Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)

Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards. Abstract References Contents Chapter 1: The Function of Symptoms of ‘Mental Health’: How Literature Is Situated in the Debate Between Cure and Care The Literary Diagnosis of Symptoms ‘On Being Ill’: On the Literary Apprehension of Illness Literature’s Symptoms Are Not Sure Clinical Signs of Illness Psychoanalysis Versus Psychiatry: Ever-Growing Tensions over the Notion of Health Subjective Responses to Symptoms The Rupture of the Modernist Era The Limits of Social Interpretations of Psychological Disorder The Book’s Premise and Structure Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Part I: Doctors’ Misdiagnoses: Symptoms, Meaning and Function Chapter 2: Symptomatic Silence: Situating the Subject in Mrs Dalloway The Sociopolitics of Mental Disorder: The Symptoms Generated by Society Septimus’s Silence: A Sign of His Symptoms Being Unheard in Their Function A Queer Soldier: The Feminisation of Septimus or the Instability of Identification The Hole of Knowledge Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 3: Meaning and Interpretation: The Failure of the Psychiatric Method in Asylum by Patrick McGrath The Shortcomings of Psychiatry: The Failure of the Psychiatrist’s Narrative Blinded by Knowledge: Subjective Creations Defeating Scientific Method Stella: The Failure of Love and the Other Jouissance Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 4: From Physical Symptoms to Subjective Creations in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy The Limitations of Medical Treatment Freud, Hysteria and the End of the Repressive Hypothesis The Sexual as the Engine of Fiction Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Part II: The Symptom and the Body: Discreet Signs of Psychological Disorders Chapter 5: The Body as Dangerous Jouissance in The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing ‘Playing with the Conventional Structures of the Novel’ Excess and Overgrowth: Two Key Words of the Family’s Shared Symptoms of Displacement The Body, Appetite and Jouissance Conclusion Bibliography Secondary Sources Chapter 6: AIDS, Manic-Depression and the Symptoms of the 1980s in The Line of Beauty Social Understanding of Illness: Inside, Outside, Marginal ‘Proper Romance Is a Sham’ (Alderson 2017: 141) Catherine’s Sinthome (Lacan 2005) Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Part III: Voices, Contemporary Symptoms and Social Cohesion Chapter 7: Voices, Silence and the Body: Cusk’s Modernist Explorations of Symptomatic Encounters in the Outline Trilogy (2014–2018) Finding One’s Voice and Making the Readers Hear Voices Confessions, Silence and How Talking Cures, or How Much She Cares Desire, the Body and the Couple as Contemporary Symptoms Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Chapter 8: Ali Smith’s Voices: Everyone Is Delirious Disconnection and ‘Bare-ings’ (SA1, 7): Loss and Gain Illness and the Body Art-Full: Saturation of Art as a Means of Connection Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Bibliography Bibliography Symptom Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index