"The Psychic Life of the Poor": A City Unseen in Mumbai, London, and New York

《穷人的精神生活：一个在孟买、伦敦和纽约看不见的城市》将考察新自由主义社会在全球城市的特定背景下对城市贫困、种族和移民的不充分参与。拟议的工作审查文学和文化的贫困表示在每个城市的心理健康文化（精神分析和精神病），以及如何在公共和私人的态度，穷人的心理生活反映这种文化。纵观医学史，城市研究，人类学和人文地理学的同源领域，这个文学批评项目是丰富的跨学科，并具有特殊的政策范围。它将涉及与学术和非学术伙伴的广泛合作和知识共享。我将与每个国家的临床心理学和精神病学的杰出人物合作。该项目还将涉及在城市化，贫困和精神疾病的界面工作的地方和全球倡议的广泛参与。这些章节将借鉴一系列文学和文化作品，探索大都市中心被遗弃的穷人的表现：小说，叙事非小说，电影，图像档案。在这个过程中，他们将介绍新的文学形式（如人道主义或生态批评小说），这些文学形式无视文学作为非世俗和深奥的共同看法。在一个围绕城市贫民心理健康护理的基本现实的项目中，文学批评的功能有三个方面。首先，文学，像精神分析一样，可以允许在新自由主义政府和自由市场话语的决定之外对情感生活进行彻底的反思。其次，审视人道主义话语对人文教育和创造性艺术的新影响是适时的。例如，20世纪末和21世纪初的作家和活动家们就环境健康和社会正义问题提出了人道主义批评，以解决脆弱的生命和居住地问题。最后，小说和叙事性非小说等文学形式不仅使支持目前许多人道主义工作的人权文化变得清晰易懂，而且还积极地将其范围扩大到传统上在人权讨论中被忽视的下层社区。该项目的一个独特和原创的特点是，它突出了围绕城市贫困的文化想象与（国家）关于穷人心理健康需求的政策之间的相互影响关系。在精神分析的历史方法中，一个被截断的（但仍然有影响力的）社会主义阶段与文学和文化干预就社会不平等和普遍正义问题进行了对话。我特别关注弗洛伊德的精神分析在国际框架和精神分析的多种形式，作为一种开拓性的非药物干预，被传递：心理治疗，咨询，团体心理学，基于创伤的认知行为治疗。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）在20世纪20年代和30年代关于精神分析的社会良知的开创性工作，导致在维也纳和其他欧洲城市建立了“免费诊所”，为这项事业提供了历史框架。弗洛伊德在这个时代的临床实践接受了一战后维也纳的社会民主主义意识形态，他在1918年至1938年期间的声明帮助建立了从扎格雷布到伦敦的十几个合作精神健康诊所。该项目追溯了“免费诊所”现象的来世，如在孟买、加尔各答、德里、班加罗尔、伦敦和纽约的一些免费或低收费心理治疗诊所的运作中所看到的，该项目的成果包括：一本专著;一卷论文;两个研究生讲习班;一次国际会议;由火炬中心维护的一个项目网页;发表在“对话”上的文章，这是一个全球性的知识项目。

"The Psychic Life of the Poor: A City Unseen in Mumbai, London, and New York," will examine neoliberal society's inadequate engagements with urban poverty, race, and migrancy, as seen in the specific context of global cities. The proposed work examines literary and cultural representations of poverty in relation to each city's mental health culture (psychoanalytic and psychiatric), and how that culture is reflected in public and private attitudes towards the psychic life of the poor. Looking across to cognate fields in the history of medicine, urban studies, anthropology, and human geography, this literary critical project is richly interdisciplinary and has exceptional policy reach. It will involve extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with academic and non-academic partners. I will work with prominent figures in clinical psychology and psychiatry in each country. The project will also entail extensive engagement with local and global initiatives working in the interface of urbanism, poverty, and mental illness. The chapters will draw on a range of literary and cultural productions to explore representations of the outcast poor of metropolitan centres: fiction, narrative non-fiction, cinema, image archives. They will introduce, in the process, novel forms of literature (such as the humanitarian or ecocritical novel) that defy the common perception of literature as unworldly and esoteric. The function of literary criticism in a project that revolves around the ground reality of mental health care for the urban poor is three-fold. First, literature, like psychoanalysis, can allow a radical rethinking of affective life outside the determinations of neoliberal governments and free market discourse. Secondly, it is timely to examine the renewed influence of the discourse of humanitarianism on humanities education and the creative arts. Problems of environmental health and social justice have, for instance, seen writer-activists in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries develop humanitarian critiques addressing vulnerable lives and habitations. Finally, literary forms such as the novel and narrative non-fiction not only make legible the culture of human rights that supports much humanitarian work now but also actively extend its remit to subaltern communities traditionally overlooked in human rights discourse. A unique and original feature of this project is that it highlights the mutually influential relationship between the cultural imaginary around urban poverty and (state) policy on the mental health needs of the poor. A truncated (but influential nevertheless) socialist phase in the historical method of psychoanalysis is brought into dialogue with literary and cultural interventions on matters of social inequality and universal justice. I focus particularly on Freudian psychoanalysis in an international frame and the multiple forms in which psychoanalysis, as a pioneering non-pharmaceutical intervention, is transmitted: psychotherapy, counselling, group psychology, trauma-based cognitive behavioural therapy. Sigmund Freud's pathbreaking work of the 1920s and 30s on the social conscience of psychoanalysis, leading to the foundation of "free clinics" in Vienna and other European cities, provides the historical framework for this undertaking. Freud's clinical practice in this era embraced the social-democratic ideology of post WW1 Vienna and his pronouncements between 1918 and 1938 helped create a dozen cooperative mental health clinics from Zaghreb to London. This project traces the afterlife of the "free clinic" phenomenon, as seen in the operations of a number of free or low-fee psychotherapy clinics in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Bangalore, London, and New York.The outcomes of this project include: a monograph; a volume of essays; two graduate workshops; an international conference; a project webpage maintained by TORCH; an article in "The Conversation," a global knowledge project.