Anthropology of Psychic Life

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Instead, in this course we will explore psychic life through the various ways in which it is known-as lived-experience; cultural, historical, and political form; object of intervention; and site of experimentation. The approaches engaged in this course draw from psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology, critical global health, history of medicine, cultural studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and critical phenomenology with an overarching dedication to de-stigmatizing "mental illness," and embracing neurodiversity in all its forms. Along the way we will cover topics including madness and reason, psychopolitics, global mental health, the governance of the self, the psychic life of racism, radical mental health collectives and the psychedelic renaissance, as well as a set of phenomena that lie at the limits of experience, such as psychosomatization, solitary confinement, oceanic feeling, and dreaming.