![]() ![]() Septimus insists he has a ‘perfect’ brain despite seeing visions of Evans, his dead friend (p. They are paranoid, afraid, and in denial that their preoccupations and delusions are far from reality. In some ways, Woolf’s characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith do lack insight. Insight is conventionally defined in psychiatry as ‘a correct attitude to morbid change in oneself’ and agreeing with this definition implies agreement that schizophrenics, or the ‘insane’, lack true insight (Sass, P. Virginia Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse might allow readers insight into the thoughts and feelings of her characters, yet the question of whether characters have insight into their own behaviour, a marker of ‘sanity’, is more elusive. Interpreting this inner world, then, is a subjective experience for an observer. Emil Kraepelin, prominently known as ‘the father of modern scientific psychiatry’, described insanity and madness as ‘an inner world’ (Thiher, p. ![]()
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