Clinical Fictions: Psychoanalysis & Literature

Graduate

Cultural Studies or Team-taught Interdisciplinary As with the other sciences, psychology presents itself as a neutral body of knowledge, which makes us forget that its findings are contestable and contingent, its theories often discarded or later found problematic. This is a particular problem with mental health discourse, because it deals with the subjective but uses objective language to do so. This gives the language of mental health an aura of mastery that conceals the partiality of its observations behind the mask of notions which seem ahistorical or even universally valid. One classic example is hysteria, which was once considered "a woman's disease" that stems from the uterus, rather than the brain, and was eventually dropped from the DSM in 1950 and once again in 1980. A more recent example would be early theories on autism, which misrecognized autistic shutdowns as a sign of sensory deficit rather than sensory overload. Such fluctuations in clinical concepts, theories, and interpretations were frequently achieved by a mutual interaction with the humanities—from autobiographical accounts where the diagnosed subject speaks about their experience, to cultural critique that exposes common biases and blind spots in our everyday interactions. In the interchange between humanities and the clinic, both the clinician and the cultural critic provide a diagnosis that can be fateful in terms of helping (or hurting) the subject. By extracting or inventing non-preexisting ways of being, such conversations work together to question and clarify existing knowledge. In this discussion, psychoanalysis occupies a fascinating space between the clinic and the humanities by actively resisting the language of objectivity through envisioning an ethical procedure that concerns the subject as a speaking being. In this course, through reading clinical literature and psychoanalytic theory and case studies, we pursue the following questions: Are the problems of diagnosis always about misdiagnosis? What happens when diagnosis becomes a label or a reference point that promises a glimpse into one's "essence"? Does diagnosis function as a means of "taming" subjects that are deemed as social disturbances or "Other," as in, make them recognizable and thereby malleable by capitalism and state apparatuses? Or is the gap between the subject and their diagnosis not a crisis, but a site of potentiality where a different relation altogether can emerge?