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One of the earliest stains on the legacy of psychiatry, my medical specialty, dates to the American 1840 census, when the US government first began systematically collecting information on “idiocy” and “insanity.” According to the results, the purported rates of mental illness among free blacks in northern cities were deemed to exceed those among enslaved blacks in the south by an 11-to-one ratio. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, a notoriously strident defender of slavery, seized upon the results as “proof” that “the African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to him to give this guardianship and protection from mental death.”
“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?”: Josh Cohen on literature and psychoanalysis The analyst and writer s latest work,
How to Live. What to Do., is a mix of case studies from his consulting room, personal reminiscence, and literary reference points. How should we conceive the relationship between fiction and psychoanalytic thought? What is the largest area of overlap, or the most fruitful point of connection? There’s a boisterous history of literary interpretation with analytic leanings – one thinks of the American scholar Peter Brooks in
Reading for the Plot (1984) or Freud himself in his essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide”. The psychology of the literary artist has also been widely explored – by the psychiatrist Anthony Storr in his essays on Kafka and Balzac, for example, or Freud again in “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming.” And it’s often said that the best clinical case studies read like accomplished short stories, with elegant
âIt seems possible to hope that this period of solitude may bring some benefits.â Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan/Alamy Stock Photo
âIt seems possible to hope that this period of solitude may bring some benefits.â Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan/Alamy Stock Photo
Mon 1 Feb 2021 02.00 EST
Last modified on Sun 7 Feb 2021 06.47 EST
When the pandemic hit, my biggest fear â oddly, perhaps â was not the virus. I had been ill for some extended periods of time before. Illness was familiar territory; I had some sense of what it meant, and how I might get through it. Back then, Covid itself did not feel like an immediate threat to me or to my family. It affected older people, I told myself. As long as my mum didnât get it, we would be fine.
photo credit: Bigstock
The mice in my absence have been at my books again, with what Marx called, with regard to the manuscript of his then-unpublished
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, their gnawing criticism. Much good may gnawing it have done them! When finally published, forty years after it was written, the manuscript did considerable harm, at least if ideas have consequences, for as an appendix to that work is inscribed one of the most beguiling and pernicious of all epistemological doctrines, namely that people’s ideas are simply the reflection of their interests; from which it follows that, since people’s interests are different and irreconcilably opposed, the only real argument is violence. And we all know what that idea led to.