Reich, Rebecca (Author)
This dissertation examines psychiatric and literary conceptions of insanity in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1980s. The period stands out not only for the development of a self-identified subculture of "thinking differently," as the Russian word for "dissent" [ inakomyslie ] may be literally translated, but also for an emphasis in unsanctioned literature on clinical representations of mental illness and a growing awareness of the state's use of psychiatric hospitalization to suppress dissenting or nonconformist views. Case studies of four writers reveal that the actual or perceived risk of hospitalization did not rule out exploration of madness in work and life; in fact, it made confronting the interaction of psychiatric and literary ideas of insanity more relevant than ever. Aleksandr Vol'pin, a mathematician, poet and human rights activist who was repeatedly hospitalized, cultivated a logic-based system of thought that psychiatrists characterized as evidence of mental illness. The prose writer and critic Andrei Siniayskii populated his works with psychiatric imagery and depicted Socialist Realism as a psychologically manipulative doctrine only to have a kind of diagnostic rhetoric leveled at him during his 1966 trial. Venedikt Erofeev made the "mask" of madness central to his work and authorial persona, yet having confronted psychiatric hospitalization in the 1970s and 1980s, he came to view the simulation of insanity as a morally ambiguous artistic device. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who was hospitalized twice in the 1960s, equated madness with a thrilling yet terrifying state of heightened creative consciousness; it was only in exile that he came to terms with what he saw as the pathological implications of that condition. Rather than bypass the overlap between psychiatric and literary conceptions of insanity, these four writers made probing that overlap part of their work and self-presentation. Their awareness of psychiatry mirrored psychiatrists' awareness of literature, suggesting that madness is defined at the intersection of cultural, political and scientific discourses.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/01, Jul 2011. Proquest Document ID: 816163870.
Book
Rebecca Reich;
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State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin
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‘Noisy, restless and incoherent’: puerperal insanity at Dundee Lunatic Asylum
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The ambivalent role of the institution in the history of child and adolescent psychiatry: a case study of the Hawthorn Centre in Michigan, USA
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Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry
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L’archivio di Franco e Franca Basaglia
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Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, 1750–1950s
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Schmiedebach, Heinz-Peter;
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Alle origini della psichiatria moderna. La figura e l’eredità di Carlo Lorenzo Cazzullo
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Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine
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Mueller, Thomas;
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Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective, c. 1800--2000
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Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908--1968
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Adams, J S;
(cited 2010)
“Challenge and Change in a Cinderella Service”: A History of Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridgeshire, 1953--1995
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Wheatley, Thelma;
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“And Neither Have I Wings to Fly”: Labelled and Locked up in Canada's Oldest Institution
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Summers, Martin;
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“Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted With Insanity”: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective
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Voci dalle cartelle. Alcune linee di ricerca dall’archivio storico del manicomio Sant’Antonio abate di Teramo
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Family Influence and Psychiatric Care: Physical Treatments in Devon Mental Hospitals, c. 1920 to the 1970s
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Australian Asylums and Their Histories: Introduction
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