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

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"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.