Third Year Winner: Stasis, Flow and the Political Production of Mental Disorders

POLS 3070, Psychology and Politics. CD: Shannon Bell.

Abstract

This thoughtful, coherent, and eloquent essay investigates the creation of mental disorders as stemming from an individual’s multiple relationships with the shifting ecological, biological, social, and political environments with which s/he constantly interacts, and argues that their source can be traced to the resulting fixity or blockage of productive flow in the unconscious. It first examines Freud’s understanding of the unconscious, then contrasts it with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of an unconscious that “constantly produces and reproduces itself”, to arrive at the “temporal, behavioral, and relational stasis” that produces mental illness. Finally, it focuses on how social-political structures foster these mechanisms, relying on the works of Fanon and Said to demonstrate that colonialism, for example, is inherent to the patriarchal and Euro-centric Oedipus complex.