School of Social and Political Science

Description

Over much of the twentieth century psychiatry was fixated on the words of ‘madness’: what was said or written by those categorised as psychotic, schizophrenic, or allied diagnostic labels. And yet these words have mostly sat under a double erasure: first, psychiatry rendered them meaningless except as evidence of specific mental pathologies; second, as such they were generally isolated from wider cultural circulation. Since the 1940s increasingly successful efforts have been made to recurate the artworks of ‘madness’ under the labels of art brut and ‘outsider art’, yet interest in textual works (other than ‘madness memoirs’ or narratives of cure) has lagged behind. This talk describes a project to anthologise such ‘excluded’ writings, and in particular the challenge to devise an adequate frame for their cultural reception – one that neither designates them as psychiatric artefacts, nor simply assimilates them into a canon of ‘literature’, nor estranges them as wholly other, or ‘beyond culture’. In so doing the project seeks also to bewilder the boundaries that would corral ‘madness’ in an elsewhere of social exclusion, or convert social exclusion too readily into psychiatric pathologies. 

Open to staff and students in the fields of Social Anthropology, Global Mental Health, and Edinburgh Mental Health.

About our guest speaker:

Matt Ffytche is professor of psychosocial and psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex and Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History. His anthology of outsider writing is forthcoming from Reaktion Books, which published his book Sigmund Freud (2022).