Sunday, January 29, 2012

Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement


The Traumatic Remainder—Trauma as an Impediment to the Political Event



Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:31:31 -0500
Subject: Advice!
From: Christopher C___@___
To: Vincenzo Di Nicola@___

Hi Vincenzo,

How are you? It’s been a little while, eh? What have you been up to?

I write to you with a request for advice, but also from intellectual curiosity. I’ll cut to the chase: I have gotten fairly involved with Occupy Wall Street, which has been a fascinating and transformative experience. It has given me incredible food for thought, as they say. One of the most interesting aspects of the movement has been its insistence on working groups for carrying out projects. Needless to say, gathering so many passionate people into small groups (and sometimes large groups) has led to much conflict and interpersonal frustration. To be fair, it has also led to incredibly productive and reflective conversations, initiatives, dynamics, etc.

The question of group dynamics has come into center stage in the movement, in many ways. While managing a crisis situation within one of my groups, I thought of you. I suppose I actually have two requests related to all of this:

1) Would you be able to recommend a reading list for getting familiar with the field of group dynamics? So far I have read Freud’s Group Analysis and Bion’s Experience in Groups. Any and all suggestions are most welcome, from the most clinical to the most theoretical or philosophical.

2) Would you be able to recommend someone in New York who is in the field of group therapy, family therapy or in other ways working with groups or studying group dynamics? Ideally, they would be left/progressive and sympathetic to the movement. And, further ideally, they would be willing to “donate” their time to the movement   :)

Thanks for taking the time. I send you kind and warm wishes, remembering my EGS days fondly!

Ciao!

Chris




From: Vincenzo Di Nicola@___
To: Christopher C___@___
Matthew Giobbi@___
Subject: RE: Advice!
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:04:33 -0500

Dear Chris,
I am delighted to receive your message.

You are obviously well, as the old joke goes about two behaviourists meeting on the street. After reading my letter, please let me know how I’m doing.

Anything I can do to support and vicariously participate in the movement is very welcome. I visited our local movement while they occupied a small park in downtown Montreal. To the best of my knowledge, only one Canadian city still has an active movement occupying a city park – St. John’s, Newfoundland. After many promises from the Mayor of Montreal not to interfere with the movement here, Tremblay did a volte-face, an “about face” (aversio in Latin) in late fall and suddenly by-laws about safety and concerns for health led to the eviction of the movement from Victoria Square in the heart of the financial district of Montreal. Exploring the roots of these words in different languages, we perceive that his “turn” certainly led to adversity for the movement here. While it is true that we have harsh winters here (today, it’s almost thirty degrees below zero, centigrade), we are a hardy people. My conversations with movement members in the park revealed that they knew what they needed to withstand the cold and snow and were well prepared. In any case, there are countless homeless people in Montreal (the French terms are instructive—either itinérants, suggesting “wanderers,” or sans abris, “without shelter”) who do not receive so much official attention.

I am spending the next six months writing my doctoral dissertation, “Trauma and Event,” which knits together three key thinkers – Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault. Both Agamben and Badiou have been very generous with their time and I am fortunate to have Thomas Zummer, our mutual friend and professor at EGS on Foucault, as an interlocutor. In an early e-mail to him, I unwittingly rechristened him, Michael Zummer, which he took with his usual good humour; we agreed that I had a telling lapsus in fusing Michel (Foucault/Thomas) Zummer. In any case, Thomas would undoubtedly be a great source of support and understanding if you contact him and has the advantage of being based in Brooklyn, despite his teaching commitments abroad.
Your question intrigues me enormously and is at the heart of my concerns about revolutionary change. I had a lively exchange with Drucilla Cornell in London at the Birkbeck College Critical Theory School last year. It comes down to this: even after all the conditions for revolutionary change are met (Cornell was referring to Étienne Balibar’s three conditions in her seminar on constituting a revolutionary government), I argued there would still be impediments to the Event (in Badiou’s terms, meaning new possibilities) because of the interpersonal and intergenerational transmission of trauma. My doctoral dissertation, “Trauma and Event,” examines how rupture, a precondition for any kind of change, may lead either to trauma (the foreclosing of possibilities) or to the Event (the opening of them). Rupture, which occurs in an evental site in Badiou’s terms—although this doesn’t cover the situations where rupture gives rise to pseudo-events (which he calls simulacra)may also lead to trauma. That is why in my work, I have called the evental site a “predicament” which has roots in Aristotle’s work on categories.

In your context, this means that the remainder of the traumatic past (the ongoing cultural hegemony of capitalism, in Gramsci’s terms) may cast a shadow on the movement’s activities, foreclosing the event (which is both in principle and practice impossible to predict). This thesis also predicts that these impediments include rivalries and struggles for control arising out of a passion to guide the movement. Badiou says that naming the Event and fidelity to it are what maintains the truth of the Event and creates the subject in a way that is reciprocally constitutive. Your transformative experience with the Occupy movement seems to corroborate his notion that fidelity maintains the Event and creates its subjects. Nonetheless, the traumatic remainder sneaks through in the form of group conflicts. Speaking only for my worries (and not my hopes), this is what concerns me—trauma as an impediment to the political Event.
For my doctoral research, I have been revisiting Sartre’s thoughts on violence and came across this quote from the French revue, Le Magazine Littéraire: 1
 
On se revolte par haine, on devient révolutionnaire par raison. Les deux en même temps. 
—Jean-Paul Sartre

We rebel out of hate, we become revolutionary through reason. Both at once.                          
—Jean-Paul Sartre (my translation)

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Chris, tell me more about how the frustrations and conflicts arose.
I hesitate over the last sentence. Are these the best words? Sartre suggests that we rebel out of hate and militate for rational change simultaneously (which is close to Freud’s thinking, by the way). As Sartre would argue, isn’t conflict inevitable, even necessary for a dialectical exchange? In this take, yes, and it is a question of understanding the critical terms and the rules of contradiction. I agree with Badiou on Mao to this extent: Badiou clarified that Mao understood that all sides of a debate are ideological, it is inherent in the nature of politics and the nature of contradiction. This is against the notion of a scientific Marxism, which asserts its historical truths.
Another take on this is from Richard Rorty, the anti-foundational American philosopher who outlined an edifying philosophy based not on “final vocubalaries” beyond which we cannot negotiate and which oblige us to take a stand but on the notion of a conversation.  To enter a conversation, according to Rorty, is not to assert, affirm or establish a vocabulary but to offer fresh descriptions of our experiences as a way to refresh and re-invigorate our commitment to what we hold dear, as a choice and not as an evident truth. This started with his major work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and was expressed with greater clarity in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I was moved by a statement Rorty made in that work, which I quote from memory:
Solidarity has to be constructed, not found already waiting

For now, I would suggest a close reading of Badiou’s Second Manifesto for Philosophy which is for me a manual for real and ongoing change. What it may lack for you in terms of specific proposals is more than compensated by the startling clarity and coherence of his program. Again, this from memory:
Philosophy is either reckless or it is nothing (Badiou’s emphasis)
and more to the point:
An event is a perturbation of the world’s order

The work of René Girard on mimetic desire—the scapegoat theory and the origins of violence—is also extremely relevant and useful. You don’t have to accept his Christian orientation to see the importance of imitation (of an originary trauma, in my reading) for group behaviour and how trauma can distort even the best intentions into violent eruptions. I am tracing two ideas that I see as important in understanding this: pharmakon (a bivalent term referring to the philter as both a poison and a remedy) and skandalon (another bivalent term meaning both stumbling block and foundation stone). Jacques Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Phaedrus in “Plato’s Pharmacy” inspired René Girard to investigate the pharmakon and led to his penetrating analysis of the skandalon leading to his elaboration of the scapegoat mechanism as a foundational mechanism in human cultures.
Let us not forget the bitter irony of Socrates’ use of the word pharmakos—when public opinion turned against him and he was put on trial, he chose the hemlock over exile. This is what I call coherence (from a systems theory perspective), this is what Badiou means by fidelity, and this is the price of what Wolfgang Schirmacher calls bold thought. We are faced in the stories of our Italian forefathers with Giordano Bruno versus Galileo. One was faithful and was burnt; the other recanted and was saved. Yet we hear Galileo’s regretful sotto voce murmur still—Eppur si muove. And yet, it moves. And yet, and yet …
I will put out the call for a progressive person who is experienced with groups to assist in your movement in New York. Do you know Matthew Giobbi who did his doctorate at EGS? He is closer to you and is exceptionally well informed about psychology, committed to change and a trustworthy leader. He is writing his book on Erich Fromm who tried—as you are trying to do—to make a synthesis of psychology and politics, so I know he is thinking about these issues very attentively. I am taking the liberty of copying our exchange to him.
I cannot imagine two more sincere and knowledgeable scholars than Thomas and Matthew to join you in building the solidarity your movement needs within in order to reach out to the rest of us. Through my deep knowledge of both of them, I can attest to the fact that they are among the least likely to transmit trauma or be a scandal for your movement.

A final thought. The slogan of your movement is an inspired one:
The one percent and the rest of us, the ninety-nine percent.
And what about the role of the intellectuals, critical thinkers and those faithful subjects, as Badiou calls you, who are open to all that is new with enthusiasm, willing to wager everything on transformative change and to be faithful to it? Are you the positive mirror image of the one percent? The faithful vanguard leading the others looking for change?

With warmest best wishes,

Vincenzo

PS Footnote:

1 Le Magazine Littéraire, avril 2011, no. 507, p. 44. The book reviewed is the French version of John Gerussi’s conversations with Sartre: Entretiens avec Sartre, John Gerassi trad. de l’anglais par Adrienne Boutang et Baptiste Touveray. Éd. Grasset. 2011. English original: Gerassi, John, ed. Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates. Ed and trans by John Gerassi. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2009.




Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:34:56 -0500
Subject: Advice!
From: Christopher C___@___
To: Vincenzo Di Nicola@___

Vincenzo,

Of course not! Go ahead and post my letter!

I would write more but I'm frickin’ exhausted from two days of non-stop meetings. Will write soon.

Be well, or you know, just ... be,

—C

Monday, January 23, 2012

Excursus: The History of Psychiatry is Not the History of Madness


 
What difference does it make—for theory, for research, for policy, and for societal ethics—to change the border between a social and a health problem? The moral, the political, and the medical are culturally interrelated, but how do we best interpret that relationship and its implications?
—Arthur Kleinman (1995, p. 16)


Having trained at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, The Bethlem Royal Hospital in London (founded in 1247), associated with the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley Hospital (founded in 1948) of the University of London, and at two prestigious North American psychiatric hospitals—the Allan Memorial Institute (founded in 1940) associated with McGill University in Montreal, and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts (founded in 1811), associated with Harvard University, I have developed something of a perspective on psychiatric history. Several of my papers and books touch on aspects of psychiatric history (family therapy, Di Nicola, 1985a, 1985b, 1997, 2011; social psychiatry, Di Nicola, in press) or the history of psychiatric phenomena (anorexia nervosa and culture-bound syndromes, Di Nicola, 1990a, 1990b, 1992; posttraumatic stress disorder, Di Nicola, 1996).


Di Nicola, VF. Family therapy and transcultural psychiatry: an emerging synthesis. Part I: the conceptual basis. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1985a;27(2):81-113.

Di Nicola, VF. Family therapy and transcultural psychiatry: an emerging synthesis. Part II: portability and culture change. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1985b;27(3):151-180.

Di Nicola, VF. Anorexia multiforme: self-starvation in historical and cultural context. Part I: self-starvation as a historical chameleon. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1990a;27(3):165-196.

Di Nicola, VF. Anorexia multiforme: self-starvation in historical and cultural context. Part II: anorexia nervosa as a culture-reactive syndrome. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1990b;27(4):245-286.

Di Nicola, VF. De l’enfant sauvage à l’enfant fou: a prospectus for transcultural child psychiatry. In: Grizenko N, Sayegh L, Migneault P, eds. Transcultural Issues in Child Psychiatry. Montreal, QC: Éditions Douglas; 1992:7-53.

Di Nicola, VF. Ethnocultural aspects of PTSD and related disorders among children and adolescents. In: Marsella AJ, Friedman MJ, Gerrity ET, et al, eds. Ethnocultural Aspects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Issues, Research, and Clinical Applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 1996:389-414.

Di Nicola, VF. A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. New York, NY and London, UK: W.W. Norton; 1997.

Di Nicola, V. Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York, NY, and Dresden, Germany; 2011:149-162.

Di Nicola, V. Family, psychosocial, and cultural determinants of health. In: Sorel, Eliot, ed., 21st Century Global Mental Health. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning; in press.

Kleinman, A. Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1995.


History of Psychiatry

Tom Burns. Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Diego De Caro. 1997. La Psichiatria Attraverso I Secoli. Napoli: Casa Editrice Idelson.

Edward Shorter. 1997. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Jurandir Freire Costa. 2007. Historia da Psiquiatria no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond.

Michael H. Stone. 1997. Healing the Mind: A History of Psychiatry from Antiquity to the Present. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Edwin R. Wallace IV, John Gach, eds. History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology. New York: Springer, 2008.

Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick. 1966. The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present. Introduction by Jules H. Masserman. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

The subtitle makes my argument quite clear: the history of psychiatry is not the history of madness or even of a professionally defined psychiatric disease but rather of “psychiatric thought and practice.”
           
A scholarly journal, History of Psychiatry, is published in collaboration with the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Then there are more specialized histories:

Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Eliot S. Valenstein. 1986. Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Michael Shepherd, ed. Psychiatrists on Psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Robin M. Murray and Trevor H. Tanner, eds. Lectures on the History of Psychiatry. London, UK: Gaskell/Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1990.

Three volumes are of historical interest in that they document the history of “anti-psychiatry” and a mainstream academic psychiatrist’s rebuttal:

Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill, eds. Laing and Anti-Psychiatry. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972.

David Ingleby, ed., Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981.

Antony Clare. Psychiatry in Dissent: Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice. Foreword by Michael Shepherd. London: Tavistock Publicationsm, 1976.


History of Madness

The texts dealing with the history of psychiatry are quite different than these below, which attempt to outline a history of madness, such as Roy Porter’s anthology, The Faber Book of Madness (1991).

Dale A. Peterson. 1977. The Literature of Madness: Autobiographical Writings by Mad People and Mental Patients in England and America from 1436-1975. Stanford University PhD.

Dale A. Peterson, ed. 1982. A Mad People’s History of Madness. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Roy Porter. 1987. A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Roy Porter, et al., eds. The Anatomy of Madness. 3 vols.

Andrew T. Scull. 1979. Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England. London, UK: Allen Lane.

Andrew Scull, ed. 1981. Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.


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None of the foregoing texts in this section on the history of madness, however, approaches the scope and reach of Foucault’s investigations into the discourse of madness.

Two of Foucault's original French texts have been elaborated in English editions:

1.     Maladie mentale et personnalité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.
Maladie mentale et psychologie. Revised edition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.

English editions:
Mental Illness and Psychology. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976.

Madness: The Invention of an Idea. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2011. Reprinted with a new title.

2.     Folie et Déraison/Histoire de la Folie

First published in French as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la
folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Librarie Plon, 1961.
A new French edition with a new preface by Foucault, along with appendices appeared as Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972.

English editions:
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965; New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Abridged version of Histoire de la Folie.

History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. This edition is a translation of: Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique (1972) with a Foreword by Ian Hacking, an Introduction by Jean Khalfa, the Prefaces to the 1961 and 1972 editions, as well as several scholarly appendices by Foucault:
“Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” and “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972); 
“Reply to Derrida” from Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits Vol II (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994)


Until recently, no one has actually tried to allow “madness” itself to speak, although Foucault approached this task by allowing texts to speak the discourse of madness. Foucault did give voice to the historical narrative of a murderer, adopting the first person in his title: “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother”: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (1982). In Foucault’s footsteps, Dale Peterson edited A Mad People’s History of Madness (1982) and Roy Porter wrote A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane (1987). In that work, Porter states that:

what the mad say is illuminating because it presents a world through the looking-glass, or indeed holds up the mirror to the logic (and psycho-logic) of sane society. It focuses and puts to the test the nature and limits of the rationality, humanity and “understanding” of the normal. In that sense, the late French philosopher Michel Foucault was quite right to insist that the history of unreason must be coterminous with the history of reason. They are doubles. (Porter, 1987, p. 3)


With much appreciation for the tasks that Foucault and Porter set for themselves, I do not see history this way, much less “madness and civilization,” “reason and unreason,” or psychiatry as a profession or as a subject. As a social and cultural psychiatrist, I hold with Ivan Illich’s view (clearly informed by the anthropology of Clifford Geertz):

Man, unmodified by a particular place and companionship, simply does not exist. He has never existed in this skinned condition, nor could he, by the very nature of the case, ever survive in this way. (Illich, 1975, p. 87)

All of these terms may be usefully scrutinized using Giorgio Agamben’s (2009) method of philosophical archaeology, which owes much to both Foucault and Freud. While there are many outstanding historians of psychiatry who produce fine texts, there are few historians of madness, much less interrogations of the notion of madness as such, as is revealed in the debate between Derrida and Foucault. Foucault’s critical argument is that philosophy does not and cannot take “the event of madness” seriously, which is why he treats philosophy with disregard (“my casual indifference towards philosophy,” Foucault, 2006, p. 578). I believe that psychiatrists do take “the event of madness” seriously but Foucault was no doubt sceptical about this claim and the capacity of the profession or historians of psychiatry to capture that event or discourse. Ironically, no one has influenced the contemporary imagination of madness or its history, notably among academic psychiatrists, more than he did. Oxford social psychiatrist Tom Burns’ (2006) very short introduction to psychiatry is reasoned, balanced and recognizes this. A counter  irony is that of all the texts cited here, my fellow Canadian, Ned Shorter, who is not a psychiatrist, adopts the most positivistic, evidence-based orientation to the history of psychiatry and is most critical and dismissive of both Foucault and Laing.

My main thesis here can be stated succinctly:

The history of psychiatry is not the history of madness.

I do not believe this has been said in quite this way and quite so clearly. Historians and other scholars have carped about Foucault’s failings as a historian or scholar in his twinned history of madness and reason. Historians of psychiatry seem to consciously or unknowingly conflate the history of a profession or of the historical and cultural evolution of our understanding of madness with madness itself and its permutations over time and across cultures. Even to try to tell the “coterminous,” two-faced, twinned or mirrored history of reason and madness is not the same as the histories of these two rather separate domains. The history of unreason, as Foucault and Porter would have it, and the history of understanding and treating this unreason are not two sides of a coin, mirror images, twinned, Janus-faced “doubles” or anything of the sort. At most, the history of psychiatry reflects aspects of the age of reason, as Foucault calls its, coming to terms with madness, but this is neither the history of madness nor a history of reason.

As I will argue in another work with the working title, “Psychiatry Against Itself,” my profession is in a state of constant turmoil, inventing or redescribing traditions, where Spinoza becomes “the first modern psychologist” (I’m guilty of that), grounding itself in this or that, as Kant tried to do for philosophy, and always ready to suture itself to its methodologies or theories. Very few have the courage to resist this suturing which they confuse with a grounding. When I first met R.D. Laing in 1976, he said, “I am not an anti-psychiatrist, I am an orthodox psychiatrist.” He gave the example of an archer aiming for the mark as an image of orthodox (Latin orthodoxus, from Greek, orthodoxos, from orthos, “straight, true, correct” and doxa, “opinion”) psychiatry. This left a strong impression upon me. Laing appealed to an audience of searchers, not rebels. He did not mean to end or even radically change psychiatry but to return it to its origins in order to understand the “knots” that humans are capable of getting themselves into (cf. Laing, Knots, 1970). His early work, The Divided Self (1960), was a brilliant and accessible distillation of the mainstream psychoanalytic thought at that time. There was nothing remotely heretical, radical or anti-psychiatric in this volume. He expressed ideas every bit as dense and complex as Lacan with several notable differences: Laing made selected clinical cases available as evidence of his approach, there was a coherence between the theory and the practice, and he wrote well.

Note: Anyone who retorts that opacity is a hallmark of French writing need only read Foucault and Badiou to be refuted. Unlike Lacan, any number of French thinkers write lucidly and compellingly, from Marie Cardinal to Foucault and Badiou, not forgetting Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus and Jean-Luc Nancy. On the other hand, a handful of British psychoanalysts of Laing’s era were particularly articulate and accessible—Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby; all of them Laing’s teachers at the Tavistock Institute. (Note that Melanie Klein—whose basic ideas are very close to Lacan’s—is decidedly not in this list.)

Psychiatry, as a profession, bathes in the Heraclitan flux where all is change (and nothing changes). That, in my understanding, is the real history of psychiatry. It has almost nothing to do with madness and is not in itself a chapter of reason, although it does reflect a great deal about the sociology of knowledge in Karl Mannheim’s sense.

In a forthcoming chapter on family, cultural and psychosocial determinants of health for a textbook on social psychiatry for students of public health (Di Nicola, in press), I offer a historical overview of how expressions of human distress are shaped by historical and sociocultural factors:


Madness always models itself in the image of the very civilization it 
perverts.
—Cesare Lombroso (1927/1856, p. 67, my translation)  

Each era has emblematic expressions of human distress. In a prescient essay in 1856 on the reciprocal influences of madness and civilization, psychiatrist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1927/1856) had the germ of an idea that was taken up a century later by Michel Foucault (1973) in Madness and Civilization, elaborated in transcultural psychiatry with the notion of culture-bound syndromes (CBSs, see Di Nicola, 1990a, 1990b), and refined by Ian Hacking (1995, 1999), a philosopher of science with his notion of “looping effects.” (Adapted from the original)



Agamben, Giorgio. Philosophical archaeology. In: The Signature of All Things: On Method (trans. by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell). New York: Zone Books;2009:81-111, 119-121 (Original published in Italian in 2008)

Di Nicola Vincenzo F. Anorexia multiforme: self-starvation in historical and cultural context. Part I: self-starvation as a historical chameleon. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1990;27(3):165-196.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo F. Anorexia multiforme: self-starvation in historical and cultural context. Part II: anorexia nervosa as a culture-reactive syndrome. Transcultural Psychiat Res Rev. 1990;27(4):245-286.

Di Nicola, V. Family, psychosocial, and cultural determinants of health. In: Sorel, Eliot, ed., 21st Century Global Mental Health. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning; in press.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Howard R, trans. New York, NY: Vintage Books; 1973.

Hacking, Ian. The looping effect of human kinds. In: Sperber D, Premack D, Premack AJ, eds. Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; 1995:351-383.

Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1999.

Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. London: Calder & Boyars; 1975.

Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. London: Tavistock Publications; 1960.

Laing, R.D. Knots. London: Tavistock Publications; 1970.

Lombroso, Cesare. Influenza della civiltà nella pazzia e della pazzia nella civiltà. In: Lombroso G., ed. Psicologia e Natura. Studi Medico-Psicologico-Naturalistici. Torino: Fratelli Bocca, Editori; 1927:52-67. (Original essay published in 1856)

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