure, and personal culpability in moral transgressions.

In cases where insight into his own condition is impossible and professional help is refused,

does the madman then speak for himself?

The anti-psychiatric perspectives on madness presented throughout the album are

interrupted by two neutralizing verses in “Brain Damage” that suggest insanity is a real

experience that acts independently from its identity as constructed by authority:

If the dam breaks open many years too soon, and if there is no room upon the hill,

and if your head explodes with dark forebodings too, I’ll see you on the dark side of

the moon. If the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear. You shout and no one seems to

hear. And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes. I’ll see you on the dark

side of the moon (Waters, 1973).

As opposed to the previous skepticism towards the construction of insanity, these

lines clearly depict insanity as a real and threatening state of mind. The idea of a mind

“breaking open” can suggest liberation, but also the loss of ability to function like a dam is

meant to hold water. The references to darkness exploding suggests that insanity here is

recognized as an inherently alienating and harmful force that lands someone in territory that

is dark and inaccessible. This is a process of internal silencing experienced by the madman

where his cries of help are futile as no one can “hear” him through reason. This marks the

limitations of finding the madman’s “voice” by valorizing him as an oppressed subject who

can speak from a deeper enlightened awareness of his own circumstances (Spivak, 1994).
While the album initially plays with the idea of “mental illness as a possible journey to

potential enlightenment” (Spelman, 2009), it punctuates this view with commentary on how

this is a contorted, romanticized ideal of meaning and purpose projected onto mental

suffering. This sarcastic commentary in the song is reinforced by the ending, when a

presumed madman speaks: “I can’t think of anything to say except, I think it’s marvelous!”

before he breaks out in unhinged laughter (Waters, 1973).

“Eclipse”, the last song on the album, drives home the compounded impact of

alienation by society and mental illness. For most of the song, every line expresses a

relationship to two different or opposing ideas (“all that you touch, all that you see, all you

distrust, all that you save, all you create, all you destroy”). These repeated assertions of “all

that” one feels, does and thinks are incomplete sentences that hang in the air. They are

subjects with no predicate as nothing is being done or being said about each of them. It could

be deduced that after the whole journey of questioning the madness in society and

experiencing madness in oneself, everything is encapsulated by total ambiguity, and nothing

conclusive can be truly said. This continues until the final two lines at the end of the song;

“everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon” (Waters, 1973). We

then hear a heartbeat again, overlaid by a man conclusively stating that “there is no dark side

of the moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark” (Waters, 1973). The heartbeat then gradually

fades into a total silence that lasts for several moments before the album ends.

Throughout the album, the sun and the moon represent layers of different antithetical

forces of good and bad, hope and destitution, reason and unreason, truth and lie. The Sun is

presented as both a false and true sanity, conformity, order and hopefulness as prescribed by

society while the moon acts as the counterpart. It is insanity but also truth, enlightenment but

also alienation, the self-awakening and internal chaos that arises in trying to “chase the Sun”.

At the end, everything through society’s lens of reason is supposedly “in tune”, but this
doesn’t matter if reason is eclipsed by insanity, in all ways that insanity can be defined and

experienced. The final line that every side of the moon is dark is a falsehood but posited as a

metaphorical truth. It turns the initial premise of the album on its head, in keeping with the

album’s inclination to reverse and subvert narratives surrounding the themes it explores. This

conclusion can be interpreted as a resignation to the all-encompassing alienation and

suffering for the madman, or a mixed embrace of “the dark side” as the only space insanity

can exist, in silence to the Sun but also eclipsing it as the ultimate arbiter of reason.

In summary, the discourse of mental illness in the album is discontinuous and

fragmented as it gets repeatedly ensnared between its own disruptive logic and the

epistemological power that seeks to contain it. It suggests that madness metaphorically exists

on the dark side of the moon, symbolic for an epistemic no-man’s land caught between the

world’s Othering conception of “madness”, the stigma and erasure of mental impairments,

and the unstable internal narratives they cause. Autonomy is turned in on itself, making self-

representation and “voice” fraught with complications for mentally ill people, potentially

subalterning them (Spivak, 1994).

The contradictions presented in the album problematize how madness is

conceptualized by Foucault. In Birth of the Asulym (1998), he refers to “madness” as it is

constructed by institutional power but also to describe aberrations in the mental states of

asylum patients. He confronts it as a label that was thrusted onto marginalized individuals

who didn’t comply with society’s standards of moral conduct. He also uses it to describe

delusional or psychotic states in which patients have beliefs that are disconnected from

reality. In his simultaneous framing of madness as an arbitrary construct and his implied

subscription to the idea that “madmen” do in fact exist, a slippage of meanings occurs, and a

circular logic is revealed. If madness is forced to correct “itself”, what is the “itself” on its

own, when it is not rationalized? What is the true content of the signified that’s been
constructed into the signifier “insanity”, its false other? In his observations of how power

assumes the character of absolute rationality, alienating anything deemed irrational, Foucault

refrains still from espousing a true “liberation of the insane” (Foucault, 1998) that the

asylums falsely practiced, and avoids arguing for the abolishment of a categorical, clinical

insanity.

According to Tirkonnen, Foucault’s work on psychiatry is primarily concerned

with how “psychiatric knowledge reduces madness to silence… to a form of suffering that

cannot speak for itself” (2019). He strongly believed in giving “personal experiences a voice

of their own” (Tirkonnen, 2019). At the same time, Foucault implies in Madness and

Civilization (1998) that the mad are inherently voiceless because “those who are labeled

as mad can become “trapped” within their own delirious discourse and within the structures

designed to confine them” (Rizvi, 2017). In either case, they avoid “any kind of analysis of

(the subject)” itself and the internal constitution of madness “beyond the circuit of epistemic

violence” that Spivak (1994) might identify as problematic.

In today’s iteration of psychiatric power, the expanding classification of mental

disorders is a function of diversifying knowledge of the mentally oppressed, creating more

epistemological space to understand their suffering and unveil their “voice-consciousness”

(Spivak, 1994) over their personal experiences. In the “ideological production” (Spivak,

1994) of madness, however, this agency is “not an ideological transformation of

consciousness on the ground level” but a “replacement as well as an appropriation of

something that is artificial to begin with” (Spivak, 1994).

These are predicaments that the investigating intellectual cannot be faulted for,

however, as the nature and character of madness is impossible to define in isolation without

the rationalizing constraints of language and the power imbued in them. The album illustrates

how madness is already an a priori, undefinable Other to rationality before it is forced into a
constructed, definable Other in its relation to society. This is precisely what makes the

“voice” of the clinically insane hard to locate even through persistent attempts to “render

visible the mechanisms” (Spivak, 1994) of power that silence the experience of madness.
 Bibliography

Anthias F (2002) Where do I belong?: Narrating identity and translocational positionality.

Ethnicities 2(4): 491–515.

Botha, R. (2016) ‘Psychiatry and the DSM: Cracks in an epistemic empire’, Psychology in

Society, 51, pp. 57–79. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-8708/2016/n51a3.

Foucault, Michel. (1998) “The Birth of the Asylum” pp. 241-278 in Madness

and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage

Books.

Fusar-Poli, P. and Madini, L., 2008. Medicine and the arts. Brain Damage by Pink Floyd

(1973). Commentary. Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American

Medical Colleges, 83(8), pp.742-743.

Hazell, C. M., Berry, C., Bogen-Johnston, L. and Banerjee, M. (2022) “Creating a hierarchy

of mental health stigma: testing the effect of psychiatric diagnosis on

stigma,” BJPsych Open. Cambridge University Press, 8(5), p. e174. doi:

10.1192/bjo.2022.578.

Kruth, J., 2023. Lunacy: The Curious Phenomenon of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon,

50 Years On. Rowman & Littlefield.

Laing, R.D., 1959. The Divided Self. An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.

Harmondsworth (Penguin) 1959.

Moreland, C., 2014. The Unbreakable Circle: An Intellectual History of Michel Foucault.

Reisch, G.A. ed., 2011. Pink Floyd and philosophy: Careful with that axiom, Eugene! (Vol.

30). Open Court.

Sengupta, R., 2017. Subaltern's image and the real: an inquiry.

madness.

Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct.

Harper & Row, 1974.

Spivak, G. C. (1994). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial

Theory: A Reader. P. Williams and L. Chrisman. Hertfordshire, Wheatsheaf.

Waters, R. 1973. Speak to Me. Pink Floyd. Dark Side of the Moon. [CD]. London: Harvest

Records.

Yngvesson, D. (2023) Epistemic violence & the subaltern [PowerPoint presentation].

(Accessed: 2nd June 2023)

Zaslow, B., 2023. Lunacy: The Curious Phenomenon of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon,

50 Years On.