American Style, Psychiatry, and the Psychoses

Abstract

What is the relationship between psychiatry and aesthetics? How have psychiatric nosologies been shaped by aesthetic reason and its histories? Recent work into the relationship between psychiatry and modern literature often assumes that twentieth-century psychiatry is an austerely flat medical system dominated by taxonomies and classifications. But the history of American psychoanalytic psychiatry reveals instead a dynamic milieu, one invested in interrogating the nature of diagnosis, symptomatology, and recovery, and turning to literature and aesthetics to do so. This chapter examines the debates about “psychotic speech” and aesthetic production that occurred in East Coast American psychoanalytic psychiatry from the 1930s to the 1960s, showing how notions of “style” were central to various psychoanalytically-minded accounts of psychotic phenomena. Because of this, the chapter argues, psychiatrists went on to think about the relationship between aesthetic production and recovery, with some challenging the idea that psychotic patients ought to write poetry in order to be understood. The chapter goes on to suggest that the emphasis on “style” in research on the psychoses reached a fever pitch at the same time as politically minded psychoanalytic psychiatrists were examining an increasing uniformity of style demanded by American liberalism. As psychoanalytic psychiatrists began to consider the organization of American capitalism—often in contrast to the Soviet Union—they also came to recognize a diminishing freedom of styles of subjectivity and speech, which is itself registered in the aesthetic textures of the literatures discussed in this chapter.