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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

The Uses of Symptoms of Mental Health in the Long 20th Century

Résumé

'To link madness and writing is to perpetuate one of the greatest commonplaces of our modernity' (Cape 2010: 7). Such statement is especially relevant when one considers the madness of the creative mind (Downie 2005: 49), the social implications of psychiatric treatment (Wall 2018), or more generally the understanding of the madness of literary creation (Felman 1978) and the very quality of language and the linguistic inventions of those regarded as mad (Ferrer 1990; Lecercle 1996). One of the reasons for literature's interest in madness might be found in the symptom of psychic disorder itself, which can be conceived as something else than a 'cyphered message' (Zizek 1992: 175), through which, in orthodox Freudian theory, 'the subject gets back… the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront'. (Zizek 1992: 175) The symptom can be defined outside its analogy to a physical symptom, which is as a sign to be interpreted in relation to some organic dysfunction and causing pain the doctor seeks to assuage. In Lacanian, contemporary psychoanalytic theory, the symptom is a subjective solution that enables each and everyone to knot together different aspects of their life into a whole that holds; a scaffolding (Moment of Being) it is the very essence of their subjective response to the world, the very cause of their discomfort with their being, inherently unsatisfactory, and that which can be manipulated or at least manoeuvred from in therapy and through writing (Lacan 2005). The question I want to raise in this work is how, thanks to the Modernist forays into the workings of the mind and the body, literature produces, instead of simply reproducing, symptoms, how the symptoms produced are decoded or made decipherable in a way that medicine leaves out (outside strict causality), but also how the represented illness defies cure and care and resists the attempts currently made to erase symptoms through biomedicine, instead of working from and around them. What this book will explore instead is the discrepancy between the way doctors deal with symptomsfor now, suffice it to say that from a medical point of view symptoms are the signs of an illness which patients want to control if not get rid of, and which biomedical science endeavours to eraseand the way literature uses and produces symptoms, especially linguistic ones, to invent characters and account for the experience of symptoms and their significance at the subjective level. The definition of symptoms as a sure sign of an illness that must be cured is what literature disputes, as can be seen in the representation of psychic disorders in the long 20 th century. Or I could rephrase this by saying that Septimus is a paradigmatic example of the dangers there are in wanting to cure someone like him.
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Dates et versions

hal-03955534 , version 1 (02-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03955534 , version 1

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Nicolas Pierre Boileau. The Uses of Symptoms of Mental Health in the Long 20th Century: Presentation of an upcoming book scheduled to be published in 2023 by Palgrave.. Resonance, Davison, Claire; Abel, Elizabeth, May 2022, Paris, France. ⟨hal-03955534⟩
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