(Dr. Rahimi)
Horacio Fabrega described schizophrenia as a “disease of the self,” which erodes and undermines the organization and functioning of the self. Sue Estroff has named it “an I am illness.” It is the systemic shift in the core experience of selfhood and subjectivity that has made schizophrenia famed as the illness that renders its victims perplexing, inaccessible, and incomprehensible –a shift already considered essential to the diagnosis of schizophrenia by Eugen Bleuler, the inventor of the term “schizophrenia,” who defined it in terms of deterioration of associative processes. In this course, we examine how schizophrenia, as lived experience and as a social category, has been experienced, studied, and represented over time and across cultures, including the psychoanalytic point of view. As a mental illness, schizophrenia challenges conventional ways of knowing the experience of subjectivity, including the relationships between mind and body, thought and perception, illness, and cure, and individual and society. The set of explanations presented by traditional biomedicine for schizophrenia are partial, narrow, and culturally, historically, and politically bound. Given the limits of biomedical understandings of the causes, courses, and treatments of schizophrenia, we expand our inquiry into other disciplines for insights into the lived experience of psychosis, cultural specificities of madness, and schizophrenia as a sociopolitical classification. Drawing largely from the fields of medical anthropology and social medicine set against a backdrop of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory and practice, we inquire how representations of madness serve to reinforce ideas of “normality” and “abnormality” across time and social contexts; what psychotic experiences tell us about the relation between mind and body, self and society; how schizophrenia and its management operate as a form of social and political control; and last but not least, what such terms as “treatment” and “recovery” mean concerning schizophrenia today.
For registration, please email Dr. Rahimi: Sadeq_Rahimi@hms.harvard.edu
Mondays at 20:00- 21:20Tehran time, beginning September 26, and then every other week on October 10, October 24, November 7, November 21, December 5, December 26, and January 9.