 Re: There's method in his madness
David, what's the difference that you see between "method in his madness" and "method to his madness"
Thank you for asking,Elena
Let's say the person tackling a problem is John so we don't get confused with all the 'he's'.
method in his madness: to the observer, John's way of going about performing some task is so radically different, and doesn't seem to be tackling it head on, but in some obscure roundabout way. However, if John explained exactly why he was doing it his way, one might then appreciate John has a very good and sensible reason for doing it that way - what seemed like a mad approach was actually very constructive. In John's mind, his goal is to deal with the task and John believes he is going about it the best way, or at least, it seems a good approach to him. He was being methodical in his goal-orientated behaviour that only seemed madness to others.
method to his madness: Some years ago, I was engaged in assessing people who claimed to have suffered intellectual and memory impairment after head injury. Depending on the degree of this impairment, and so, the degree of brain injury that must have been sustained to cause this degree of impairment, the person would be in line for a very large sum of money for compensation. It was easy to tell those that were faking. Their method of trying to present themselves as impaired was to respond to tests as if they now had a global difficulty doing and remembering things, whereas in genuine patients, there is selective impairment - some things are impaired, others remain intact even after severe brain injury.
Similarly, an experiment was done were students tried to get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals by faking mental illness. However, they were detected because the way they went about pretending they were ill didn't correspond to what is usually seen in particular kinds of patients. Their method in trying to fake was to pretend to hear voices, have imaginary conversations, talk about martians persecuting them, sit slumped in a chair for a while as if profoundly depressed, then jump around acting in a manic fashion etc. Here, the goal was to appear to be mad, and they had to have some way of going about it that they thought would fool the doctors. Their goal was the appearance of madness itself, and there was method to their madness!
Last edited by David L.; 08-Dec-2007 at 08:20.
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Re: There's method in his madness 
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