Crossing the Borderline (Personality): Madness Interrogated in Girl, Interrupted G. Thomas Couser When the [inmates] began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of [asylums]. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of [inmates] and those we call delinquents. Michel Foucault For those who aren't familiar with it--even though it is now a major motion picture starring Winona Ryder, and coming soon to your neighborhood theater--let me begin by briefly characterizing Girl, Interrupted. It is Susanna Kaysen's account of an eighteen- month sojourn in McLean psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, during her late teens in the late 1960s. McLean has the reputation of being--at least in New England--the asylum of choice of the rich and famous, who are treated with discretion. (Its alumni include Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, the musical Taylor family--James, Livingston, and Kate--and, somewhat anomalously, Ray Charles.)For the most part, its patients are not rich or famous, of course, but it does have a well-deserved reputation as a relatively humane facility for a middle-class clientele. In contrast to the oppressive look and feel of most mental hospitals, with their visible security features, McLean has a collegiate ambiance, with patients living in small units that resemble the dorms on many New England campuses. i A short book, Girl, Interrupted consists of thirty-four chapters, most of which are only a couple of pages long. Rather than a continuous chronological account of an eighteen-month episode in her life, it is a collage of at least three different