The Neurotic Turn: Inter-Disciplinary Correspondences on Neurosis

223 Pages·2017·1.55 MB·English

by  Charles Johns

THE NEUROTIC TURN
THE NEUROTIC TURN
Inter-Disciplinary
Correspondences on Neurosis
Edited by Charles William Johns
Contents
Introduction
Charles William Johns
PART ONE — PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY: WHERE DID NEUROSIS GO?
“Neurosis can still be your comforting friend”:
Neurosis and Maladjustment in Twentieth-Century Medical and Intellectual
History
Petteri Pietikainen
The Place of Neurosis and Its Rise to Absence
John O’Donoghue
Anthroponotic Neurosis: Interspecies Conflict in
Clinical Animal Studies
Dany Nobus
The Psychology of Productive Dissociation, or What Would Schellingian
Psychotherapy Look Like?
Sean McGrath
PART TWO — PHILOSOPHY: RECONSTRUCTING, DISCLOSING AND UNBINDING
NEUROSIS
The Neurotic Turn
Charles William Johns
Conceptual Animism as Neurosis
Graham Freestone
Neurotic Situations
John Russon
Neurosis: Asymmetry and Infinity
Christopher Ketcham
PART THREE — CAPITALISM, TECHNOLOGY AND NEUROSIS
Anorexia Nervosa and Capitalism
Katerina Kolozova
Neuroses and Complexity, Alien Subjectivity and Interface
Patricia Reed
The Neurotics of Yore: Cyber Schizos vs Germinal Neuroses
Mohammad-Ali Rahebi
PART FOUR — LINGUISTICS: CULTURAL NEUROSES
“Neurotic I Am”
Benjamin Noys
Neurosis, Obsession and Dis-Identification Relief
Patricia Friedrich
Freud’s Wolf-Man in an Object-Oriented Light
Graham Harman
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY
WHERE DID NEUROSIS GO?
Petteri Pietikainen
John O’Donoghue
Dany Nobus
Sean McGrath
“Neurosis can still be your
comforting friend”:
Neurosis and Maladjustment in
Twentieth-Century Medical and
Intellectual History
Petteri Pietikainen
By the 1970s, neurosis had started to collapse. It had become an overblown,
diffuse and psychoanalyticallytinged diagnostic category that was out of time. In
1980, the publication of the third edition of the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) signaled the
deathblow to neurosis as a general diagnostic category. At the same time, the
decades-old distinction between psychoses and neuroses was, by and large,
abandoned as a fundamental organizing principle in psychiatry. DSM-III
radically deconstructed the concept of neurosis and relegated it to the margins of
official psychiatry. This was a huge disappointment to the American
psychoanalysts, whose professional expertise as well as livelihood were largely
dependent on the diagnostic proliferation of neurosis (Decker 2013: 278).
The main “executioner” of neurosis was identified as Robert L. Spitzer, the
principal creator of DSM-III. In letters to editors of various medical and
psychiatric journals, the psychoanalytic supporters of neurosis voiced their
discontent at the removal of neurosis as a major diagnostic category. In 1982,
one supporter expressed his concern as a poem published in a psychiatric
journal. Spitzer replied to him in the same poetic style:
In Reply. — Peter, oh Peter, your pain is so real, the word, neurosis, has
great appeal. It tells you what the problem is not, neither psychosis nor
organic rot. How comforting it is for you to know the cause of all
mankind’s woe. If only we could be so sure that untangled conflict led to
cure. But other theories now abound, who’s to tell which of them is
sound? Bad mothering, of course, sure isn’t good, but consider these
paths to ‘patienthood’: Could bad cognitions be the hex, instead of
conflicts over sex? A transmitter lacking in your brain may lead to lots of
psychic pain. Had your neurosis Bacillus been found, in DSM-III the
term would abound. Have cheer, dear Peter, this isn’t the end, neurosis
can still be your comforting friend. Use DSM-III for a diagnostic
description, and neurosis to help with your prescription. (Spitzer 1982:
623)
Apparently, such a loss of diagnostic status caused anxiety and other neurotic
symptoms to some dedicated friends of neurosis.
My essay focuses on the intellectual and sociocultural contexts of neurosis in
the decades following World War II. Between 1945 and 1980 neurosis was
closely linked with the problem of adaptation and adjustment. A socially
disruptive failure in adjustment — maladjustment — was not only a “symptom”
that was of special importance to American psychiatry, it also attained a
diagnostic status in 1952, when DSM-I was published. In addition to its strong
appeal to the behavioural experts, the issue of maladjustment had strong
sociological and political overtones. This was because post-war American
psychiatry was fundamentally concerned with a mechanism of the individual and
collective “fitting in” to the social order and the community. Individuals who
suffered from periodic or constant maladjustment were often diagnosed with
neurosis, especially if such maladjustment was not linked with criminality or
other gross violations of social rules and norms (in which case the preferred
diagnosis was psycho-/sociopathy). For mental health professionals,
maladjustment was typically seen as the individual’s deviance from the societal
norms, or as a failure in socialization, but there were very few “psy experts” who
deliberated on the social and political aspects of mental deviance. One of them
was Erich Fromm, a German-American psychoanalyst and a critic of managerial
capitalism, and another was the British psychoanalyst and radical psychiatrist
R.D. Laing. In the second part of my essay, I will discuss the ideas of Fromm
and Laing, as well as those of three more sociologically, economically and
philosophically oriented critics of society, C. Wright Mills, J.K. Galbraith and
Herbert Marcuse. Their perceptions about the condition of (mainly American)
society provides a larger sociocultural framework of the epidemic of post-war
neurosis.
Neurosis, Social Engineering and Maladjustment
I understand neurosis as a form of medicalized distress, and as such it was
closely associated with the second wave of industrialization between circa 1870
and 1914. The “second industrial revolution” was unleashed with the help of
colonial domination of non-European regions, large-scale capitalism and new
technology, especially electricity, railways, iron steamboats, steel, petroleum and
telecommunications, such as telegraph and telephone. Industrialization is
predicated on the principle of economic and cognitive growth, hence the
premium put on education and skills in industrial societies. To a large extent,
what is loosely called “modernity” can be equated with industrial capitalism,
which brought with it population growth, urbanization, universal education,
division of labour, the strengthening of the middle class and the emergence of
the working class on the political scene.
When neurasthenia ¾ literally, “nervous exhaustion” ¾ became an extremely
popular diagnosis during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the
Western world was experiencing the second industrial revolution. In this rapidly
changing world, what came to be called the “social question” required scientific,
rational solutions. The social question referred to the societal consequences of
industrial capitalism, including poverty, urban squalor, poor hygiene, high
mortality, physical and mental disabilities, alcoholism, suicide and political
radicalism. The authorities’ need to acquire knowledge about the social
conditions of people and about the general functioning of the social system
paved the way for the society of experts and for the “scientisation of the social”
(Etzemüller 2009).
The rise of the social sciences was one consequence of the rise of the social
question; another was the medicalization and psychologization of the human
condition. In short, the rise of neurasthenia and other neuroses is closely tied to
late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century modernity, in which science
provided empirical and statistical information about society and individuals
while science-based social planning or social engineering provided societal
regulation and stabilization in rapidly changing societies. The way I use the term
“social engineering” refers to a set of public policies designed by academically
trained experts together with policy makers with the aim of organising and
stabilising society, as well as shaping patterns of citizen behaviour. In social
engineering, social scientific, psychological and medical knowledge is applied to
various social fields, such as education, work, military, health care, social policy,
law and penal institutes, religion and urban planning. In late-nineteenth-century
Europe, the rationale of social engineering was implemented in the social
hygienic ideas and policies revolving around the social question.
In regard to an ideal citizenship in a nation state, social engineering revolved
around the key ideas of adaptation and adjustment. In the biological sciences,
adaptation, a term derived from Darwin’s theory of natural selection, refers to
the process in which the specific phenotype (e.g. size or colour) evolves for a
given external environment. By the early twentieth century, the human sciences
had borrowed the concept from biology, and it began to denote the human
capacity to learn and to rearrange social relations in response to changing
circumstances. Adaptation is related to adjustment, which refers to an active
effort by policy makers and experts to control and manage the process and
direction of social adaptation. In Western Europe and North America after
World War I, the concept of adjustment became intrinsic in the idea of rational,
apparently apolitical designing of a society in which the disadvantaged groups,
including the mentally ill, economically distressed and unskilled workers, would
become economically and socially useful citizens, or at least not harmful to
society. The normative idea of adjustment implied that citizens should learn to
be active and productive in the labour market, which in turn required efficient
health care and social policy to minimize economic inefficiency and political
tension.
The two most important criteria for successful adaptation were the citizens’
ability and willingness to work and comply with the legally sanctioned rules and
norms of society: every individual should become an industrious, morally
upright and law-abiding member of society, regardless of his or her political
affiliation. In this context, the human sciences represented what the historian Jan
Goldstein has called a “machine for the production of selfhood”: accumulating
knowledge about human behaviour and social organization could be utilized to
steer society and shape citizenship to conform to the seemingly objective
demands of the modern industrial world (Goldstein 1994). The key to
understanding the scientization of society was inclusive normalization of
deviances, rather than exclusive stigmatization or elimination of them. With
“normalization” I refer to the public policy of social adjustment in which the
parametres of “normality” and “abnormality” were set by statistics (of
criminality, mental illness, suicide, etc.) as well as by the shared understanding
of the ideal citizenship by the elite groups of society.
The goal of social engineering can be expressed by the shift from adjustment
to adaptation, from policies of external control and management to those of
selfcontrol and self-management. There were human “costs” or unintended
consequences involved in the policies of adjustment and adaptation, including