Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THE PAINS OF EVERYDAY LIFE:
BETWEEN THE D.S.M AND THE POSTMODERN
Dr. Simon Gottschalk,
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
pp. 18‐48 in
Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience.
Edited by Dwight Fee. London: Sage. 2000
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DIAGNOSTIC COLLAGE
The self‐inflicted psychotic pollution by a culture will not respond to any
psychiatric treatment as long as its main symptoms (regression, dissociation, de‐
individualization) are systematically nurtured and encouraged by surrounding
cultural milieux ... Those of us who live today in Europe and the US suffer from a
chronic psychosis whose intensity is still mild. If the manifestly paranoid and
schizoid characteristics of our daily behaviors are not experienced for what they
really are, it is simply because we all share them (Laplantine 1973, p. 112 ‐‐ my
translation).
While a growing number of works discuss the mental disorders 2 most likely to
afflict the postmodern self, my always‐incomplete list of the diagnoses they propose
constructs an annoyingly confusing clinical picture. Among others, the postmodern self
is diagnosed as anxious (Massumi 1993), schizophrenic (Jameson 1988, 1983; Levin
1987) multiphrenic and fragmented (Gergen 1991), paranoid (Frank 1992, Burgin 1990),
depressed and nihilistic (Levin 1987), self‐possessed (Kroker 1992), postnomic (Frank
1992) and anti‐social (Gottschalk 1989). Suffering from narcissistic pathology (Frosh
1991, Langman 1992) and schizoid dichotomy (Kellner 1992), s/he oscillates between
terror and chronic boredom (Grossberg 1988, Petro 1993), panic and envy (Kroker and
Cook 1986, Langman 1992), strained casualness and ecstatic violence (McCannell 1992).
Stretched across a variety of psychiatric categories and torn by several diagnostic
axes, it seems that the postmodern self could be afflicted by any one of these disorders
and by all of them at the same time. But this might exactly be the point. Following
Lasch’s suggestion that “every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which
express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure” (1979, quoted in Frosh
1991, p. 63), and accepting the assumption of a postmodern moment or age, it seems
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that the search for a postmodern self and its specific mental disorder might be a
contradiction in terms. Accordingly, the disagreements between the various diagnoses
may partly result from the utilization of a modern discourse of the self to describe the
postmodern self ‐‐ an entity which must logically elude it. In the following section, I
attempt to explain this contradiction.
FROM MODERN SELF TO POSTMODERN SELFHOOD
What would it be like to have never had these commercialized images in my
head? What if I had grown up in the past or in a nonmedia culture? Would I still
be “me”? Would my “personality” be different? I think the unspoken agreement
between us as a culture is that we’re not supposed to consider the
commercialized memories in our head as real, that real life consists of time spent
away from TVs, magazines and theaters. But soon the planet will be entirely
populated by people who have only known a world with TVs and computers.
When this point arrives, will we still continue with pre‐TV notions of identity?
Probably not (Coupland 1996, p.112).
Memories are made of Aunt Jemima® mornings (commercial).
Over the last two decades or so, the postmodern has become one of the most
controversial concepts in the human and other sciences, and the topic of a growing
number of articles, books, conferences, seminars, and intellectual skirmishes. 3
Characteristically, the postmodern means different things to different people, and it is
rare to find two authors who define it similarly. Whereas many dismiss this concept as
the faddish articulation of a crisis among Western intellectuals or worse (Callinicos
1990, Faberman 1991, Huber 1995, Morin 1993, Rosenau 1992), others approach it with
more curiosity and intellectual tolerance (Agger 1992, Denzin 1996, Dickens 1995,
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Dickens and Fontana 1996, 1994, Hall 1996, Seidman 1996, 1994a 1994b). Here, I follow
Giddens’ (1990) approach, and define postmodernity as the structural changes
characterizing post‐World War II Western society (see also Crook et al. 1992, Dickens
1995, Harvey 1989), and postmodernism as the cultural and psychological articulations
of such changes (see for example Connor 1989, Jameson 1983, 1984b, McCannell 1992).
Of course, both terms implicate each other. Accepting the postmodern assumption that
everyday life in post‐Word War II institutions is constantly and qualitatively transformed
by an exponentially accelerating pace of change which we do not really comprehend
and which traditional sociological models cannot seem to adequately account for
(Baudrillard 1983, Denzin 1994, Marcus 1994, Seidman 1996, 1994a, 1994b), the
postmodern call for the “abandonment of previous social theory” (Kroker and Cook
1986), although radical, should not be surprising. As Denzin (1996, p. 746) explains:
We inhabit a cultural moment that has inherited (and been given) the name
postmodern. An interpretive social science informed by poststructuralism,
Marxism, feminism, and the standpoint epistemologies aims to make sense of
this historical moment called the postmodern ... We seek an interpretive
accounting of this historical moment, an accounting that examines the very
features that make this moment so unique.
Exploring this perceived gap between the modern sociological models we think
through and the postmodern everyday we experience, theorists associated with the
postmodern turn have also considerably undermined the sociological project with
proclamations such as the end of the social and sociology (Baudrillard 1983), of meaning
and Man (Baudrillard 1982), of philosophy and culture (Kaplan 1988), of referentiality
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(Poster 1988), of the self (Gergen 1991), of time, space, methods, truth (Rosenau 1992),
of history, ideology, art, social class (Jameson 1984a), of citizenship (Wexler 1991), and
of “the rule of the Enlightenment and its Trinity of Father, Science, and State” (Gitlin
1989a). The reframing of those pivotal modern ideas as obsolete yet powerful
ideological constructs has further encouraged those seduced by the postmodern turn to
radically question the very epistemological, ontological, methodological and political
assumptions guiding their own work. Reactions to such questioning have of course been
mixed (Kaplan 1988, Rosenau 1992, Ross 1989) and as Dickens and Fontana (1996) note,
often emotional.
This questioning of pivotal modern ideas also significantly informs postmodern
approaches to the slippery concept of the “self”. As Gergen (1991) observes, the
dominant modern view specified that the self was a finite, rational, self‐motivated and
predictable entity displaying consistency with itself and others across contexts and time
(see also Anderson and Schoening 1996, Bauman 1996, Geertz 1983, Gubrium and
Holstein 1994, Hall 1996, for example). In the modern view, the self could be healthy or
pathological, self‐fulfilled or alienated, integrated or anomic, but it could be isolated,
observed, diagnosed and preferably “improved”. In postmodern theory, however, this
assumption is rejected as ideological and untenable (Erickson 1995, Flax 1990, Frosh
1991, Gergen 1996, Grodin and Lindlof 1996, Jameson 1984b, Kellner 1995, 1992,
Langman 1992, Lather 1991, Mouffe 1988, Sass 1992, Stephenson 1988, Weedon 1987).
Partly destabilized by a poststructuralism positing the self as a constraining cultural
imperative, a narrative, or a “conversational resource” to be deconstructed (Gubrium
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and Holstein 1994, McNamee 1996), the self caught in the postmodern turn loses its
footing and mutates into fluid and protean selfhood (Gergen 1991, Kvale 1992). In this
new theoretical space, selfhood is approached as continuous processes, the multiple
social relationships constructing such processes are given priority over the self‐propelled
and atomized entity constructed by modern discourses (Gergen 1996, Lyotard 1984),
and, as I will elaborate shortly, these processes and relationships are increasingly
mediated by technologies of simulation and telepresence. Informed by such
assumptions, a postmodern approach to selfhood and its “mental disorders” must
obviously proceed differently than a modern one.
PSYCHOSOCIAL PATHS ACROSS THE POSTMODERN LANDSCAPE
Pathology is always metaphorical ( Levin 1987, p. 4).
Psychotizing cultures are those which exact a psychic tension and energy which
is absolutely unbearable by the majority of group members ... But a the same
time, in order to reduce the pathological effects resulting from their own
development, such societies increasingly allow compensatory regressive
mechanisms whose role is to buffer the perception of a nightmarish real
(Laplantine 1973, p. 112 ‐‐ my translation).
Psychiatry has consistently sought to medicalize “mental illness” by locating its
causes in biology, or to psychologize it by tracing its roots in restricted family networks.
Here, I want to re‐socialize mental illness by discussing contemporary macro‐ and
micro‐social relations which fundamentally destabilize contemporary selfhood, and
drive it to a “normal” madness that the DSM cannot (or does not attempt to) fathom.
Adorno’s suggestion that “horror is beyond the reach of psychology” (quoted in Levin
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1987, p. 519) holds even more so for psychiatry. Informed by this first and not
altogether original position challenging the psychiatric discourse, I will not discuss the
“mental disorders” of postmodern selfhood by using established diagnoses which
reproduce the ideological tenet of private (genetic, biochemical, psychological)
dysfunctions. Rather, I will approach them as psychosocial paths: dynamic, interrelated
and even sequential strategies individuals develop as they attempt to proceed across
the landscape (or labyrinth) of everyday life we call the postmodern. This second
position positing mental disorders as psychosocial strategies has a long tradition in
critical psychiatry, and has been substantially developed in the works of Delacampagne
(1974), Laing (1985, 1969, 1967, 1961), Lasch (1978), and Szasz (1987, 1974, 1970)
among others. Ethnopsychiatrists such as Al‐Issa (1982), Devereux (1980), Fourasté
(1985), Laplantine (1973), and Opler (1967, 1959) have convincingly supported the idea
that such strategies are informed by culture, and scholars such as Bateson (1956), Laing
(1969, 1967, 1961), Lemert (1962), Watzlawick (1971) and others associated with the
Palo Alto School (Sedgwick 1982, Winkin 1981) have also advanced that these strategies
constitute responses to incapacitating communication patterns between patients and
their significant others. As I’ll attempt to show throughout this paper, such assumptions
are central to the development of postmodern approaches to “mental disorders”.
A third position guiding this work maintains that the exponentially
accelerating pace of change spinning the postmodern landscape is risk‐laden, anxiety‐
provoking, and all too often painful. 4 While many sociologists contend that the modern
landscape could be similarly characterized (Berger et al., 1974, Callinicos 1990, Giddens
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1991, 1990, Hoggett 1989, Kahler 1967, Sass 1992, Van den Berg 1961, 1974), I believe
that there are important differences distinguishing between the two. One condition
distinguishing the present landscape (both human and nonhuman, both external and
internal) from previous ones is its saturation by multiple electronic screens which
constantly simulate emotions, events, desires, and thus a certain “reality”. Postmodern
selfhood must not only proceed across this hallucinatory landscape, but, perhaps more
interestingly, may very well experience it through a consciousness which is always‐
already contaminated ‐‐ encoded? ‐‐ by the multimedia logic. Accordingly, whereas the
classical sociological literature contains an enormous wealth of compelling insights
discussing the psychosocial changes fostered by the shift from a pre‐modern to a
modern moment, this literature could neither anticipate the incomprehensible
saturation of everyday life by the multimedia, nor assess the effects of such a saturation
on the everyday ‐‐ whether conscious or not. Of course, the postmodern “turn” hinges
on much more than just this claim of multimedia saturation. The long list of “ends”
mentioned above, the palpable globalization of everyday life, the rise of brutal
fundamentalisms, the return of genocides, the awareness of ecological holocausts, and
the new forms of warfare (see Bauman 1995) constitute some other important
interacting trends supporting the claim that the postmodern is indeed a new moment
and, as philosopher Bernard Henry Lévy (1994) suggests, a particularly vicious one. Thus,
while the multimedia saturation of everyday life constitutes but one term in the
postmodern equation, it is, I believe, a significant one precisely because such a
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saturation invariably mediates our very experiences of these other trends characterizing
the postmodern moment.
Combining these contributions from critical psychiatry, ethnopsychiatry and
postmodern theory, I attempt to develop in this paper a tentative synthesis of the
various postmodern “diagnoses” suggested by the literature. Approaching these
diagnoses as sequential strategies which exaggerate more diluted collective cultural
dispositions, this synthesis will hopefully promote a different understanding of
postmodern “mental illness” than the one enforced by the psychiatric discourse.
Following Sass’ (1992) extensive study of modernity and schizophrenia, I do not suggest
that the psychosocial strategies (“diagnoses”) I am discussing here are caused by the
postmodern moment, but only that they articulate interesting affinities with it. The
purpose of this paper is thus neither to offer a comprehensive analysis of postmodern
selfhood, nor to provide a definitive diagnosis of what it suffers from, nor even to
arbitrate between different theories of this or that diagnosis. I am more interested in
asking different kinds of question and in encouraging alternative ways of approaching
this topic. In other words, this essay seeks to resonate with the reader’s experience
rather than to “prove” a particular point.
ASSESSING THE CLIMATE: LOW‐LEVEL FEAR
The threats of death, insanity and ‐‐ somehow even more fearsome ‐‐ cancer lurk
in all we eat or touch (Giddens 1991, p. 123).
We may now be entering the era of a continuous and silent holocaust (Bauman
1995, p. 159).
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Research conducted by government agencies report that the diagnostic category
psychiatrists most often assign their patients is anxiety disorder (Gallagher 1995, p.
252), and conservative estimates find that more than twelve percent of the population
is so diagnosed. Acknowledging the endless list of problems plaguing the collection and
analysis of epidemiological data, 5 it is still the case that most people who become
psychiatric statistics approach mental health workers with complaints about states of
body, mind, heart, or relations which they (and others) define as problematic and
painful, and for which they seek quick solutions ‐‐ preferably in the
psychopharmacological form. The finding that anxiety disorder is the diagnosis most
often assigned by psychiatrists deserves reflection. If, in Civilization and Its Discontents,
Freud (1961) argued that increased anxiety was the unavoidable price of civilization
posing as the reality principle, Frankfurt School theorists added that different
sociohistorical conditions maneuvered this anxiety, modulated its intensity, and
encouraged various “escape mechanisms” (Fromm 1956, Marcuse 1955, 1968). Logically
then, the anxieties which torment individuals living in a postmodern moment often
described as lacking compelling cultural truths, parameters, center or horizon, must be
significantly different from the anxieties which afflict the citizens of more repressive yet
seemingly more organized and purposeful societies. As Baudrillard (1993, pp. 42‐43)
aptly put it, “the revolution of our time is the uncertainty revolution ‐‐ an uncertainty
which covers all aspects of everyday life, including especially the sense of identity.” [my
italics]
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What becomes of the Freudian “baseline” anxiety of civilization in the postmodern
moment remains uncertain, but it seems reasonable to suggest that its intensities must
be considerably amplified by a growing sense of “ontological insecurity” (Giddens 1990),
and that its trajectories must be significantly redirected among an increasing number of
individuals who have not and will not grow up in the kinds of family structure Freudians,
Kleinians, object‐relations theorists and others had in mind while assessing the extent to
which a modest form of mental health was possible at all in societies such as our own
(Elliott 1994, Frosh 1991, Giddens 1991, Silverstone 1993). Thus, not only must a large
number of individuals living in contemporary society proceed across a vertiginous
sociocultural landscape which is perceptibly anxiety‐provoking and risk‐laden, but they
must also do so without the assistance of a variety of adaptive psychological
mechanisms which ‐‐ it is assumed ‐‐ can only be appropriately developed through a
long process requiring the enduring presence of nurturing, stable, and consistent
parental figures. As Langman (1972, pp. 73‐74) notes:
Freud treated Guilty Man tormented by unacceptable desires; today’s patient is
Tragic Man, an empty facade seeking ever more problematic confirmation of a
fragmented selfhood that anxiously experiences itself without cohesion from
either within as legacies of infancy or from without in the pluralistic life worlds.
To add insult to injury, this baseline anxiety which must have been exacerbated early on
by parental disappearance, unpredictable presence, replacement and confusion, is also
materialized ad nauseum and on screen by compelling electronic texts which
obsessively repeat stories of random catastrophe, constant brutality, and insatiable
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desire. Accordingly, the strategies necessary to deflect this constant assault promoting
insecurity, vulnerability and lack may coalesce, if only for a while, into psychosocial
dispositions which blur once‐distinct psychiatric diagnoses. Massumi (1993, p. 24) for
example, observes a condition of anxiety which:
is vague by nature. It is nothing as sharp as panic. Not as localized as hysteria. It
does not have a particular object, so it’s not a phobia. But it’s not exactly an
anxiety either, it is even fuzzier than that. It is low‐level fear. A kind of
background radiation saturating existence ... It may be expressed as “panic” or
“hysteria” or “phobia” or “anxiety”. But these are to low‐level fear what HIV is to
AIDS.
I take this permanent and insidious low‐level fear as the given, the very climate of the
postmodern landscape. It is in this climate (both internal and external) that postmodern
selfhood unfolds, breathes, engages the everyday and Others. The “diagnoses” assigned
to postmodern selfhood constitute psychosocial strategies individuals deploy in
response to this climate.
MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE: TELEPHRENIC COORDINATES
The screen that provides with information about the world’s realities, is also a
screen against the shock of seeing and knowing about those realities ... A certain
reality is perceived but its significance is de‐realized...The weightlessness of the
image induces a sense of detachment and remoteness from what is seen ...
(Robbins 1994, p. 460).
Roseanne Greco, 52, of West Islip, was charged with second‐degree murder for
killing her husband, Felix, in their driveway in 1985. She insisted at the time that
the cartoon character had taken over her husband’s body. Roseanne Greco was
found mentally competent to stand trial (Massumi 1993, p. 17).
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Ethnopsychiatrists and critical theorists have long suggested that understanding a
patient’s culture was an essential requirement for the assessment of the mental illness
s/he might be suffering from. As indicated above, however, any discussion of
postmodern culture must assign a central place to telecommunication media. Altheide
(1995, p. 59) expressed this point well:
We regard the mass media as major factors in contemporary social life ... Indeed,
culture is not only mediated through mass media; rather, culture in both form
and content is constituted and embodied in mass media.
Thus, while Fromm (1956) suggested that the cultural dynamics of a society could
encourage “socially patterned” neurotic incapacitations, ethnopsychiatrists Laplantine
(1973) and Devereux (1980) argue that in contemporary Western society, more serious
incapacitations are systematically cultivated by collective hallucinations which are
realized and authenticated on media screens and, unavoidably, the everyday (see also
Chen 1987). Elaborating on such claims, theorists of the postmodern (Baudrillard 1981,
Frosh 1991, Jameson 1984b, Kaplan 1987, Kellner 1995, Levin 1987, McCannell 1992)
propose that the media saturation of everyday life has radically altered the meaning of
central social and psychological coordinates such as time, space, the real, the simulated,
the serious, the entertaining, self and Others (see also Meyrowitz 1985). According to
them, these changes promote a fragmented and disoriented consciousness which
displays interesting similarities with schizophrenia or even multiphrenia (Gergen 1991).
Yet, while the schizophrenic diagnosis might at first sound appropriate to describe a
person’s inability to distinguish between intersubjective and idiosyncratic reality (Laing
1967, Sass 1992), the tentative concept of telephrenia emphasizes that both
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intersubjective and idiosyncratic reality, the very practices of perception, (self)
reflection and interaction have already been contaminated by the multimedia 6:
With the intrusion of television into the socialization process, the relation of self
to Other has taken on a new quality ... In the age of television, we learn to see
Others as if our eyes were a camera ... [and] self‐presentations are increasingly
intertwined with popular imagery, at times becoming parodies of media images
and celebrities ... the Other may be present and within view or what has been
called the “Other of the Imaginary”, the anonymous viewers that inhabit
malldom or all those folks out there in the television audience (Langman 1992,
pp. 56 & 63).
In telephrenia, then, this media presence is not just “more powerful than the reality
principle” (Fiske and Glynn 1995, p. 509) but displaces the reality principle and posits
itself as the absolute referent. The whole gamut of defense mechanisms are already
informed by past media scenarios or anticipated ones, and unconscious televisual
flashes or “moments” randomly discharge into an already disoriented conscious,
replacing the traditional Freudian slips. But then, does the reoccurring delusion (?)
among Western modern schizophrenics of being invaded and controlled by an
omnipotent, omniscient, all‐hearing, and all‐seeing “machine” (see Sass 1992) sound all
that unreasonable in postmodern telephrenics? Further, if “delusions, hallucinations,
incoherence, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and flat or inappropriate
affect” constitute the major symptoms of schizophrenia listed by the DSM IV (1994,
295), it seems that such tendencies are systematically nurtured and normalized by the
media logic and the “space” it hails spectators in. For Burgin (1990, p. 63),
we are in turn bombarded by pictures not only of hopelessly unattainable images
of idealized identities, but also images of past and present suffering, images of
destruction, of bodies quite literally in pieces. We are ourselves “torn” in the
process, not only emotionally and morally but in the fragmentary structure of
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the act of looking itself. In an image‐saturated environment which increasingly
resembles the interior space of subjective fantasy turned inside out, the very
subject‐object distinction begins to break down, and the subject comes apart in
the space of its own making. As Terry Eagleton has written, the postmodern
subject is one “whose body has been scattered to the winds, as so many bits and
pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation or reflex of desire.”
Thanks to the multiplying sockets linking consciousness to virtual sites of
interaction, entertainment, and consumption, the blurring between mind and electronic
screen is rapidly becoming a fait accompli whose consequences cannot be presently
imagined (Gottschalk 1997). By comparison to the psychiatric description of
schizophrenia therefore, telephrenia neither presumes an inability to function in
intersubjective reality, nor necessarily an exacerbated “self‐reflexivity to the point of
dissolution” (Sass 1992). 7 As the schizophrenia of the multimedia age, telephrenia
evokes rather a radically altered way of perceiving, self‐reflecting and (inter)acting in a
reality which becomes increasingly indistinguishable from its simulation. As situationist
Guy Debord (1977, p. 1) remarked, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a
social relation among people mediated by images.” [italics mine] Paradoxically then, by
comparison to schizophrenic symptoms usually described as dramatically visible and
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audible , the telephrenic ones appear quite unremarkable in the society of the
spectacle. As always, it is a matter of degree.
To low‐level fear as the climate of the postmodern moment, I thus add media
screens as its constantly shifting cultural coordinates. Because such coordinates and the
logic organizing them were absent in previous historical moments and minds, I believe
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that they must be included in any discussion of the psychosocial strategies
(“diagnoses”) attributed to postmodern selfhood.
CHOOSING AN ITINERARY: TENSE AMBIVALENCE
Borderline Personality Disorder: A pervasive pattern of instability of
interpersonal relationships, self‐image, and affects, and marked impulsivity
beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts ... (DSM IV
1994, 301.83).
Not only am I unable to decide whether something is beautiful or not, original or
not, but the biological organism itself is at loss to know what is good for it and
what is not. In such circumstances, everything becomes a bad object, and the
only primitive defense is abreaction and rejection (Baudrillard 1993, p. 74).
The postmodern climate and coordinates outlined above may also promote a
variety of responses which are not satisfactorily explained by DSM diagnoses. For
example, Grossberg (1988), Jameson (in Stephanson 1988), Petro (1993), and others
have suggested that postmodern selfhood is characterized by rapidly shifting intensities.
It can rapidly oscillate between complete indifference and passionate involvement,
between intense idealization and devaluation, between terror and chronic boredom.
The DSM IV provides of course a name for such rapid emotional shifts towards self‐
image, others, relationships, future and values. It organized them as “borderline
personality disorder” (1994, 301.83). Awaiting the discovery of biological “causes,” the
psychiatric discourse usually traces the roots of such a disorder back to childhood
traumas such as incest, physical and sexual abuse, the witnessing of violence (!), and
early separation experience (see Schwartz‐Salant 1987, Weaver and Clum 1993, for
example).
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Viewed in a larger cultural context however, it seems that, with or without early
traumatic experiences, those unstable and potentially self‐destructive dispositions
characterizing the borderline personality disorder are reasonably synchronized to a no
less destabilizing media logic and the everyday it informs. When yesterday’s celebrated
products, ideas and desires are today ridiculed in favor of their improved tomorrow,
when “spouses are being traded as cheaply and easily as used cars” (Derber 1996, p.
111), when continual uprootedness is normal, when our immediate physical space is
constantly being redesigned, and when expert knowledge is instantly obsolete, to
remain passionately committed to anything is to obsess. In such a situation,
relationships and self‐presentation are orchestrated with the single purpose of
achieving what Bauman (1995, p. 90) calls “maximum impact and instant obsolescence.”
Here, intense seduction expectedly turns into indifference, and commitment binds
individuals only until further notice, if at all. Perhaps, the most enduring form of
commitment postmodern individuals are increasingly encouraged to develop is the
serial kind dedicated to commodity brands whose names and logos are proudly
displayed on T‐shirts, baseball caps, and bumper stickers. As Bauman (1996, pp. 19‐24)
also remarks:
And so here the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble
(even buy) identity, but how to prevent it from sticking. Well constructed and
durable identity turns from an asset into a liability. The hub of postmodern life
strategy is not identity building, but avoidance of fixation ... The main identity‐
bound anxiety of modern times was the worry about durability; it is the concern
with commitment‐avoidance today. Modernity built in steel and concrete;
postmodernity, in bio‐degradable plastic.
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This normalized and constant assault on any sense of constancy is also complicated
by the increasingly common experience of virtual interaction which collapses time and
space, reorganizes one’s experiences of Others, selfhood and communication (Altheide
1995, Turkle 1995), and thus necessarily transforms their very meaning. For Virilio
(1996, p. 46), “the fact that one can be closer to another who is far away than to the
one who is close by constitutes the political dissolution of the human species.” (my
translation) Increasingly immersed in technologically‐mediated and decontextualized
interactions, chronically ambivalent engagements and widely shifting intensities easily
cross over into an already compromised and disappearing “real”:
The question of telepresence dislocates one’s position, the situation of the body.
The entire problem of virtual reality is essentially the negation of hic et nunc, to
negate the “here” on behalf of the “now” ... Here is no more, everything is now!
Technological delays which cause telepresence try to rob us once and for all of
our own body on behalf of our infatuation for the virtual body ... We confront
here a considerable menace, the loss of the other ... (Virilio 1996, p. 45 ‐‐ my
translation).
Those tendencies which the DSM IV organizes as borderline personality disorder
thus perhaps exaggerate psychosocial strategies which are actually attuned to a
“normal” but pathological everyday. In such an everyday, selfhood processes are
increasingly informed by the logic of a “throwaway society” promoting constant change
as its axial cultural principle, chronic anxiety cum discontent as its reigning psychological
mood, and instant obsolescence as its ruling economic imperative. When such processes
increasingly also unfold in interaction with “telepresent” others, the psychiatric
requirements of constancy, stability and continuity (which the borderline assumedly
lacks) seem anachronistic. Such requirements assume a macro‐social order, an
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everyday, interactional parameters, and a consciousness which continue to exist mainly
in nostalgic discourses.
TRAFFIC RULES: REASONABLE SUSPICION
Paranoia is the normal state of affairs in the postmodern world, a paranoia well‐
founded on the activities of eavesdroppers, information‐manipulators, liars.
Nothing and no‐one can be trusted; they may know us better than we know
ourselves, and will always put this knowledge to their own use (Frosh 1991, p.
132).
In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to
check my balance ... The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my
independent estimates feebly arrived at after long searches through documents,
tormented arithmetics. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The
system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval ... What a pleasing
interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not
at all, had been authenticated and confirmed (De Lillo 1986, p. 46).
Today, the surveillance screen tends to replace the window (Virilio 1996, p. 66 ‐‐
my translation).
The conditions discussed above also facilitate distinctive rules of engagement while
interacting with Others in the postmodern landscape. Whereas Gumpert and Drucker
(1992, p. 90) note that “transactions” increasingly eclipse “interactions,” Bauman
(1995, p. 90) elaborates that such transactions are essentially narcissistic, mutually
exploitative, and partial. Here, one squeezes out as much pleasure or novel sensation as
possible from the other and severs up the bond once the supply has dried out, when
sensations fail to live up to their promised intensity, or when the Other starts voicing
problematic expectations revolving around notions of responsibility and commitment.
Narcissistic recognition by the Other has become a (if not the) sacred quest in the
society of the spectacle (Langman 1992), and as Laing (1969) suggests, it is the fear of
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social invisibility which, paradoxically, activates paranoid disorders. Interestingly then,
what characterizes paranoid transactions in the postmodern moment is not so much a
fear of the physical harm the Other might inflict, but of the emotional needs s/he might
hide, impose, awaken and predictably frustrate.
But such transactions also unfold between highly mobile and fiercely competitive
individuals struggling for scarce resources in societies which, as we are routinely
reminded, are technologically unstable, bureaucratically terrorizing, economically
predatory, politically delegitimized, and decidedly punitive towards those whose
usefulness has ceased to fulfill the needs of a late capitalism gone global, supersonic and
increasingly ruthless (see Lévy 1994, Morin 1993). As Massumi also argues, this
“capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically inhabitable space of fear. That much is
universal” (1993, p. 23). Painting a seemingly realistic social life as “a jungle deprived
even of jungle laws,” (Bauman 1995, p. 36), the media also normalize an everyday
where most people die young, violently, and victims of another’s ill will, negligence, or
incompetence. According to social analyst Behr (1995, p. 17), citizens “have abdicated to
violence in the same way as they abdicate to natural disasters such as hurricanes,
thunderstorms and floods” (my translation). As he (p. 220) also remarks, such overall
dispositions are well expressed in recent Hollywood trends depicting a world where the
rich and the excluded underclass live in close proximity but never actually meet face‐to‐
face, except to murder each other. Massumi’s “low‐level fear” thus also interacts with
and enables a diffuse “paranoia” which the media routinely incarnate as a variety of
threatening Others: extra‐terrestrials, mutant organisms, natural disasters,
21
insubordinate machines, unsafe buildings, terrorists, “inner cities” male teenagers,
rogue cops, dangerous colleagues or members of one’s immediate family.
While an individual overtly displaying such fears of victimization would undoubtedly
earn a paranoid label, Burgin (1990, p. 64) reminds us that “to whatever extreme the
paranoid process may appear to take the subject, it is never far from ‘normal’
psychology.” Paradoxically, if basic trust undoubtedly remains the healthiest disposition
for the practice of everyday life (Frosh 1991, Giddens 1991, Silverstone 1993), such a
disposition might requires an increasing psychological investment in those processes
Freud identified as denial, splitting, and magical thinking. But such investments are
invariably costly and, as we have seen above, already compromised.
It might also be interesting to explore whether postmodern “paranoids” (Burgin
1990, Frank 1992, Gitlin 1989b) delude about similar types of villain or predicament. For
example, although prediction is always a risky business, I anticipate that “delusions of
surveillance” might increasingly appear as a common diagnostic subtype in the
psychiatric evaluations of such individuals. Yet, such delusions would only caricature a
bizarre everyday requiring that we willingly subject ourselves to permanent electronic
surveillance whenever we step into the public realm ‐‐ the private one being next. From
airports to offices, from parking lots to malls, from banks to campus, we have become
the preys of an increasing number of real and simulated monitoring devices (Altheide
1995, Bogard 1996). Our every act performed in public spaces can now become
captured and made available for reproduction, analysis, communication, and even
morphing. Visits to the doctor’s office, cyberspace, the store or the library generate
22
instant flows of electronic traces in virtual data banks we’ll probably never access. At
the same time, we also know that these traces could, in nanoseconds, be retrieved,
organized, and combined in any way judged relevant by the computer logic and its
technicians (see Lyon 1994). To some extent, the practice of “cocooning” (Ansay 1994,
Derber 1996) ‐‐ the noticeable withdrawal from public life, the privatization of leisure,
the flight behind the walls of gated communities ‐‐ normalizes such a condition through
paranoid architectural forms (see especially Davis 1992).
Lemert’s (1962) classical research on individuals labeled paranoid is also instructive
in this respect. As he remarked, these people had often “become paranoid” following a
period marked by disturbing interactional dynamics of exclusion and surveillance with
real and visible others. In the postmodern everyday though, constant surveillance and
the invisible circulation of private information have become normal, predictable, self‐
validating, extended to an increasing number of life‐spheres, and deployed by
anonymous others for unfathomable reasons. Accordingly, in his/her firm conviction of
being constantly monitored and investigated by often invisible and overall not
benevolent others, the postmodern “paranoid” may be only shamelessly verbalizing
what “normal” citizens experience mostly as nagging apprehensions. Worse yet,
whereas Lemert’s “paranoids” could sense problematic changes in interaction, verbally
engage their enemies, ask for feedback, or attempt to rectify misunderstandings, the
technological mediation of surveillance is increasingly preventing such interventions.
To complicate matters, this technologically‐induced soft “paranoia” must be further
intensified by the increasingly normalized experience of interacting with bureaucrats
23
who delegate decisions about complex human situations to computer programs which,
as we are often notified, crash, err, are broken in by genius hackers, or fall prey to viral
infections (Ross 1991). In the meantime, the kind of disposition that can reasonably be
expected to develop under the double imperative of monitoring and investigation as
sine qua non conditions of citizenship/consumption has remained largely unexplored.
But in such a regime, the very diagnosis of paranoia becomes a farce. As Adorno (quoted
in Levin 1987, p. 519) once argued, “whether exaggerated suspicions are paranoiac or
true to reality, a faint private echo of the turmoil of history, can therefore only be
decided retrospectively.”
TRAVELING SPEED: SO FAST, SO NUMB 9
Schizoid Personality Disorder: A Pervasive pattern of detachment from social
relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal
settings, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts ...
(DSM IV 1994, 301.20).
Just as an excess of pain causes you to fall into a faint or unconsciousness, and
just as extreme danger plunges us into a state of physical and mental
indifference which corresponds to the brutal indifference of the world towards
ourselves, isn’t the disintensification of affects (or “movements of the spirit”) in
an artificially animated world a ruse of the species while awaiting a better
world? (Baudrillard 1990, p. 170).
Note that in thirty brief years, violence and slaughter had increased at
geometric ratio, while the human reaction to it had altered inversely (Mumford,
1954, p. 170).
Characterized by the DSM IV (1994, 301.20) as lack of desire for close
relationships, inability to experience pleasure, indifference to praise or criticism, and
24
emotional coldness and detachment, the schizoid diagnosis often assigned postmodern
selfhood is usually linked to problematic childhood dynamics. R. D. Laing’s (1969)
seminal work, for example, approaches the schizoid disorder as a developing process
which essentially reacts to ‐‐ and perpetuates ‐‐ family interactional dynamics which
essentially incapacitate and invalidate the patient’s emerging sense of selfhood. As a
contributor to the work undertaken by the Palo Alto School, Laing (1961) paid particular
attention to repetitive “schizogenic” parents‐child communication patterns which were
believed to promote schizoid disorders in the offsprings. 10 For example, among the six
communicative forms people can use to “drive others crazy” noted by Searles (in Laing
1961, p. 121 ), four seem especially relevant:
(1) p repeatedly calls o’s attention to areas of personality of which o is dimly
aware, areas quite at variance with the kind of person o considers himself to be.
(2) p simultaneously exposes o to stimulation and frustration or to rapidly
alternating stimulation and frustration. (3) p switches from one emotional
wavelength to another while on the same topic (being “serious” and then being
“funny” about the same thing). (4) p switches from one topic to the next while
maintaining the same emotional wavelength (e.g. a matter of life and death is
discussed in the same manner as the most trivial happening).
Replacing “p” with a variety of TV programs or the televisual logic itself, and “o”
with audience, the case could be made that repetitive schizogenic communicative forms
also circulate in “normal” families under the guise of entertainment or “information”.
For example, (see points 1 and 2 above), the pervasive numbness and detachment
characterizing schizoid disorders might narcotize a media‐boosted “pain of inadequacy”
(Bauman 1995, p. 157, Sass 1992, p. 79). Alongside the list of childhood dynamics which
might have nurtured it, this pain is constantly irritated by televisual voices calling
attention to and demeaning every body part or function which has not yet been
25
connected to its appropriate object ‐‐ preferably a designer brand. Routinely evoked for
commercial purposes, this engineered frustration and pain of inadequacy is predictably
resolved through the glorified act of consumption by a simulated alter(ed) ego.
Accordingly, remarks Langman (1992, p. 71), this postmodern schizoid indifference is
actually propelled by envy. As he adds,
postmodern envy is not so much in wanting your neighbor’s spouse or even
wanting his/her various possessions ... Envy is a comparison of one’s own
subjectivity to that of the Other. This creates what might be called a relative
deprivation of selfhood.” Such a disposition is importantly fueled by “narcissistic
pathology ... the extreme expression of normalcy in amusement society where
recognition from others has become problematic and often frustrated.
As another example, the quote by Baudrillard above suggests that the schizoid
strategy might very well constitute a “ruse” individuals develop as they become
increasingly attuned to a “necrophiliac television” (Robbins 1994, p. 457) which both
peddles an obsessive “pornography of the dying” (Burgin 1990, p. 53) while
simultaneously encouraging autistic responses to such material (see points 3 and 4
above). Switching effortlessly between Bosnia’s ethnic cleansing and professional ice‐
skating, “the catastrophic and the banal are rendered homogeneous and consumed with
equal commitment” (Robbins 1994, p. 460; see also Postman 1985). Does the TV logic
devitalize emotional centers ‐‐ a little like electroconvulsive therapy at distance? Does it
require that we indeed deploy protective mechanisms which neutralize the full
emotional impact of a delirious “real”, and thus prevent a terminal paralysis or
breakdown?
26
The “schizoid” strategy should finally also be examined in light of the brutal speed
catapulting everyday life in the present moment ‐‐ a condition constantly exacerbated
by mind‐boggling technological developments. Whereas the 1960s slogan warned
amphetamine users that “speed kills”, the sociocultural speed at which we are
increasingly required to engage Others, the self and the everyday might also induce
addiction, disorientation, inappropriate emotional responses, exhaustion, and
accidental death (Morin 1993). As a relatively unexplored dimension increasingly
guiding everyday life and interaction, speed could end up being an essential variable for
a more critical understanding of postmodern selfhood and its “mental disorders”. Like
the general weakness, nausea and vomiting accompanying car‐, air‐ and sea‐sickness, a
constricting of the heart, a chronic decrease in emotional temperature, and a sullen
detachment from Others may be at least partly symptomatic of a toxic speed sickness.
In sum, daily invalidated by moronic mantras constantly criticizing every aspect of
one’s beingness, desperately seeking (simulated) Others’ validation, secretly envious of
their subjectivity, confused by the media logic which casually obliterates the difference
between the catastrophic and the trivial, and destabilized by the sheer velocity of
change, one relatively accessible path is to go blank, to develop emotional anesthesia,
to achieve “some form of narcosis of the senses” (Robbins 1994, p. 454). The
postmodern shrug replaces the modern shriek, emotional cruise control takes over, and
radical indifference is mobilized to ensure performance and emotional stability. To put it
in a characteristic 1990s slogan: Whatever.
27
While this numbing strategy or “adiaphorization” (Bauman 1995, p. 149) might be
psychologically adaptive in the short run, its long‐range impact remains dubious.
McCannell (1992, p. 220) for example, warns that this numbing practice is not fail‐proof,
and that postmodern selfhood can be characterized by a “kind of intense, strained
casualness that sometimes fails to hold and is overturned by euphoric frenzy and
ecstatic violence.” As Bauman also remarks (1995, p. 156), “an admixture of violence is
now suspected and expected to appear in the most intimate relationships, where love
and mutual well‐wishing were supposed to rule supreme.” Accordingly, if emotional
flatness traces a relatively accessible escape route out of a psychosocial war zone, it can
also lead to an emotional minefield which, to the surprise of all concerned, seems to
increasingly detonate in the private sphere. More disturbingly perhaps, the radical
indifference, the objectification of Others, the chronic coldness, and lack of empathy
characterizing the “schizoid” move might also lead to a course which is both more
methodical and ruthless.
DEAD‐END: THE (ANTI)SOCIO PATH
In sociopathic societies, the clinical effort to dissect the sociopathic personality
cannot be separated from an analysis of national character and ideology (Derber
1996, p. 24).
But then, when you’ve just come to the point when your reaction to the times is
one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned
into the insanity, and you reach that point where it all makes sense, when it
clicks ... (Ellis 1991, pp. 6‐7).
Whatever It Takes (TV commercial for Digital ® ).
28
The various psychosocial strategies outlined above might also lure postmodern
selfhood to a region which is alarmingly similar to the condition catalogued by the DSM
IV as sociopathic 11 disorder (Derber 1996, Gottschalk 1989, Sanchez 1986). Driven by a
fierce individualism which is neither restrained by social bonds nor capable of empathy,
the sociopath is characterized by “ruthless manipulation, impulsivity, deceitfulness,
irritability, aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the rights of others, consistent
irresponsibility, lack of remorse, skillful role‐playing, and a high tolerance for
excitement” (DSM IV 1994, 304.7). Of course, most individuals living in the postmodern
moment cannot be labeled as sociopaths, whatever this label means. I am referring here
to more diluted tendencies which may be systematically encouraged and more readily
accessible in the current moment. To develop this point a bit, what distinguishes the
DSM sociopath from “normal” citizens cannot only be reduced to a fundamentally
different psychological, biographical, genetic or biochemical baggage, but should
perhaps be explained as an individual’s willingness to follow existing sociocultural trends
to their fatal conclusions. Similarly, keeping with my sequential approach to
psychosocial strategies, the sociopathic condition is not symptomatic of a “disease” that
befalls particular individuals, but constitutes perhaps the resolution of a potential
already latent in the more passive strategies reviewed above.
More precisely, in a situation where anything can become ‐‐ in short succession ‐‐
an object of desire, irrelevance and danger, in a situation where distrust guides the
normal everyday, where emotional interaction is fragmentary, exploitative, and in any
29
case nonbinding, and where immediate pleasure is the only remaining and much
trumpeted game in a crumbling social order, the sociopathic move might become
increasingly seductive. In its clear and simple rules, all Others are essentially worthless
beyond their immediate purpose, and all ambiguities are resolved by the single‐minded
logic of the omnipotent self (Reid 1986, 1978, Sanchez 1986, Smith 1978). While Others’
emotional validation was a primary ‐‐ albeit ambiguous ‐‐ concern for the schizoid, it has
become, for the sociopath, largely irrelevant except perhaps for a primal need to
dominate and be recognized as omnipotent. I am, therefore I am (see Langman 1992, p.
53). In a cultural moment when the most damaging verdict no longer charges another of
being unethical, immoral, cruel or heartless but of being a loser (another 1990s term), a
diluted antisocial disposition should hardly be surprising. Besides, if the DSM IV lists
“compulsive lying,” “manipulation” and “deceitfulness” as characteristic sociopathic
modus operandi, I can think of very few commercials which do not engage audiences
according to these exact same principles. Whatever it takes, warns Digital ®
Deleuze and Guattari (1977) posited the schizophrenic process as an extreme
metaphor of, and reaction to, the social disorganization unleashed by advanced
capitalism. Here, I suggest that the “sociopathic” process symbolizes a different kind of
reaction to this disorganization. Both the schizophrenic and the sociopath retreat from
the social, but the latter controls this departure, keeps his (usually his) bearings and acts
with cold rage, impeccable control, superior intelligence, and merciless strategic skills.
Most individuals living in postmodern society are certainly not those “classical”
sociopathic cases who perpetrate the gory massacres so hypocritically deplored on
30
media screens. At the same time, as Laing (1969, 1967, 1961) and scholars associated
with the Palo Alto school (Winkins 1981) remind us, coercion, abuse, humiliation, and
mutilation are more likely to be experienced ‐‐ or perpetrated ‐‐ through verbal and
emotional interactions between “normal” individuals than through dramatic physical
confrontations between ax‐wielding monsters and their victims.
Finally, while the sociopath directly and physically victimizes Others in order to
achieve certain psychosocial pleasures, Bauman suggests that our fascination for
necrophiliac television might fulfill similar gruesome functions: “We live through the
deaths of the others, and their death gives meaning to our success: we have not died,
we are still alive” (quoted in Robbins 1994, p. 458). If this is indeed the case, the
dispositions characterizing the sociopath have become much less distinct than was
traditionally believed.
TENTATIVE SYNTHESIS
In truth, what we are calling individual “psychopathology,” and are treating as
such, are only the more extreme cases of a collective suffering in which we all
take part in accordance with our individual constitution and character (Levin
1987, p. 482).
I believe in invisible dissolutions ‐‐ withdrawal among some, sudden regression
among others, also a certain absence, a distance, a madness in everyday gazes
(Lévy 1994, p. 131 ‐‐ my translation).
In this paper, I have attempted to synthesize various suggested diagnoses of
postmodern selfhood as dynamic, intersecting, and sequential psychosocial strategies
individuals develop as they engage an increasingly pathogenic everyday. As I
31
emphasized throughout this essay, these strategies or paths cannot be explained by
advancing individualizing theories of biochemical, genetic or psychological dysfunctions.
They are private and perhaps exaggerated articulations of, and reactions to, collective
trends which are systematically normalized, albeit in a more diluted form, in the present
cultural moment.
To recapitulate, postmodern selfhood proceeds across a landscape constantly
shaken by “low‐level fear” and saturated by compelling media voices which obsessively
recite stories of permanent catastrophe, random brutality, and constant dissatisfaction.
Increasingly encoding both conscious and unconscious processes, television and other
technologies of telecommunication also cultivate a radical ambivalence and
disorientation vis‐à‐vis, any object, person, environment, and the very experience of
selfhood (“telephrenia”). Accordingly, any object can ‐‐ often unexpectedly ‐‐ become a
“bad object”, a source/target of violence, fear, hostility, or abandonment (“borderline
personality disorder”). Informing relationships between fiercely competitive and
permanently threatened individuals, such a volatile orientation is also mobilized by an
unhealthy dose of suspicion, a free‐floating and diffuse “paranoia” exacerbated by the
experience of constant and anonymous surveillance. While a radical detachment
(“schizoid personality disorder”) manages to maintain some control and allows for a
“modicum of pseudo‐functioning” (Kovel 1988, quoted in Frosh 1991), it sometimes fails
to hold and explodes in unpredictable violent outbursts in otherwise seemingly well‐
adjusted individuals. In others (“sociopaths”), this violence is more successfully
controlled, more strategically deployed, and released from all anxiety or guilt.
32
Viewed in isolation, each of the suggested DSM diagnoses tells only a part of the
story ‐‐ a particular strategy or “moment” in postmodern selfhood processes. In some
ways, if Gergen (1991) suggests that the postmodern self is “multiphrenic” and
“fragmented,” I have gathered some of these fragments and have tentatively organized
them as an unfolding process. This synthesis‐as‐process does not seek to
comprehensively explain postmodern selfhood and its “pathologies” but seeks to
promote an alternative approach to this topic. Further, the strategies discussed here are
neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. They combine with other ones, inform each
other, may produce new ones, and coalesce, if only for a while, into clinical pictures
that the DSM IV freezes as static diagnoses. In so doing, the psychiatric discourse
reaffirms its fundamental assumptions positing the self as an isolated entity, mental
illness as a private trouble located “within” that entity, and the “normal” as equivalent
to the “sane” .
Throughout this paper, I have discussed the psychosocial strategies of postmodern
selfhood without distinguishing between gender groups. While undoubtedly
problematic, such a choice constitutes a response to a theoretical situation not unlike
Bateson et al.’s (1956) “double‐bind”. On one hand, readers might interpret my lack of
attention to gender specificity as a sexist failure to appreciate the significant differences
in the experiences of men and women, and the necessary implications of such
differences for the development of distinctive psychosocial strategies or “diagnoses”.
Criticizing the psychiatrist discourse, many provocative feminist writers such as
Broverman (1974), Chesler (1972), Miles (1988), Russel (1995), Showalter (1985), Tavris
33
(1992) and Wenegrat (1995) for example, have suggested that the diagnoses women are
most likely to receive (anxiety disorders, depression, multiple, histrionic, and dependent
personality disorders) do not articulate mental disorders but express reactions to the
fundamental powerlessness they experience in patriarchal society. On this basis, it
would then seem appropriate to discuss my psychosocial strategies by also exploring
how gender enables or inhibits their development.
For example, are women more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety (or borderline)
disorders because they “really” do suffer from such disorders more than men? And if
this is the case, should this “real” overrepresentation be explained in social,
psychological, biological or linguistic grounds? As an interaction of all four? Should we
instead explain this overrepresentation as an effect of a sexist psychiatric discourse
which ignores ‐‐ and reproduces ‐‐ women’s social, political and economic oppressive
conditions? Alternatively, do both men and women suffer equally from anxiety but
express it differently and with different diagnostic and social consequences? Or do
gender differences in these disorders result instead from a complex interaction of all
these forces? Conclusions are generally ambiguous.
On the other hand, however, differentiating between men and women and
exploring how gender inflects psychosocial strategies would tacitly support the no‐less
problematic assumption (see Irigaray 1993, Wittig 1993) that there indeed exists an
essential “woman” and “man” experience, and that such an experience accounts for
gender‐specific strategies or diagnoses. But if individuals can be differentiated on the
basis of gender, they can as (un)justifiably be differentiated on the basis of variables
34
such as race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, profession, and
physical condition. These variables might be as important as gender, in any case
modulate its effects, and always interact together in complex ways (Brah 1993, Carby
1993).
Dismissing gender as a significant variable might thus be criticized as sexist, but
differentiating individuals according to gender can also be attacked as somehow
essentialist and insensitive to other differences which may count as much as, more, or
differently than gender, in the development of psychosocial strategies. As always the
approach one takes with regard to such questions depends on the author’s purposes.
Here, I have decided to follow the approach characterizing the literature on mental
disorders in the postmodern era ‐‐ a literature which generally does not distinguish
between social groups. It goes without saying however that, being located at the
intersection of multiple social positions, individuals will experience the everyday
differently and will therefore respond to it by developing strategies which will inevitably
be inflected by gender as well as by a host of other subjectivities.
A brief discussion of feminist contributions to a critical understanding of “mental
disorders” would not be complete without also mentioning the important parallels
ecofeminists have drawn between the pathogenic gender relations enforced by
patriarchy and the pathogenic human‐nature relations imposed by anthropocentrism
(Carlassare 1994, Mathews 1994). Informed by Ecofeminism (Merchant 1994, 1989) and
Deep Ecology (Devall 1988), the concluding remarks attempt to ground a critical
35
approach to “mental disorders” in an ecological context, or more precisely in the
relationships we enforce upon it, and hence upon ourselves.
CONCLUSIONS: ECOLOGICAL SELFHOOD
Thus, the metropolitan type of man ‐‐ which of course, exists in a thousand
individual variants ‐‐ develops an organ protecting him against the threatening
currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him.
He reacts with his head instead of his heart (Simmel 1965, p. 411).
When you think about the incredible neurotic complexities of millions of
individuals and about the cumulative effects of all those problems, you realize
that the psychic pollution of the planet is much worse than the biological or
technological one (Baudrillard 1995, p. 47 ‐‐ my translation).
Precisely because we have acquired the power to work our will upon the
environment, the planet has become like that blank psychiatric screen on which
the neurotic unconscious projects its fantasies (Roszak 1995, p. 5).
Ecopsychologists and deep ecologists have long suggested that the pathologies for
which we get individually diagnosed result from the problematic reactions humans will
unavoidably develop upon finding themselves uprooted from their natural environment
which they then proceed to destroy. In the Deep Ecology view (Conn 1995, Devall 1988,
Devall and Session 1985, Dickens 1992, Maines 1990, Merchant 1994, Shepard 1992),
this uprooting constitutes a painful physical, emotional and cognitive exile which in turn
provokes ruinous distortions in human consciousness, dispositions, and relations. For
psychologically‐oriented deep ecologists (Roszak 1995), this uprooting constitutes the
underlying neurosis; for radical ecofeminists (see Merchant 1994), the first false
consciousness. Experiencing the everyday through unearthly landscapes, frenetic
36
rhythms and inhuman noise, we have come to define the unnatural as normal and then
mistakenly equated it with the “healthy.” (see also Milgram 1970) Unfortunately,
according to Roszak (1995, p. 2), psychologists and therapists have typically ignored this
critical fact as “their understanding of sanity has always stopped at the city limits.”
Following Metzner’s (1995, p. 64) remark that “the entire culture of Western industrial
society is dissociated from its ecological substratum,” I would add that the taken‐for‐
granted belief that mental health and harmonious psychosocial processes can flourish in
an everyday which is so ostensibly alienated from and destructive of its natural habitat
is itself delusional and symptomatic of this very dissociation. As Hillman also suggests
(Roszak 1995, p. 5), we should “bring asbestos and food additives, acid rain and
tampons, insecticides and pharmaceuticals, car exhausts and sweeteners, television and
ions within the province of therapeutic analysis.” Despite accusations of essentialism
(see Zimmerman 1994) and epistemological impurity (see Manes 1990) ecopsychologists
also maintain that de‐naturation dehumanizes, devitalizes, and extinguishes
fundamental understandings ‐‐ ways of knowing ‐‐ which may not always be socially
constructed (Searles 1960, Spretnak 1991). 12 As many thinkers associated with these
perspectives also argue, the recovery of such understandings is a vital means and ends
of accomplishing the double project of digging out the psychosocial roots of our
demented assault on the environment, and of mending our collective psyche. As
Bergman (1996, pp. 282‐284) aptly puts it,
37
The issues we face in nature are essentially issues about relationships, and in our
own relationships with nature, the same issues apply as in our relationships with
other people ... A culture writes its own values into nature...
Synthesizing findings generated through a variety of experiments, therapeutic
encounters, theoretical development, and pedagogical practices, several
ecopsychologists (Cahalan 1995, Fox 1990, Greenway 1995, Harper 1995, Sewall 1995,
Thomashow 1995) advance that ecologically‐informed shifts in the
definition/experience of selfhood often produce epiphanic changes in individuals’
experience of self, of human and nonhuman Others. Although the precise temperament
of such a selfhood is not altogether clear, scholars interested in the topic agree that its
distinctive traits include mutuality, reciprocity, cooperation, a nurturing ethic,
complementarity, empathy, the experience of permeable boundaries between inner
and outer processes, and an all‐inclusive identification with both human and non‐
human Others (Naess 1989). 13 If this is indeed the case, the development and fostering
of such a selfhood should constitute a particularly important project for a symbolic
interactionism intersecting with a critical postmodernism (Agger 1992, Denzin 1996,
Michael 1992, Rosenau 1992), a feminist‐postmodern psychology focusing on
relatedness and process (Flax 1990, Gergen 1996, Kvale 1992, Russel 1995), and an
emergent ecological postmodernism (Bordessa 1993, Ingalsby 1996, Spretnak 1991,
Zimmerman 1994). Whereas the often‐noted spiritual inclinations of this selfhood might
sound uncomfortable to some, such inclinations seem especially fitting Denzin and
Lincoln’s (1994, p. 583) call for the project of a “sacred science.” At the same time,
though, the reciprocal projects of developing both ecological selfhood and sacred
38
science can only proceed if such a science not only “links all its practitioners and
participants in bonds that are respectful of our humanity,” but if it also extends those
respectful bonds to the biosphere at large. Failing to do this, this sacred science would
remain literally groundless (see also Catton and Dunlap 1978). In the meantime, it
seems clear ‐‐ to me at least ‐‐ that an ecological selfhood could engage environment
and Others in radically different manners than the ones evoked in this paper. On this
basis alone, it deserves our attention.
39
NOTES
(1) DSM refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth
Edition. 1994. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association. For a better
appreciation of the psychiatric definitions of paranoid, anxiety, antisocial, borderline,
schizoid, and schizophrenic disorders, the reader is encouraged to consult the original
version.
(2) Right from the start, I want to specify here that by “mental disorders” I am referring
to those behavioral, emotional and cognitive patterns which (a) are judged abnormal,
bizarre, undesirable, and odd by either the individual experiencing them and/or by
those around him/her, and (b) which are not demonstrably caused by organic or genetic
dysfunctions. In this paper, I will focus on anxiety, psychotic, delusional, and personality
disorders. This definition thus excludes all those mental conditions judged abnormal but
attributed to causes squarely located in the individual’s organism. Thus, although
discourses about the latter category are no less socially constructed than discourses
about the former, there is, until further notice, little controversy between psychiatrists
and social scientists about their etiology.
(3) Agger (1992), Anderson (1990), Bauman (1995, 1988), Best and Kellner (1991),
Connor (1989), Crook et al., (1992), Denzin (1994, 1993, 1991), Denzin and Lincoln
(1994), Dickens and Fontana (1994), Featherstone (1991, 1988), Flax, (1990), Foster
(1983), Gane (1991), Gergen (1991), Gitlin (1989a), Gottschalk (1997, 1995a, 1995b,
1993), Grossberg (1988), Harvey (1989), Hassan (1987, 1983), Hebdige (1988a, 1988b),
Hollinger (1994), Huyssen (1990, 1986), Jameson (1988, 1984a, 1984b, 1983), Kaplan
(1988, 1987), Kellner (1995, 1992), Kroker (1992), Kroker and Cook (1986), Kvale (1992),
Lyotard (1984), McCannell (1992), Marcus (1994), Pfohl (1990, 1992), Poster (1995,
1990, 1988), Rosenau (1992), Ross (1991) Seidman (1996, 1994a, 1994b), Smart (1990),
Tyler (1986), Vattimo (1992), Venturi et al. (1977), Wolin (1984). Of course, this list is
but a minuscule sample of an exponentially growing body of texts which address a
multiplicity of postmodern topics from a wide variety of angles.
(4) As Freud argued, “the avoidance of unpleasure may be a more significant motivating
force in human behavior than the obtaining of pleasure” (Robbins 1994, p. 454). Support
for the assumption of a painful everyday abounds in a growing variety of sources. See
for example Bauman (1995), Burgin 1990, Frosh (1991), Gergen (1991), Gottschalk
(1995a, 1995b, 1993), Jameson (1984a), McCannell (1992), Virilio (1996).
(5) See Banton et al. (1985), Broverman (1974), Brown (1986, 1984), Chesler (1972),
Conrad (1980), Costerich et al. (1975), Delacampagne (1974), Foucault (1965), Ingleby
(1980), Laing (1985, 1969, 1967), Rosenhan (1973), Scheff (1984, 1975), Showalter
(1985), Szasz (1987, 1974, 1970).
40
(6) See also Agger (1992), Baudrillard (1993, 1990, 1983), Chen (1987), Denzin (1992),
Gergen (1991), Gottschalk, (1993), Hartley (1992) Kellner (1995), Langman (1992),
Meyrowitz (1985), Mitroff & Bennis (1989), Morley (1992) Poster (1990), Postman
(1987, 1985), Silverstone (1994, 1993, 1989). Note also that this literature focuses only
on television. More recent works also address the possible effect of other technologies
of telecommunication and simulation such as videos (Gottschalk 1995b), computers
(Poster 1995, 1990; Turkle 1995), and Virtual Reality (Chayko 1993, Robbins 1994, Virilio
1996).
(7) Sass (1992). Even though he makes a compelling argument that schizophrenia
exacerbates the modern cultural trend toward self‐reflexivity, today, it seems
impossible to talk about self‐reflexivity without, again, asking oneself about the
influence of media texts in such an activity.
(8) Scheff’s (1984, 1975) work is especially relevant in this respect since he approaches
schizophrenia and other mental illness as “residual deviance” ‐‐ visible, audible and
quasi‐palpable violations of unwritten norms of interaction.
(9) R.E.M. 1996. “So Fast, So Numb.” New Adventures in Hi‐Fi. Warner Brothers, Inc.
(10) More specifically, the three main schizogenic forms are: disconfirmation (failing to
validate an actor’s self, actions, intentions and communication), mystification (denying
that what an actor thinks, feels, perceives, believes is valid, and attempting to convince
him/her that what seems untrue and unreal in fact is), and double‐binds (self‐
contradictory messages). See especially Laing (1961) and Watzlawick (1971).
(11) The terms “sociopath,” “psychopath,” and “anti‐social personality disorder” are
used interchangeably in the literature and esentially point to the same diagnostic
picture.
(12) See also Marcuse (1972), Roszak (1995) and Searles (1960).
(13) Simmons (1993, p. 134) summarizes Naess’ Deep Ecological view as follows:
1. The value of non‐human life is independent of the usefulness of the non‐
human world as resources.
2. The diversity of life‐forms has a value in itself and humans may reduce this
variety only to satisfy vital needs.
3. The flourishing of non‐human life requires a diminution of the size of the
human population.
41
4. The increasing manipulation of the non‐human world must be reversed by the
adoption of different economic, technological and ideological structures.
5. The aim of such changes would be a greater experience of the connectedness
of all things, and enhancement of the quality of life rather than an attachment to
material standards of living.
6. Those who agree with this have an obligation to join in the attempt to bring
about the necessary changes.
42
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