Clinical and Cultural, or ‘Fixed’ and Fragmented Selves: A Rhetorical-Narratological and Materialist Analysis of Schizophrenic Identity in Contemporary Memoir

“Schizophrenia is probably the most misused psychological term in existence,” both in science and in culture (Carlson 1990). As part of the dynamic and contested history of the term, memoir and autobiography played a key role in the development of the diagnosis and cultural constitution of schizophrenia. Inspired by Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970), Deleuze and Guattari, for example, influentially opposed the “clinical”—the schizophrenic patient—to the ‘cultural’ schizophrenic—“schizophrenia as a process” of countering capitalism and “any notion of a fixed identity,” thus showcasing schizophrenia not as a disease but as an individual response to greater socio-cultural pressures (2000, 379; Roberts 2007, 123–24; Granger and Naudin 2022, 99–100). While the twenty-first-century memoir and contemporary life writing theory have become more “resolutely focused on the self” and on its relationality to others rather than on truth and factual details (Yagoda 2010, 2), schizophrenia memoirs have proliferated since the 2000s and approaches to schizophrenia diagnosis and treatment which explore the relationship between the patient’s story, his self, his environment, and others (e.g., phenomenological psychopathology) have recently gained popularity. This paper proposes to analyze contemporary schizophrenia memoirs in these cultural and diagnostic contexts. Mainly armed with insights from rhetorical narrative medicine (Phelan 2022), new materialism and affect theory, it will examine the author/patient’s self as constructed in a state of constant physical/affective interconnection with “material agencies” (Alaimo 2010, 17) such as diagnosis, treatment, therapy, and their consequences (e.g., social exclusion and hospitalization). Building on these analyses, this paper will discuss and interrogate the various (experimental) ways through which the contemporary schizophrenia memoir can corroborate, complicate and/or challenge ideas of a stable or curable self and of schizophrenic identity as fragmented.
Works Cited
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Phelan, James. 2022. Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx. New York: Routledge. Yagoda, Ben. 2010. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead Books.