Alterity and Disorder in Psychiatry and Literature since the 1970s

“1970年代以来精神病学与文学的变奏与失序”项目从认识论、文学研究和医学史的角度考察了1970年代以来精神病学与文学关系中的相互交流、共同问题、误解和扭曲。这一时期的特点是对精神病理学概念和现有分类系统的批评浪潮，这导致了西德引入国际标准化诊断手册，随后实施了障碍的概念，取代了以前的疾病类别。该项目调查了这些认知变化如何与精神病学话语中的自我反思以及文学中表现精神变态和精神疾病的新方式进行沟通。自20世纪70年代以来，文学不再是反精神病学话语和反精神病学批评形式的首选场所。相反，文学写作开始探索新的策略，以揭露和定位有精神病经历的人的异质性。与此同时，民族精神病学的国际话语到达西德。对民族精神病学概念的接受，以及对精神异质性的民族志的第一次遭遇，与精神病学内部正在进行的认识变化产生了共鸣，并使精神病学--至少部分地和在元理论讨论中--对异质性的表达与新的写作形式中所探索的相似。我们的项目结合了文学研究和医学史，对现代文学，精神病学和民族精神病学的接受之间的交流和交叉进行了比较研究。因此，该项目考察了那些表达和反思精神变异经验的地方;它旨在对一个动荡地区的历史认识论进行研究，该地区的特征是疾病实体变得脆弱和可疑。基于对文本和来源的共享语料库的分析，该项目旨在建立一种历史认识论，即在切断与疾病单位的联系后，精神病学知识的形成和稳定。

The project “Alterity and Disorder in Psychiatry and Literature since the 1970s”investigates the mutual exchanges, shared problems, misunderstandings and distortions in the relationship between psychiatry and literature since the 1970s from the perspectives of epistemology, literary studies and history of medicine. This period was marked by a wave of criticism of psychopathological concepts and of the existing classification systems and it led to the introduction of the international, standardized diagnostic manuals in West-Germany, with the subsequent implementation of the concept of disorder, replacing the former category of disease. The project investigates how these epistemic changes communicated both with the self-reflection in the psychiatric discourse and with new ways of representing mental alterity and psychiatric disorders in literature. Since the 1970s, literature did no longer function as preferred place for a counter-discourse on psychiatry and the forms of criticism applied by anti-psychiatry. Instead, literary writing started to explore new strategies for exposing and positioning the alterity of people with psychiatric experiences. At the same time, the international discourse of ethno-psychiatry arrived in West-Germany. The reception of ethno-psychiatric concepts and the first encounters with the ethnography of mental alterity resonated with the ongoing epistemic changes within psychiatry and opened psychiatry – at least partially and in meta-theoretical discussions – to expressions of alterity similar to those explored in the new forms of writing. Our project combines literary studies and history of medicine for a comparative investigation of the exchanges and crossovers between modern literature, psychiatry and the reception of ethno-psychiatry. The project thus examines places where experiences with mental alterity were articulated and reflected upon; it aims at a historical epistemology of a zone of unrest whose characteristic feature was that disease entities had become fragile and doubtful. Based on the analysis of a shared corpus of texts and sources the project aims at a historical epistemology of the shaping and stabilizing of psychiatry knowledge after its connection with disease units has been cut.