Understanding ‘Insanity’ in Literature as a Case Study and Philosophical Counseling as Emerging Therapy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53032/tcl.2023.8.6.07Keywords:
Insanity, Melancholy, Pathology, Neurasthenia, Psychiatry, Philosophical Counseling, Talk therapyAbstract
This article is an attempt is to understand insanity, melancholy, madness, sorrow as the offshoots of gender discrimination and stereotype roles prevailing in the society. Such issues, being claimed as the subject of clinical psychology, have been analyzed popularly from the Freudian point of view, but in this paper, the researcher endeavors to philosophize the issue of insanity and attempts to offer a kind of solution to the problem which seems more ethical and moral in nature. The researcher proposes ‘philosophical counseling’ as an active practice to avoid such mental conditions. Since the study focuses on the gender-biased understanding of insanity, researcher will choose only women as the case of study. It is usually suggested by the scholars such as Terry Eagleton (in Literary Theory: An Introduction) and Edward Said (in his seminal work, Orientalism) that any literary work has to be studied and interpreted in its appropriate socio-cultural and intellectual background.
Downloads
References
“Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization”, Official Record of the World Health Organization, 2,1946.
Appignanesi, Lisa. Sad, Mad and Bad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800. Virago Press, 2008.
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”
Benjamin Roberts, “Humor.” In Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. by Peter 10 N. Stearns, vol. 5, Culture & Popular Culture/Modern Recreation & Leisure/Religion/Education & Literacy/Everyday Life. (Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 134.
Beverly, A. Hume, “Managing madness in Gilman’s” The Yellow Wall-paper”, Studies in Fiction V: 30 (2002) (as cited in Much Madness in the Divinest Sense: Madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper’’, 2009, https://www.iasj.net/iasj
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Philadelphia: E. Claxton & Company, 1883. www.https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t4sj20m7r;view=2up;seq=26;size=125
Chesler, Phyllis. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? St. Martin’s Griffn, 2005
Epicurus, cited and translated by Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Frohelic, Heather, “Thus, to make poor females mad: Finding the ‘mad woman’ in Early Modern Drama”, Varieng, University of Helsinki, 2016. Web
Garcia, Christian. (2014). Psychoanalysis and the Yellow Wallpaper. Wikispace.com. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.wikispce.com.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “Elizabethan Psychology and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38, no. 3 (1977): 373-88. doi: 10.2307/2708670.
Marie Jahoda, Current Concepts of Mental Health. Basic Books, 1958.
Marinoff, Lou, Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems. Harper Colllins, 1999.
Martin, Mike W., “Ethics as Therapy: Philosophical Counseling and Psychological Health”, Indian Journal of Philosophical Practice, Vol.1, Issue1, 2001.
Mayne, Mandy. (2011). The Color Yellow in The Yellow Wallpaper. Retrieved from http://patchworknotebook.blogspot.com/2011/03/color-yellow-inyellowwallpaper.html
Michael Miller, Foreword to The Cruelty of Depression: On Melancholy, by J. Hassoun Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997.
Parker, Nancy. (2013). Ghosts Within: The Yellow Wallpaper. Retrieved from http://ahauntingofthemind.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-yellowwallpaper.html
Plato, Republic, trans. F.M. Cornford. OUP, 1945.
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own. British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, 1977.
Showalter, Elaine., Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. Columbia University Press, 1997.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Pantheon Books, 1985.
Thelandersson, F., 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health, Chapter 2 (“A Historical Lineage of Sad and Mad Women”), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_2
William Shakespeare, King Lear. J.B. Alden, 1887.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Duke University Press, 2004.
www.http://www.pinzler.com/ushistory/cultwo.html
www.https://1babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015082533277;view=2up;seq=2.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
ARK
License
Copyright (c) 2023 The Creative Launcher
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.