Abstract
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Jonathon Erlen 1 has provided the following annotated list of dissertations relevant to our field, based on his review of Dissertation Abstracts. 2 Entries are in alphabetical order of author; each entry gives title, author, doctorate, year, institution, number of pages (if known) and unique identifier/order number. Note that in titles, no accents are used in Dissertation Abstracts.
After the clinic: Gendered pathology in modernist literature.
Allkins, Alisa, PhD, 2016, Wayne State University, MI, 201 pp., 10193801.
This study demonstrates the ways in which formal innovations of modernism construct a relationship between sexual pathology and modernity. The author reads a selection of canonical and lesser-known modernist works through their investments in overturning hierarchical relationships constructed through the clinical institution, focusing on their depiction of clinical types such as the traumatized male veteran, the hysterical woman, and the often-patriarchal figure of the doctor. Modernist prose and hybrid works by Alfred Döblin, William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle depict sexological and psychoanalytic definitions of pathology as gendered products of clinical discourse and the chaotic reality of modern life. Lesser-known or marginal artists Marcia Nardi and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven confront the hypocrisy of clinical alienation from modern experience through their position as hystericized or ‘mad’ women.
Finding the self in tension: The importance of play for embodied consciousness in post-Kantian philosophical anthropology and psychology.
Denison, Jaime Thomas, PhD, 2016, University of New Mexico, 253 pp., 10155629.
This work looks at how four figures in the German philosophical tradition employ a similar concept of play in their models of the ‘Ich’, often translated as ‘Self’, as they explore the complexities of establishing a unity within embodied consciousness. These four figures are Friedrich Schiller, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. The author situates this concept of play within the contemporary debate of the interdisciplinary field of play studies, showing that what emerges is a theory of play that avoids marginalizing it to children and leisure, but rather recognizes it as a state of consciousness that provides a semblance of self and a meaningful engagement with the world. It will become apparent how these revised understandings of the self have a significant impact on how we approach areas like moral philosophy, political philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of biology, cognitive science, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of art.
Take a chill pill: A cultural history of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Hansen, Jonathan Herbert, PhD, 2014, University of Iowa, 370 pp., 10181782.
During the last 30 years, millions of Americans have come into contact with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), if not through their own diagnosis or the diagnosis of a friend or family member, then through the perennial and occasionally passionate debate this behavioral disorder has inspired in US popular culture since its inauguration in 1980. The competing claims of this debate are many and varied, and they revolve around a number of subtle distinctions that have emerged from diverse discourses and institutional histories. This project analyzes this under-theorized behavioral disorder from a rhetorical and cultural perspective. In doing so, it aims to go further than other critiques or defenses of the diagnosis and its chemical therapies. It does so by bringing discourse analysis to bear on ADHD, thereby illuminating how this assemblage of rhetorics and questions – centered as they are on the Mind/Body continuum – constitute what Michel Foucault refers to as biopower, or a process of social control exercised on and through the technological manipulation of life itself. The author demonstrates that a biopolitics of consciousness structures the emergence of and the debate surrounding ADHD and the administration of stimulant drugs for the purpose of managing this condition.
Depictions of mental illness in Batman comic books
Hawley, Steven, PsyD, 2016, University of Hartford, CT, 112 pp., 1845027151.
The public holds inaccurate, and largely negative, ideas about persons with mental illness. This can contribute to persons with mental illness being isolated socially, experiencing difficulty obtaining work, being treated unfairly in the community, and being less likely to seek treatment due to the negative stigma surrounding mental illness. Previous research has indicated that a wide variety of types of media have depicted persons with mental illness as dangerous and likely to commit violent acts. The present research focused on a specific subset of media: comic books featuring the character of Batman. These books were chosen on the basis that their characters are often suggested to have a mental illness and the suggestion that this significantly contributes to their violent and antisocial behaviors. The results suggest that characters in Batman comic books are frequently identified as having a mental illness. Instances of identified characters were found to be violent, aggressive, cruel and unattractive. They were frequently show to commit violent behaviors, and in the few instances when treatment was shown, it was rated as unhelpful.
Jung and Plotinus: The Shadow of Metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Shadow.
Hoffman, Dylan Kirk, PhD, 2016, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 203 pp., 10242189.
This study provides a comparative analysis, using dialectical hermeneutics, of the philosophy of Plotinus and the depth psychology of C.G. Jung. While coming from different historical contexts, they each address the nature of unconsciousness, or the unconscious. This work concentrates in particular on one archetypal aspect of the unconscious that Jung calls the shadow. According to Jung, the shadow is a psychological dynamic that both hides from our awareness certain aspects or depths of our own inner reality, and also, when recognized, mediates our initial confrontation with those fuller realities. The author analyzes Jung’s view of the psyche, through the lens of shadow, to reveal the shadow in Jung’s work, examining how he denies or disavows metaphysical reality as a legitimate domain of depth psychological inquiry. Secondly, the biographical and historical backgrounds to this shadow are explored, and the potential consequences of it are discussed.
Textual deviants: Women, madness, and embodied performance in late twentieth-century American literature and photography.
Kuryloski, Lauren, PhD, 2016, Northeastern University, MA, 214 pp., 10249864.
Situated at the juncture of literary, gender and visual culture studies, this study provides a necessary corrective to traditional analyses of gender and madness in feminist thought. The author analyzes texts, created between the 1960s and the 1990s, by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Edwidge Danticat, as well as photographers Francesca Woodman and Ana Mendieta; it is asserted that authors and photographers adopt performance art aesthetics in order to challenge dominant modes of reading and viewing and unsettle artistic and social hierarchies. This project builds on, but critically diverges from, this interpretation by arguing that, far from being an avenue to resistance, the condition of madness only furthers women’s marginalization.
Quelques figures de la folie dans la littérature caraïbo-guyanaise.
Sainte Claire, Linsey, PhD, 2016, University of Chicago, IL, 344 pp., 10190915.
This work examines, through a literary and historical approach, the representation of figures of madness in several colonial texts, and contemporary Antillean fictions and plays from Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Haiti and Martinique. While subscribing to Foucault’s theory articulated in his History of Madness (1961), that madness is primarily a socially-constructed concept, this study considers the specificity and singularity of this process in Antillean literature. The author addresses an understudied area in the French Caribbean literary and critical production and also provides a new way to look at the phenomenon of madness, rather than focusing on the occidental psychoanalytical discourses on madness, and instead opts to explore this notion through a historical and literary lens that attests to the importance of the socio-cultural and political history that has shaped the life of Antillean people.
Asylum literature and patient narrators: Authors, authorities, and advocates.
Santoro-Murphy, Stacey V., PhD, 2016, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 224 pp., 10144728.
Using three autobiographical accounts of challenges and labels related to mental illness and disability, this story demonstrates how vital and necessary the personal, authentic narratives of patients are to both their diagnoses and their treatments. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, and Frances Farmer’s Will There Really be a Morning? demonstrate patient narrators’ struggles to have their voices validated, especially in the shadows of labels such as ‘disability’ or ‘illness’. These three women’s texts prove to be interesting, especially as they were written during the rise and eventual fall of the asylum movement in the USA during the twentieth century.
Rationality in ancient Stoic psychology.
Shogry, Simon Theodore, PhD, 2016, Princeton University, NJ, 282 pp., 1845309524.
This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the psychological theory of the ancient Stoic philosophers, in particular of their account of what it means to be rational. According to the interpretation proposed here, the Stoics conceive of rationality, in its most fundamental sense, as a capacity to receive certain kinds of information: more specifically, to be rational is to grasp information that has conceptual and language-like structure. In propounding this doctrine, the Stoics say more than the commonplace, that it is possible to assign propositional content to the mental states of adult humans. Rather, they mean to advance a more ambitious claim regarding the features that set apart rational cognition from the kind of thinking engaged in by young children and non-human animals. According to the interpretation defended here – reconstructed on the basis of the relatively few surviving Greek and Latin fragments that record ancient Stoic doctrine – only rational minds correlate each sense-impression (phantasia) with a single sentential entity, or ‘sayable’ (lekton), that suffices to express all of what the impression sensorily represents. Since the Stoics claim that all of our beliefs, intentions to act, and emotions are just acts of ‘assent’ (sunkatathesis) to the content of our sense-impressions, they can defensibly posit this correlational capacity as the fundamental feature of adult human psychology, governing all of its activities. The author aims to present this account of rationality in detail and to explore how it illuminates further aspects of Stoic doctrine in the domains of ethics, action theory and epistemology.
A yellow science: Hereditarian psychology in America, 1903–1930: Preliminary.
Sweeney, Gerald, PhD, 1997, Harvard University, MA, 283 pp., 9810715.
It is well established that selected psychologists rendered vital assistance to the American species of eugenics. By promulgating a radically hereditarian position on the question of how intelligence develops in the individual, they gave American eugenics its doctrinal core. Moreover, these figures proclaimed the social and political significance of their findings before public audiences. Historians have recently formed a depreciatory view of these activities. This study treats such conclusions as premature. As no attempt has ever been made to trace the salient features of this story in connected and cumulative fashion, no developmentally-informed judgment on the significance and legitimacy of its elements has been possible. In conducting a critical examination of early hereditarian psychology, ultimately this study will chronicle its development, application and recession between 1903 and 1930, largely by supplying a prosopographical narrative of the activities of key, directing individuals. Only at this level, arguably, can issues of methodological legitimacy and motivation be properly addressed. Moreover, the historical effects of hereditarian psychology will also be considered.
Madness in the making: Psychosocial disability and theater.
Wallin, Scott Matthew, PhD, 2014, University of California, Berkeley, 198 pp., 10150683.
The author begins at the promising crossroads of performance studies and disability studies. How does theater influence our perceptions and responses to psychosocial disability? While plays and productions often reinforce dominant social views that stigmatize and oppress people who are considered mad or labeled mentally ill, theater attuned to these concerns can also critique such treatment by offering fuller, more complex depictions that encourage us to rethink psychosocial disabilities. This study analyzes North American theatrical productions that engage with madness in atypical ways. Drawing from performance theory, disability theory, and ethnographic inquiry via audience and artist interviews and close readings of live and video-recorded performances, this work analyzes moments where theater and psychosocial disability work together to disrupt normative practices, initiate productive discussions around psychosocial disability, and reach towards a more inclusive and innovative theater. Using moments of performance to exemplify psychosocial disability’s specific perspectives, concerns and strengths, this study reevaluates how disability studies require and valorize the functional, normative mind as a way to understand and advocate for those with physical disabilities. By deconstructing an ideology of ability and hermeneutic mastery that pervades theater practice, psychosocial disability can engender a more inclusive and critical process for audiences, practitioners and theorists.