Abstract
The demand for narrative coherence within a nonnegotiable normative frame may enact a form of what Judith Butler calls ethical violence. Through an interpretive analysis of archival data from O’Loughlin, Arac-Orhun and Queler’s research with psychosocial clubhouse members, I argue that this ethical violence can be countered through recognition of the unsymbolizable elements of personhood that elude conscious narration. Drawing from Lacan, Bion, and Butler, I argue that by risking our exposure to the opacity of the psychiatric sufferer’s subjectivity, we may avoid objectifying patients and reifying the unsymbolizable psychic violence encoded in severe forms of psychiatric distress.
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Notes
The term “psychosis” is commonly used to signify “serious mental illness,” thereby situating psychosis in a medicalized diagnostic framework. Although I dispute medicalized categorizations of psychiatric suffering in this paper, I use the term psychosis to refer to phenomena in which a person’s status as subject is threatened with dissolution. Framing psychosis this way displaces it from the narrow field of individual psychopathology, highlights the links between trauma and psychiatric distress, and emphasizes our ethical responsibility in the clinical encounter.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Michael O’Loughlin, Secil Arac-Orhun, and Montana Queler for their integrity and respectfulness in conducting the fieldwork upon which this paper is based. I also thank “Dylan,” the participant whose interviews inspired this paper, for the gift of allowing us to listen.
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Cohen, E. Recognition beyond normativity: Ethically-attuned listening with the subject of psychosis. Psychoanal Cult Soc 28, 179–196 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00338-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00338-5