ESCAPE FROM INSANITY

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

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 ofus who live today in Europe and the US suffer from a chronic psychosis whose intensity is still mild. If themanifestly paranoid and schizoid characteristics of ourdaily 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,

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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 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

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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

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it with more curiosity and intellectual tolerance (Agger

1992, Denzin 1996, Dickens 1995, 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:

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We inhabit a cultural moment that has inherited (and been given) the name postmodern. An interpretive socialscience 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 thevery 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 (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

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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,

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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 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).

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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 increasinglyallow 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 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

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(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

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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 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

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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 saturation invariably mediates our

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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

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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 morefearsome -- cancer lurk in all we eat or touch (Giddens1991, p. 123).

We may now be entering the era of a continuous and silent holocaust (Bauman 1995, p. 159).

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

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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:

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Freud treated Guilty Man tormented by unacceptable desires; today’s patient is Tragic Man, an empty facadeseeking 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 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

17

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 asense 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, intheir 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

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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 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 socializationprocess, 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

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imagery, at times becoming parodies of media images andcelebrities ... 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

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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. Weare ourselves “torn” in the process, not only emotionally and morally but in the fragmentary structure of 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

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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 audible 8, 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 that they must be included in any discussion of the

psychosocial strategies (“diagnoses”) attributed to

postmodern selfhood.

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CHOOSING AN ITINERARY: TENSE AMBIVALENCE

Borderline Personality Disorder: A pervasive pattern ofinstability of interpersonal relationships, self-image,and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts ... (DSMIV 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 isabreaction 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

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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).

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

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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.

This normalized and constant assault on any sense of

constancy is also complicated by the increasingly common

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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 ... (Virilio1996, p. 45 -- my translation).

Those tendencies which the DSM IV organizes as borderline

personality disorder thus perhaps exaggerate psychosocial

27

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 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 knowus 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

28

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 thatsomething of deep personal value, but not money, not atall, 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

29

the) sacred quest in the society of the spectacle (Langman

1992), and as Laing (1969) suggests, it is the fear of

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

30

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, 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

31

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

32

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 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

33

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 who

delegate decisions about complex human situations to

34

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 avariety 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

35

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? (Baudrillard1990, 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 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

36

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 tobe. (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

37

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 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

38

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?

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

39

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

40

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.

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

41

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 separatedfrom 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 intothe 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 ® ).

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

42

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

43

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 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

44

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 media screens. At

45

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

46

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 amongsome, 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 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

47

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

48

otherwise seemingly well-adjusted individuals. In others

(“sociopaths”), this violence is more successfully

controlled, more strategically deployed, and released from

all anxiety or guilt.

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

49

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 (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

50

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

51

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

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

52

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 approach to “mental disorders”

in an ecological context, or more precisely in the

relationships we enforce upon it, and hence upon ourselves.

53

CONCLUSIONS: ECOLOGICAL SELFHOOD

Thus, the metropolitan type of man -- which of course, exists in a thousand individual variants -- develops anorgan 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

54

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 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

55

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,

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...

56

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,

57

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 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.

58

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 inthe 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,

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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 theobtaining 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).

(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.

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(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.

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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 joinin the attempt to bring about the necessary changes.

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