Through theory and practice we will examine the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious in the late 19th to 20th century. Starting with the fin-de-siècle Parisian hospital Salpêtrière, we will touch upon the historical resonances of the invention of mental pathology, and aesthetic forms that resonance has instigated.
We are normal, and we want our freedom!
We will read a selection of this new approach to psychic individuation alongside the Laing/Cooper nexus that sprung the anti-psychiatry movement and resulted in open psychiatric institutions, mental health liberation activity, and an on-going critique of “bourgeois” psychiatry and contemporary behaviorism, cognitive and psycho-pharmacological approaches to the question of what is mental health.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, —from Ginsberg’s Howl