Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A study of schizophrenia and culture in Turkey
Sadeq Rahimi
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 1138235563
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book explores the relationship between subjective experience and the cultural, political and historical paradigms in which the individual is embedded. Providing a deep analysis of three compelling case studies of schizophrenia in Turkey, the book considers the ways in which private experience is shaped by collective structures, offering insights into issues surrounding religion, national and ethnic identity and tensions, modernity and tradition, madness, gender and individuality.
Chapters draw from cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and political theory to produce a model for understanding the inseparability of private experience and collective processes. The book offers those studying political theory a way for conceptualizing the subjective within the political; it offers mental health clinicians and researchers a model for including political and historical realities in their psychological assessments and treatments; and it provides anthropologists with a model for theorizing culture in which psychological experience and political facts become understandable and explainable in terms of, rather than despite each other.
Meaning, Madness, and Political Subjectivity
provides an original interpretative methodology for analysing culture and psychosis, offering compelling evidence that not only "normal" human experiences, but also extremely "abnormal" experiences such as psychosis are anchored in and shaped by local cultural and political realities.
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slightly differing versions (see, e.g., Khairallah, 1980). But some 182 Love, loss, and a language for madness core elements are constant: a young man meets a young woman, falls in love with her, and she proves inaccessible to him. In pain and frustrated, as he loses access to the beloved so does he lose all bounds of reason. Majnun abandons all signs of ‘order,’ within and without: he becomes ‘mad,’ and he quits home, family, and town to become “king of the wilderness,” associated and able to
in time when a synchronic system of language could be constructed. Thus a synchronic system, from the objective point of view, does not correspond to any real moment in the historical process of becoming. And indeed, to the historian of language, with his diachronic point of view, a synchronic system is not a real entity; it merely serves as a conventional scale on which to register the deviations occurring at every real instant in time. (p. 32, original emphasis) But Voloshinov then went further
idea of siblings, recalling remarks about her brother/lover as the entity bringing father and mother together. Notice that Emel applies the East/West dualism to her father and her mother, with her mother standing for the Western/non-Turkish side and her father for the Turkish/Islamic side. Her next association, “it means peace,” is congruent with the earlier mention of a sibling/love object who produces peace/ unity by bringing together opposing sides of a schism, that is, the father and the
Bakırköy thus started, constructed to represent a modern, medical, and liberated perspective on mental illnesses (see, e.g., Bayülkem, 2002, p. 47f). Over the 80 years of its new life, Bakırköy has come to stand for the notion of mental illness across Turkey. I have seen movies in which a character’s mental ruin after a love disaster or a fallout with his or her family is symbolized and summarized in a simple shot of Rodin’s Thinking Man. This is not just any Thinking Man, of course, but a shot
shared with the staff and would be used only for my research. Ahmet was weary of the tape recorder at first and questioned why I had to record the interview. I explained to him that I was interviewing many people, and this was the best way for me to accurately remember the content of all those interviews. “All right, I understand,” he said finally, seeming convinced that I was harmless. He raised the same concern at the beginning of the second interview, though not as seriously, and he ultimately