Review of Death, society, and human experience.

This article explores what the work of Sigmund Freud has to offer those searching for a more spiritual and philosophical exploration of the human experience. At the early stages of my psychotherapy training, I shared with many peers an aversion to Freud’s work, driven by a perception of a mechanistic, clinical approach to the human psyche and of a persistent psychosexual focus. This article traces my own attempt to grapple with his work and to push through this resistance. Bettelheim’s (1991) treatise that Freud was searching for man’s soul provides a more sympathetic lens through which to explore Freud’s writing, one which enabled me to discover a rich depth which had not previously been obscured. This article is an account of my journey to a new appreciation of Freud’s work. It identifies a number of challenges to Bettelheim’s argument, whilst also indicating how his revised translation allowed a new understanding of the relevance of Freud’s work to the modern reader. This account may be of interest to those exploring classical psychotherapeutic literature as well as those guiding them through that process.

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Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/mod.2018.0227 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 496-517

Author(s):

Ned Hercock

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽

Discrete Series ◽

Human Experience ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽

Marcel Duchamp ◽

The World ◽

Production History ◽

History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

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Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology

Somatechnics ◽

10.3366/soma.2019.0285 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (2-3) ◽

pp. 291-309

Author(s):

Francis Russell

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Mental Illness ◽

Social Justice ◽

Cultural Theory ◽

Human Experience ◽

Mental Illnesses ◽

False Consciousness ◽

The Subject ◽

Biological Ontology ◽

Health Discourse

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

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