Annotation on Philosophical Dictionaries

Note: I am reviewing a number of philosophical dictionaries and trying to put them into some kind of order. Here is one way to sort out the dictionaries I have used with some thoughts about two that I have consulted over the years, sometimes with delight, more often with consternation. 

Analytic Philosophy

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Second Edition) edited by Robert Audi (1999)

A Dictionary of Philosophy (Revised Second Edition) by Antony Flew (1979)

Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind by Pete Mandik (2010)

Continental Philosophy

Keywords by Raymond Williams (1983)

Dictionary of Critical Theory by David Macey (2001)

Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisables edited by Barbara Cassin (2004) *

* This is the most scholary and edifying of the dictionaries I have in my possession. See review: Howard Caygill. From Abstraction to Wunsch: The Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies. Radical Philosophy, 138 (July-August 2006): 10-14.

Particular Philosophers in the Continental Tradition

Dictionnaire Sartre edited by François Noudelmann and Gilles Philippe (2004)

Le Vocabulaire de Sartre by Philippe Cabestan and Arnaud Tomes (2001)

A Derrida Dictionary by Niall Lucy (2004)

The Derrida Dictionary by Simon Morgan Wortham (2010)

The Agamben Dictionary edited by Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte (2011)

“Glossary of Zizekian Terms” in Zizek: A Critical Introduction by Sarah Kay (2003)

Alain Badiou provides his own scholarly definitions in his two-volume magnus opus:

Being and Event (2005) has a substantial “Dictionary”

Logics of Worlds (2009) has a “Dictionary of Concepts”

Special Studies

Plastic Words by Uwe Poerksen (1995)

Annotation and Its Texts edited by Stephen A. Barney (1991)

Philosophical Dictionaries in the Analytic/Scientific Tradition

Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology by PB Medawar and JS Medawar (1983)

Philosophical Dictionary (Enlarged Edition) by Mario Bunge (2003)

There are certain kinds of scientists who believe that their achievements in their domains authorize their pontifications in others. I can formulate a general rule for this in the biological and social sciences: the greater the scientific stance, the more the insistence on correctly understanding and resolving philosophical problems. In psychology, for example, phenomenological and humanistic psychology are not presented as scientific and do not pretend to resolve philosophical problems. Rather, they address philosophical problems or pose new ones. The texts of physiological psychology, behaviorism and later cognitive psychology are filled with pronouncements on the history of science with a similar, well-rehearsed narrative: that the evolution of science is from superstition to philosophy to pseudoscience to scientific psychology. The emblem and avatar of this approach is in Steven Kosslyn’s statement that cognitive psychology had the means to resolve questions that have been “hopelessly metaphysical.” The difference becomes clear by adapting Alain Badiou’s notion of philosophy and its conditions. In this view, philosophy has allowed itself to be “sutured” or subordinated to its four conditions (politics, science, love, art). So the question becomes does psychology (or some other supposed science, from biology to physics) “suture” or subordinate philosophy or does philosophy remain autonomous as “the queen of the sciences”?  

Peter Medawar was a brilliant biologist who made signal contributions to biological research and medicine for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The dictionary he wrote with his partner, JS Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (1983) which the dust jacket advertises as “in the spirit of Voltaire,” demonstrates the extent to which even accomplished researchers endorse an ideology. In Medawar’s case, he cannot plead ignorance as he was a known polymath, and his dictionary is a canny combination of scientific reasoning at its best along with selective readings of the history of science, philosophy and other areas. What this dictionary does, like all such works, from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary to Diderot’s encyclopaedia, is to propound an ideology. Medawar’s animus against psychology and psychoanalysis in particular, the social sciences in general, and philosophy and theology more broadly, are evident throughout.

The same spirit is evident in Mario Bunge’s Philosophical Dictionary (Enlarged Edition, 2003). Unlike Medawar’s dictionary which mentions Voltaire in his Preface, Bunge appropriates Voltaire’s title and style without so much as a nod. Bunge, whose first training was in physics and mathematics, demonstrates the extent of Badiou’s contention that philosophy has become sutured to its “conditions”—in the case of the Medawar and Bunge dictionary, to science. His brief Foreword offers, nonetheless, the kind of self-referential prose that wooden satire engenders.

Medawar’s mini-essay gems on “Eugenics” and “Form and Mathematics” are offset by fluff pieces on “Missing Links” and “Illness.” On the latter, his thinking is mundane and neither critical nor inspiring. In between are open-minded reappraisals of such notions as “Atavism” and “Behaviorism” and his essay on “Aristotle.” It is undoubtedly useful to have a working scientist read Aristotle and appraise how biologists understand him in our day. Against all expectation that a Nobelist in Medicine would have something of value to say, his essay on “Biology in Medical Education” is typical of his style of citing some arcane sources, hinting at what he considers common knowledge (although I trained in England, I have no idea of the traditions he is referring to) and concluding through an oblique process with a very specific biological example, the relevance of which lesser mortals are to divine.

An antidote to such pretensions is to be found in Karl Jaspers’ reviews of Einstein’s philosophical speculations. However brilliant Einstein was in physics and however much it may interest us to know what and how he thought about other subjects, I endorse Jaspers’ conclusions that no serious philosophy awaits us there.

Conclusion: These two scientists with philosophical inclinations (one the winner of a real Nobel Prize and the other the winner of what he described to me as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in philosophy) demonstrate how science has attempted to suture philosophy into its discourse. In throwing their nets far and wide, both of them indicate that the contemporary attitude of scientists is that they can put the entire house of knowledge in order, from Greek philosophy to Marxism and from psychoanalysis to sociology.

Second Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement

Every Movement Creates its Own Psychology, Every Revolution Remakes Reality

From: Vincenzo Di Nicola@___
To: Christopher C___@___
Subject: Second Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 23:05:29 -0500

Dear Chris,

Hope you got some rest and are ready for some reading!

To respond to your request for “a reading list for getting familiar with the field of group dynamics,” I looked over my bookshelves and want to offer you three things:

(1) A highly personal, even idiosyncratic, list of recommended reading, annotated with comments about the contexts and impacts of these works

(2) Some background about two key thinkers to put this list in perspective—

Sigmund Freud and Antonio Gramsci

(3) Why the best thing to do (except for scholarly purposes, occasional inspiration and theory) may be to forget what is in these texts.

(1) Recommended Reading

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922 in German)

Besides his speculative anthropology which has been thoroughly discredited, this is the least successful or convincing of Freud’s books. He simply revisits the prejudices of his time about groups (Le Bon, McDougall, Trotter) and offers no new insights. All the successful works on groups do not use Freud as their starting point. Freud’s starting point is the individual. I am of the opinion that we should start with the group and go to the individual rather than extrapolate from the individual to imagine the group. In Freud’s approach the individual is always compromised by the demands of civilization, as he called it (we call it culture today). Adorno revisited this essay in 1951, arguing that Freud “clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories.” I call these “talking dog interpretations”—everybody thinks their dog talks but no one else can understand the animal. Freud not only did not foresee fascism but had to be dragged kicking and screaming from Vienna in 1938 to save his life, ransomed for one million pounds sterling by Marie Bonaparte—truly a king’s ransom at the time. So much for Freud’s insight into groups.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960 in German)

Nobelist Canetti wrote only one novel, translated as Auto-da-Fé (from the German Die Blendung—“The Blinding”) about a solitary scholar who turns on his own work and sets fire to his library. Canetti returns to this theme in his magnum opus, Masse und Macht/Crowds and Power, of crowds and the burning of books. Literary reviewers held this book as the summa of social psychology in the 20^th century but this theme is better dealt with in Badiou’s The Century and no conclusions can be drawn about crowds from totalitarian societies.

I put this book in the group of texts that have a negative view of groups, of crowds, and of relationships. In chapter 4 of my book, Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos, 2011), I examine the psychological and psychotherapeutic literature for what I see as predominantly negative views of relationship and also offer more positive ones. Against the socialist notion of solidarity, the individual is imagined as a monad, an atomized self, a singularity, not a multiplicity (as Badiou does).

Books from 20^th century Europe about crowds, movements, “social forces” were written in the light of the struggle for “the new man” which started in Mussolini’s Italy and caught fire in movements as diverse as Marinetti’s Futurism to the Soviet Union’s new vision of psychology to Nazi Germany. I read any text about group psychology in its social and political context. The generation that taught me was as much informed by Richard Crossman’s edited anthology, The God That Failed, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon criticizing communism’s failure and excesses as by Benjamin, Marcuse, Arendt or Adorno warning about the excesses of capitalism.

I’ve always thought that Crowds and Power was an unfinished book; meandering, shapeless, almost atheoretical. When I read Benjamin’s Arcades Project, I connected the two works with Fernando Pessoa’s interminable project, The Book of Disquiet. All three books are by lonely men, toiling away in solitude, obsessively moving around, tasting everything new but with a kind of reactive nostalgia. Benjamin was himself a kind of intellectual flâneur, sniffing here and there, turning up brilliant insights in odd corners of the city of the mind, before moving on to another site. All three works lack what Lacan called le point de capiton—something that anchors or gives structure—“grounds” in the philosophical sense—the inner logic of the work. Wolfgang Kohler would have called this organizing principle a Gestalt.

Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy (2009 in French)

Simply a lucid and compelling outline of the implications of Truth and Event for the subject faithful to them. His typology of “subjectizable bodies”—the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject—may be interesting to examine in terms of how people respond to the challenges of Occupy, within and without. You may want to read this beside his most accessible book, The Century, where he offers a philosophical overview of the main conflict of the 20^th century, the struggle for “the new man.”

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (1990 in Italian)

This lovely book written by Agamben, whom Badiou calls the “Franciscan of ontology,” was a response to a crucial moment in the European imagination after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a new European community. A response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s La Communauté désouevrée (The Inoperative Community) and Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community) which are about belonging, Agamben’s book takes a U-turn and disavows the notions of belonging, identity and representation. Agamben offers the notion of “whatever singularity” which has no identity and “severs any obligation to belonging” (Carlo Salzani in The Agamben Dictionary, 2011). If the Occupy movement is going to elaborate a notion of community, this book is essential reading to help us re-imagine community with an alternative to the polarity “universal-particular” by proposing the “example.”

           

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933 in German)

This is another example of the paranoid view of crowds and masses as given to reactionary politics. Reich argues that, “Fascism is only the organized political expression of the structure of the average man’s character. It is the basic emotional civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life.” Badiou casts this—the reactive subject—as only one of three types of subjects, the others being the faithful subject and the obscure subject. Reich’s approach reaches its apotheosis in American political science with Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). I don’t say they lack insight or incisiveness, I do say that it is one school of thought about mass movements. If we accept it, we will always be suspicious of movements from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street.

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973 in English)

Best read as part of a trio I am recommending: Canetti’s Crowds and Power and Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, yet Fromm’s book is by far the most cogent of the three. If my own notions of the “traumatic remainder” which perpetuate trauma and foreclose the Event have an inspiration, it was clearly in this book which I read as a young man in my Fromm-Marcuse-Adorno phase of trying to marry Marxism with psychoanalysis. To repeat, you must be really aware of the context and what Fromm was responding to at the time.  

Jacob Moreno, The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity (2008 in English)

I have colleagues who run children’s groups using Moreno’s psychodrama which is as rich and supple an instrument for working groups as I’ve seen. This is in marked contrast to the outcome-oriented approaches where one must produce “results” like production quotas at a factory.

René Girard, The Scapegoat (1982 in French)

This is a seminal text to understand Girard’s mimetic theory, perhaps the most lucid and compelling contemporary theory of violence, touching on the relationship between the scapegoat mechanism in history and the structure of myth. His connection to Derrida, notably through the essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is critical and made explicit in the introduction to The Girard Reader (2000). Any mass movement needs to understand the possibilities for violence, let alone violence as a chosen strategy. This book will help your movement focus on the question of violence and our unwitting repetition of myths to create scapegoats. As Freud asks in the quotation below, what will we do when we run out of scapegoats?

Mara Selvini Palazzoli and associates: Paradox and Counterparadox, The Magician Without Magic, The Hidden Games of Orgnanizations (1975, 1976, 1981 in Italian)

In a series of  radical interventions, this Italian psychiatrist and her colleagues in Milan turned from psychoanalysis to family systems theory to write a series of brilliant explorations in relational psychology. Her motto was, “Family therapy is the starting point for the exploration of ever wider social units.” She and her colleagues established the most radical and effective model of family therapy in Paradox and Counterparadox, followed by two books on working with larger systems, from schools to industry. How they saw through institutional games and crafted ways around them is documented with lucidity and panache. The third title is badly translated from the Italian—Sul fronte dell’organizzazione: strategie e tattiche, “At the Front of Organizations: Strategies and Tactics”—which sounds more appropriately like a guerilla manual for psychological warfare. Together, these works are modern iterations of The Art of War for human relations!

Otto Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995 in English)

The dean of American Freudian psychoanalysts offers his view of the aggression that is at the heart of all relationships. At once informed and disturbing yet touchingly compassionate. This is the man who coined the term “malignant narcissism” which describes destructive leaders like Saddam Hussein. Kernberg is a bit like Kant in psychoanalysis—you can try to refute him, but you can’t avoid him!

Finally, there is an entire range of utopian and dystopian texts that are hard to get out of your imagination once they enter it. For someone of my generation, coming into political awareness during the 1960s, it is difficult to put these images out of my mind when we talk about groups, society and change:

·      some you know well: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

·      some deserve to be more well-read: Eugene Zamyatin’s We (plagiarized by Huxley and Vonnegut); others less: Ayn Rand’s Anthem is a glimpse into a really mediocre mind (she is the darling of US libertarians and the Tea Party)

·      some are not well-known but can be paired with more famous works: H.D. Thoreau’s Walden and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two

·      Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as well as their predecessor, Thomas More’s Utopia, are still worth reading to prepare you for the possibilities of what happens when we are trying to imagine new communities

·      Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is fascinating not only for being a fictional  incarnation of Canetti’s book burnings, but for how society is organized without book knowledge and how rebel readers build a new society, which touches on themes about technology and memory as old as Socrates and Giulio Camillo’s “theatre of memory”

·      Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (“nowhere” more or less backwards) is along with Zamyatin’s We among the most intellectually lucid of dystopias. The Erewhonians reversed illness and crime: it was a crime to be ill and criminals were treated with compassion for their unfortunate and totally contingent condition.

(2) On narcissism and being one’s own doctor

I would like to share extended quotes from two authoritative thinkers:

·      Sigmund Freud on the conflicts between the individual’s instinct for aggression as he called it (we hardly have better words for it, in spite of Steven Pinker’s recent cheerful history of violence) and civilization as he called it (we would say culture); and

·      Antonio Gramsci on the similar theme of how the individual is forced into a hypocritical conformity to the demands of society (Marx called it false consciousness, a theme take up by Sartre in his theoretical existential psychoanalysis and clinically by psychiatrist R.D. Laing).

Freud on “the narcissism of minor differences”

This is one of Freud’s political comments from Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 in German) of which much has been made, from descriptions of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the hilarious scenes in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” (1979) where factional fighting among the Judean resistance groups becomes more fractious and passionate than the struggles against the occupying Romans:

The communists believe they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and as well-disposed to his neighbor; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and waited the temptation to ill-treat his neighbor; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor.  If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men.  Since everyone's needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.  I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous.  But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the systems based are an untenable illusion.  In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property.  It reigned almost before property had given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child).  If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike in the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing.  If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow at there.

It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression.  They do not feel comfortable without it.  The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.  I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other -- like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on.  I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”, a name which does not do much to explain it.  We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance, part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.  To the Romans, who had not founded their communal life as a State upon love, religious intolerance was something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the State and the State was permeated by religion.  Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-Semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempts to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois. (Italics added)

Gramsci on “the insulted and injured” and being “one’s own doctor”

Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading political theorists of the 20^th century, was imprisoned by Mussolini. These are from his Lettere del Carcere/Letters from Prison (1965 in Italian, 1973 in English)¹ to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, about his wife Julia living in Moscow and suffering from bouts of psychological illness.

“To be sure,” Gramsci admitted in a letter dated February 15, 1932, “my knowledge  of psychoanalysis is neither vast nor precise … but of the little I have studied I think there are at least a few points on which I can give a definite opinion … The most important point seems to be this: that a psychoanalytic cure can be helpful only to those elements in society which romantic literature used to call the ‘insulted and injured’ … those individuals who are caught up between the iron contrasts of modern life … people in short who fail to overcome warring contrasts of this nature and are incapable of arriving at a new moral serenityamd tranquillity; i.e., an equilibrium between the impulse of the will and the ends which the individual can reach. The situation becomes dramatic at certain definite moments in history and in certain environments: when the environment is superheated to extreme tension, and gigantic collective forces are unleashed which press hard on single individuals… Such situations become disastrous for exceptionally refined and sensitive temperaments … I believe therefore that a person of culture, an active element in society (as Giulia certainly is), is and must be his own best psychoanalyst.”¹

In a later letter dated March 7, 1932, Gramsci expanded his views of the “dialectic of the human psyche” in James Joll’s (1977) descriptive phrase, acknowledging that psychological crises not only affect the insulted and injured but that they arise when the demands made by society with “an individual’s actual tendencies, which are founded on the sedimentation of old habits and old ways of thinking” (italics added).¹ If this tension cannot be resolved – for instance by a sceptical and hypocritical conformity with the demands of society –

“the question can only be resolved in a catastrophic manner, because it gives rise  to morbid outbreaks of repressed passion, which the necessary social ‘hypocrasy’ … has merely numbed and driven deeper into its subconscious.”¹

Joll (1977) sees in this a limited acceptance of Freud’s repression and the unconscious combined with Gramsci’s Hegelian view of an “ideal society” where the laws of the state and the dictates of the individual conscience or will coincide. This is precisely what Freud holds to be improbable – hence the discontents of civilization – and, Freud has the honesty to add, at least in the civilization we have come to know. Nonetheless, Gramsci maintains that

“one can arrive at a certain serenity even in the clash of the most absurd contradictions and under the pressure of the most implacable necessity. But one can only reach it if one succeeds in thinking ‘historically’, dialectically, and identifying one own task with intellectual dispassionateness … In this sense … one can and therefore one must be ‘one’s own doctor’.”¹

Gramsci sees the possibilities of being one’s own doctor as related to a clear understanding of one’s surroundings, including an understanding of the historical situation and the possibilities of action. For Gramsci as for Marx, theory must be yoked to praxis, just as praxis makes the true philosopher. They are organically related, creating what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals.”

What Gramsci calls “the sedimentation of old habits and old ways of thinking” I call in more Freudian/Lacanian terms, the traumatic remainder. Freud argues for the necessity of aggression in our civilization or culture, which is only partly tamed at the price of creating outsiders upon whom that aggression is discharged, whether it be neighbours who are minimally different or scapegoats creating by differences in beliefs, such as Jews. René Girard elaborated this at great length in his analysis of the scapegoat with his mimetic theory. While Gramsci holds for an ideal of the individual adapting to the society, he understood that this required great presence of mind and great clarity of purpose in the face of “collective forces which press hard” on the individual.

¹ Citations from: James Joll. Gramsci. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977.

(3) Every movement creates its own psychology, every revolution remakes reality

A revolution cannot take anything for granted. How to deliver the milk and eggs, how to write the constitution for a revolutionary government, how to understand and respond to suffering, how to deal with questions of order and justice.

Just as you wouldn’t want the old guard to repeat tired old answers to these questions from the economy to justice in a new guise, you wouldn’t want a revolution to start with the same old assumptions about “human nature” as both the nativists in psychology and humanists argue, but rather address the problems of living together in fresh ways that speaks to our current hopes and dilemmas. Every movement creates its own psychology. Especially in the social or human sciences—everything involving our understanding of being and existence, from language acquisition and education to the social sources of suffering—will be rethought and revitalized anew. Every revolution remakes reality. The faithful subject is marked by porosity, an openness and an enthusiasm for what is new and liberating.

Let me suggest an interesting question for Occupy:

If tomorrow you were to be given the task to teach a child about the movement, about your personal transformation, about your hopes and wishes for yourself and for her life, what would you share with her? And how would you do it?

How would you balance sharing your frustrations and what brought you to resist with transmitting your hopes and expectations for today and the day after? Not some mystical time and place—“the coming community” in Giorgio Agamben’s vision—but the community we are building hic et nunc as our ancestors said. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” says the Gospel of Matthew. We’ve had enough of social ills (or however we construe “evil” today), let’s make social good, starting now, and put trauma behind us.

So, if you do consult the books on this list, be sure to maintain a critical stance as to the social, political, ethical context in which they were conceived and expressed. Foucault calls them “discursive formations.” Being aware of that creates what Zizek calls the “parallax view” and makes us more exquisitely aware of context. These texts were put together to solve the predicaments in their worlds. What are ours?

With social hope and growing solidarity,

Vincenzo

Letter to a Young American Friend in the Occupy Movement

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

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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

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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.

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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

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., 21^st 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.

*

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 19^th 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., 21^st 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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