Elena Vogman & Christopher Chamberlin - Freedom ◊ Madness: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Psychosis

Between the rise of fascism in Europe and the dawn of decolonization in Africa, a radical constellation of clinicians, philosophers, and artists reconceptualized the causes of mental illness and reenvisioned the aims of psychotherapy. It began by listening to the “mad.” If delusional speech expressed a conflict between lived experience and the crises of modern social life, psychosis had to be treated as an ethical response to dehumanizing conditions wherever they persisted—from the asylum to the colony. By adopting the ethics of psychosis, radical psychiatrists and psychoanalysts expanded freedom from political ideal into a principle of therapeutic action. Treatment could not stop with the care of the individual but had to turn pathological institutions into therapeutic ones—and invent new transferential milieus in which the lived experience of catastrophe could find its place as a mode of existence. Once madness could be heard, the cure became an ethical, aesthetic, and political project.

At the crux of this paradigm shift, a debate raged that reverberates to our own day and age. Is madness a contingent “pathology of freedom,” from which the speaking subject must be liberated to actualize their desire? Or is psychosis a necessary “limit of freedom,” an inherent gap in the essence of the human being?

This talk excavates the origins and terms of this debate about the relationship between madness and freedom. We will excavate Jacques Lacan’s “pre-structuralist” account of paranoid psychosis in his wildly influential 1932 medical dissertation, examine how the psychiatrist François Tosquelles reworked these notions through the field of institutional psychotherapy that he helped found, and examine the writings of Frantz Fanon, who, as a clinician in Algeria and Tunisia, bore witness to colonial extermination as the logical end of the ideology of the asylum, and thus as an urgent occasion for the reinvention of the human.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. A Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar and Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, she is the author of Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Sensuous Thinking. Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method, 2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019). Her current work focuses on the politics of madness and its intersections with decolonial discourse, psychoanalysis, feminism, and institutional psychotherapy.

Christopher Chamberlin is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His work examines the history and afterlife of racial slavery from a variety of clinical, theoretical, and historical angles, with an emphasis on the work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon. Chamberlin is a member of a number of psychoanalytic organizations based in Berlin, Quebec, and California, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.