IN#SANE

DFG-funded project from 2021 to 2024

Together with Armin Schäfer (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Cornelius Borck leads the subproject "Alterity and Disorder in Psychiatry and Literature since the 1970s" within the DFG research group „IN#SANE. The Contemporary History of an Eroding Difference“.

Since the 1970s, the erosion of a semantics of madness has been accompanied by a normalization, but also an increased psychiatrization of mental disorders. This dynamic also captured literature, which was and still is an exemplary site of engagement with mental alterity and disorder. Therefore, this research project examines the exchange relationships, shared problematics, misunderstandings, and fault lines in the relationship between psychiatry and literature from epistemological, literary, and historical perspectives. Starting with contemporary critiques of psychopathological concepts and classification systems and the subsequent assertion of the concept of disorder in the psychiatric system of record, the project examines how this epistemic shift has communicated both with methodological self-reflection in psychiatry and with new representational options of mental alterity and disorder in literature: Since the seventies of the 20th century literature was no longer the preferred place of a counter-discourse to psychiatry, but developed new ways of representing psychic alterity as well as new varieties of criticism that did not merge into anti-psychiatry. In psychiatry, this period also saw a reception of ethnopsychiatric concepts in Germany and first interactions with the ethnography of psychic alterity.

On the work program of the research group IN#SANE:
The history of psychiatry has revolved around the difference between normality and madness. In the recent past, however, this difference has become increasingly fragile. On the one hand, madness gains everyday normality with the opening of psychiatric institutions and the integration of inmates into society; on the other hand, some forms of ordinary behavior such as drinking or lacking attention are pathologized and become increasingly the target of psychiatric interventions. In light of these developments, the established narrative of the historiography of psychiatry loses its interpretative power, which is owed to the very dichotomy that is currently being called into question. This is where the research group comes in. It does not attempt to trace yet another change in the concept of madness, but focuses instead on this erosion of the difference between normal and mad in society and mental health. The overarching aim of the project participating at the research group is to take these recent developments in psychiatry that have not yet been adequately analyzed as a starting point for a history of the present. This goal is implemented by decentering the history of psychiatry, and opening it to phenomena that traverse established disciplinary topics:

1. constellations of actors that include not only psychiatrists and patients but also other professional groups, and activists;
2. logicistics and spaces that, in addition to the politics of public administration and psychiatric institution also include participatory rationalities and thus open up to the life worlds of artistic interventions;
3. methodological approaches based on practices and techniques of interaction that include media theory and modes of appropriation in the psychiatric field.

By decentering the history of psychiatry in this way, the research team aims to gather elements of a history of the ongoing transformations in dealing with psychiatric alterity. In this way the research team IN#SANE intends to write a history of the contemporary in analogy to the anthropology of the present. IN#SANE is an interdisciplinary research team comprising scholars from history, anthropology, art history, literary studies, cultural history, science studies and media theory. Due to its subject area, it has a focus on medical history, which includes in addition to psychiatry and psychology also social work and artistic practice in its research approach.