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Voices from the Asylum
0 - Default Title
Description
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
260
Release Date:
2010-12-16
Publication Date:
2010-07-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
0199579350
ISBN13:
9780199579358
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Weight:
502 g
Height:
145 cm
Width:
222 cm
Thickness:
19 cm
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