Hey, heres a quick post where we can all post our email addresses.  I’ll break it up into reading groups to make it easier.

Group:

Adam – Adamcwagner88@gmail.com

Matt mcf295@nyu.edu

Ruperta

Shona – shonamari@gmail.com

Group:

John scoop.giunta@gmail.com

Gabriel- gabrielseijo@live.com

Samantha- samantha.g.gamble@gmail.com 

Group:

Yana – yana.walton@gmail.com

Jason

Sabrina

Group:

Alessandro

Yitian – yitianliao@gmail.com

Kristina

Hope that helps.

The McCarthy-Adams chapter provided a very clear analysis of the experiences of voice-hearing individuals. I thought the breakdown humanized them and rendered them ordinary people struggling with mental illness. While reading this it occurred to me that we are all voice-hearers, in as much as we all have an ongoing verbal narrative in our heads, but I suppose the difference with schizophrenics is that they feel the voices are not their own, and that ideas and/or commands are visited upon them from without against their will, and further those thoughts may be irrational or illogical….

I never felt that Heller was humanized in Lowboy , from the beginning of the story he was lost to his illness, and because his thoughts were so disordered, I found it difficult to sympathize with his character. I was however, struck by the contrast between the very familiar setting, New York City, and Heller’s very unfamiliar, subjective experience. As with Benji in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I felt distanced from him and frustrated by the logic of his world. Still, in the context of all our readings, I think the story illustrates the fragility and vulnerability of this thing called self, and that an identity can be radically and permanently altered by mental illness

In two or three paragraphs, your proposal should introduce your topic, identify your genre, and articulate the intellectual or scholarly motives for the project. (See Gordon Harvey’s “Elements of the Academic Essay” on motive.) Your proposal might include a hypothesis, but that’s not necessary.

Be sure to include the following (in whatever order is logical within the framework of your proposal):

1. A list of texts you plan to discuss in the project.

2. A description of the methodology you plan to use–and why you plan to use it. You might want to name works whose methodologies will be models for you.

3. A practical research plan–how you will find the material you need: academic databases, bibliographies of works on your topic, course readings, readings for other courses, useful online materials, etc.

Research Databases

The Graduate Center has subscriptions to a variety of electronic databases that will help you with your research.

Three databases will be especially helpful for your projects: The MLA International Bibliography (which will help you find articles about literature), PsychInfo (which will help you find articles about psychology), and EBSCO (a general database that encompasses many fields of study).

The second is the library’s collection of electronic journals. Project MUSE and JSTOR will be especially helpful, but you might also find PsycArticles and Psychology Collection useful.

Of course, you should also use the library’s online catalog to search for books.

Logistics

You’ll submit a draft of your proposal to me and to your writing group by Friday, October 18 (via email). We’ll workshop these proposals in class on October 23. Based on the feedback you receive, you’ll revise and submit your final proposal to me by Wednesday, October 30.

I find the study of individuals with psychiatric diagnoses to be fascinating, and both Wray and McCarthy provided us with a diary of explanation for the everyday life of voice-hearers or schizophrenics. One text is more observational and than less creative than the other but they both capture the sense of what it’s like to perform daily function and interact in the ‘norm’ society.

For McCarthy the information is very linear and resembles the format of a patient-doctor study. One interesting note that she mentions in regards to voices is the fact that individuals who hear voices develop relationships with their counterparts and verbalize conversation as if it were a real person in front of them. Sometimes there is a change in identity. These are certainly not new analyses because I’m sure we’ve witnessed this type of behavior at some point, but I appreciate the way in which McCartthy puts it into perspective. What’s even more insightful is the fact that we can link majority of her points to the character of Wray’s Lowboy.

As a young paranoid schizophrenic, Lowboy believes that the world is in danger of climate change and he has the answer to cooling everything down (i.e loss of hope). The fact that his setting is in and out of the train stations sets the tone for the type of out-of-this-world behavior and the mind-blowing conversations that he has been himself and his alters Skull & Bones. What I thought was also interesting is the sense of  experiences with medication for both Lowboy and Heather (i.e maybe the sense of loss of homeostasis). On page 42, he says “The explanation was plausible and clean, an educated guess, the kind that they approved of at the school. A Clorazil-flavored answer, he said to himself. Clorazil with the Thorazine on top.” In fact the drugs become creative motifs throughout the story which was just brilliant. Also, the fact that Lowboy also speaks in code is great because it plays on the idea of his own identity as an individual even though he s considered unstable.

Without getting too detailed (because let’s face it both texts will allow you to do so) I will conclude with the fact that both McCarthy and Wray go hand-in-hand in observing the behaviors and identity of self when it comes to psychological disruptions.

McCarthy-Jones writing on Hearing Voices is, in my opinion, the best scientific work we’ve read thus far. It was interesting and full of information. The variety of sources made it dense but convincing. I think the most important part was that he quoted patients through-out the work. The one thing that I have difficulty with in both of this weeks readings is that to me it seems to be impossible to understand and describe the mind of a schizophrenic unless you are yourself schizophrenic. McCarthy-Jones quoting the patients made his conclusions more reasonable, having the first hand information.

I don’t doubt that Wray did a great deal of research on the subject before or while writing Lowboy; that fact is clear in the details of the writing. It is a wonderful book and I particularly like that it switches points of view, from Lowboy to the Detective. But I still can’t help but question the accuracy of Wray’s descriptions of schizophrenia. I don’t believe that there is any amount of research one could do on the subject that could make them truly understand, or truly capable of making someone else understand, the experience of schizophrenia unless they themselves have lived with it. I don’t know what it is like personally so I don’t know if Wray’s description of the experience is a good one and in that way I feel detached from the subject and the book.

McCarthy-Jones’ Hearing Voices did help in the understanding of Lowboy. While I do know a little about abnormal psychology my base of reference is very small and reading McCarthy-Jones first gave be a better frame of reference with which to read Lowboy but it still seems that its not enough. With mental illnesses like schizophrenia the individual experience is so different from that of people without such a diagnosis that really getting a sense of what its like to be inside that persons mind is almost unfathomable. I can appreciate McCarthy-Jones’ collection of studies and thoughts on the subjects scientific research as well as Wray’s own research and literary exploration of the subject but I still feel it would be even more effective and more powerful if told by someone who truly understands that experience.

Both of our readings this week discuss schizophrenics from different perspectives but deal with similar issues. John Wray’s Lowboy represents a phenomenological approach to schizophrenia; Simon McCarthy-Jones’ Hearing Voices examines schizophrenia from the institutional framework of the “psychiatric system” (144). Lowboy places the reader within schizophrenia’s experience of the world; McCarthy-Jones investigates how the psychiatric system constitutes the lived experiences of schizophrenia when “voice-hearer” becomes the psychopathologized schizophrenic. It seems both texts are trying to complicate our understanding of mental illness.

I know that I reference Foucault a lot, and I am going to do so again here. These readings instantly made me think of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Foucault claims that the notion of madness as being inside the body, as constituting the individual, is part of the discursive formation of madness of the modern period. The taxonomy of illness, to define it, locate it, diagnose, treat, and relegate bodies with the illness represents a new form of productive power within modernity. (I apologize for the long quote)

“In the serene world of mental illness, modem man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence” (x-xi).

McCarthy-Jones, who seeks to find space for the “voice-hearers” within modern society wherein hearing voices is not “pathological” but an inability to cope “can be labelled illness,” seems to align with Foucault against “the constitution of madness as a mental illness” (145). McCarthy-Jones appears to offer a practical solutions to undo the social and individual stigma of pathologizing schizophrenia. Nevertheless, McCarthy-Jones situates voice hearing within a schema of “recovery,” which resumes “a monologue of reason about madness” by simply establishing a new demarcation of “being a patient voice-hearer” from “a healthy voice hearing” (145). McCarthy-Jones’ good faith approach to help schizophrenics conform their condition within normative society still takes up psychology’s discourse; it still sees the condition of hearing voices as a condition to be treated. To the psychologist the schizophrenic subject’s inherent ontology is within the realm of the pathological. McCarthy-Jones’ may be working against the stigma of pathology but his analysis derives from legible categories of psychopathology: behaviors, statements, ideations, are still categorized and subjected to professional scrutiny. The subject as a “patient” must seek recovery through the psychologist’s humanized regimen. The patient continues to possess an illness that needs sterilization. Foucault’s genealogy of madness complicates this binary by arguing that the taxonomy of mental illness has a history; that before it represented a malady “within man,” madness was a link to the “subterranean,” existing outside of the body that could be accessed in order to retrieve the truth of the world (26). The discursive shift of madness occurs when the madman becomes the mentally ill, a subject in need of profession help.

Looking back at The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt has some interesting things to say about schizophrenia. In contrast to Hegel, who reasons that “our self-consciousness is rooted in relations between the self and other,” for “some schizophrenics” the concept of self-consciousness has no basis since “‘I’ and ‘you’ become confused or meaningless” (76-77). On the one hand, we can view the lived experience of schizophrenia as perversion of consciousness; on the other, the concept consciousness as existing and emanating from within the self is unsatisfactory from the perspective of the schizophrenic. The ontology of schizophrenia, in other words, expresses the limitations of “self” as a isolatable concept. Moreover, Hudstvedt brings up Ian Hacking’s proposition that psychological diagnoses “affects people” (148). Similar to McCarthy-Jones’ argument, being labeled schizophrenic will place the subject within “the subculture of psychiatry” (149). In other words, the subject is placed within the arena of psychiatric observation and induced into incessant confessions of his/her illness. The diagnosis of schizophrenia is not simply reference to a natural biological affliction. It both effects new outcomes and regimen of behaviors, which will be thoroughly researched and analyzed as well as affects how the individual thinks about him/herself. The diagnosis of schizophrenia does not elicit the truth of the subject; instead, the “schizophrenic’s” identity is subjected to the organizational, institutional, and discursive power embedded within the epistemology of schizophrenia. As a result, the possibility of escaping the bounds of the Hegelian dialectical identity is denied; that “meaningless” terrain described by Hustvedt is no longer acceptable. Instead, identity is supplanted by the psycopathological binary: the abnormal “schizophrenic” and the normal “you.”

The diagnosis of schizophrenia is not simply a symbolic supplantation of identity; it places within the body legible traits that are dangerous to society, and therefore must be medicalized and quarantined. The novel Lowboy articulates the “psychological” (and sociological, why not?) damage that the labeling of schizophrenia inflicts. The book is not about how meds or psychotherapeutic treatment improve the life of William Heller. It tells instead a tragic story of the newly diagnosed schizophrenic reentering the world as a schizophrenic. But at the same time, it Wray wants to complicate our notion of schizophrenia. After suffering what is most likely a concussion, the detective Ali Lateef hears a voice, “I’m Rufus White, he thought suddenly. The thought came to him in an odd voice, faraway but insistent, like the thoughts that sometimes visited him as he fell asleep, or the voices reportedly heard by schizophrenics” (152). What’s fascinating about this moment is the simultaneous acquisition and admission of a legible schizophrenic trait as well as Lateef’s dismissal of its existence inside of him. Nevertheless, Lateef reads his internal phenomenon as evidence of a possible alteration of self: “He’ll change me too if I allow it, he thought. Maybe he already has” (152). This moment suggests the unspoken logic for the treatment of psychosis: that madness is contagious and must be subjected to quarantined professional scrutiny so that it does not infect normal society.

The possibility to return to a world where mental illness loses its meaning as a relevant signifier seems impractical. In this light, McCarthy-Jones’ prescribed solutions for undoing the negative effects of the psychiatric system may be a step in the right direction for now. However, I can’t see how inventing euphemisms solve the problem. Substituting “voice-hearer” for “schizophrenia” does not diminish the diagnosis; rather it functions as pseudo-psychiatric sublimation, by fulfilling the suppressed urge of diagnosing. Psychiatry will not willingly self-destruct, nor will the value we place (including myself) on their role in making us more productive citizens subside. What we could do is perhaps stop inventing individuated selves, or at least recognize that the notion of a “true self” is social construct.

This week’s readings can put into question the aspect of “true self” that was discussed in earlier class discussions. Is a notion of “true self” created for individuals dealing with the hearing of voices? McCarthy-Jones describes the coming to self as part of the process of coping with such a condition; Lowboy in a way used the voices in his head to push forward with his quest. It would appear that the general identity of individuals could be considered that part of our personality that interacts with the rest of our personalities. In the case of Lowboy, that part of him that realized the aspects of his mental state and interacted with the different voices and characters that conflicted with his mind.

In my personal experience, the last five years of my grandmother’s life were populated with tactile hallucinations, and on occasions it very much helped catching her attention and remembering her of her mental state, which resulted in the continuance of the hallucinations, but with a more balanced ratio from that mental state and her mindfulness.

I felt that Wray’s narrative capacity to describe scenes in the story through senses other than sight gave the notion of consciousness a whole other spectrum. His descriptions of the weather in relation to the body recognized the necessary relationship of body, mind, surrounding; and the constant description of places through their smell got me thinking of Damasio’s biological explanation of memory storage and image filing in the brain. Places that smell similarly will be recalled through memory when that particular odor is sensed. I feel that John Wray’s style of description goes in hand with Noe’s conception of the relationship of body, mind, surroundings, and got me to thinking: is that part of our identity that interacts with our variant personalities something that can be considered the “true self”?

I thought it might be interesting to compare John Wray’s representation of Will’s psychotic experience in Lowboy with that of Septimus Smith, the  shellshocked character in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. This is a famous passage from Woolf’s novel,  in which Clarissa and the shellshocked Septimus Smith–strangers to each other–seem to share a perceptual experience “drumming” through London:

Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. (205)

Compare Woolf’s passage with from this scene from Wray’s novel,  in which Heather Covington (aka Rafa) and Will fail to divest him of his virginity:

Blood was rushing to Lowboy’s head like steam from a boiler as he let himself be dragged into the dark. Heather Covington was a few steps ahead of him, whispering to herself affectionately, moving carefully along the tunnel’s concrete seam. The last feeble light lapped against her. He could just make out her feet in their cellophane leggings, rustling with each step she took, as though she were picking her way through fallen leaves.

The tunnel was wide and straight and the lights of the A took a long time to fade. It got warmer and tamper and soon it go too warm to breathe. The world is inside me, Lowboy said to himself, and I am inside the world. He opened his mouth but no air entered it. (63)

Notice how both Septimus and Will feel the world’s stimulus in their bodies. In both cases, the conflict that drives their psychotic quests involves an embodiment of world crises. They feel their bodies as vehicles for the crises. Following from our conversations and readings in class, it seems these representations of psychosis involve acute forms of the relation between “brain, body, and world” (in Noë’s words) or “organism and object” (in Damasio’s).

Of course, both characters experience the disruption of “basic human needs” and a worsening of symptoms under the care of medical professionals described by McCarthy-Jones.

I found McCarthy-Jones’ comparative outline of qualitative research literature with Romme’s emancipation approach provided a framework from which to absorb the significance of Wray’s work of fiction. McCarthy Jones’ analysis acted as somewhat of an anchor for navigating the sometimes winding, wobbly road of Lowboy’s fictional narrative.  To me, McCarthy-Jones’ discussion of some of the outcomes of voice-hearing or psychotic person’s becoming patients in the mental health system revealed details for understanding further what might have been experienced by the fictional characters Lowboy and his mother.

In Lowboy, I found it less dizzying to stay in tune with the chapters delivered through the perspective of Lateef and Violet/Yda’s journey than those composed through the lens of Lowboy/William himself. The sections portraying Lowboy’s condition during his subterranean psychotic spree seemed to effectively envelope the reader into the non-stop disarray of his consciousness, as I often felt a headache coming on during certain sections.

Lowboy’s relationship with his voices was one of importance to his identity, (or what he knew of his identity as an adolescent), and certainly did not seem to be rejected by him as a way of “trying to maintain a sense of self”, (McCarthy,135). Skull and Bones were pivotal keepers of Lowboy’s understanding of his purpose in solving the global temperature crisis. I read Covington/Rafa as a heard voice, but also the Sikh man and the Dutchman (?) Although voice-hearing is not detailed in  Yda’s experience with her illness, it would seem that she rejected her voices as much as possible in order to keep a semblance of agency in her role as caregiver; and in her desire to be viewed as a “whole person” (McCarthy,140), without abdicating autonomy.

McCarthy Jones documents the de-humanizing often debilitating affect of the mental healthcare system on voice-hearers. Similarly, Wray’s depiction certainly conveys the tragedy of unmanaged or mismanaged schizophrenia. One can imagine how Romme’s emancipation approach might have provided a path of alleviation for characters such as Lowboy and perhaps his mother. The ability to harness the individual’s capacity for transforming voice-hearing into a functional facet of self-understanding rather than an impediment to such seems logical and perhaps feasible. While McCarthy points out this approach still requires more empirical research to create solid and broad psychiatric application, it would seem to make a lot more sense than the de-dismantling of selfhood which occurs in treatment commonly administered in the mental health system.

Voice-hearing represents an important aspect of selfhood, for those diagnosed with this condition, which despite its functional flaws in “normal” reality, needs to be embraced and re-worked in a way that allows for the ill patient to preserve and further nourish their sense of self and identity. Where in the voice-hearer’s consciousness lies the autobiographical self? Or might they perhaps benefit from a concert of autobiographical accounts of the world housed within one mind, brain and body?

Instead of reading a fully fleshed out theoretical argument such as those we have been reading over the previous few weeks, this week I feel as if I’m reading a psychological test, and the wheel that is supposed to help me understand my personality is likely to be the birth chart that tells me how the horoscopes are aligned for my birthday. This may sound not serious, but Carter states her points in a very easy way for me to understand. Daily life examples that she addresses in the Personality Wheel pictures ideas such as major-minor and double major in my mind. Like what McAdams said, a person’s character is ever-changing during his or her lifetime, in terms such as those of personalities and social roles. Multi-personalities can exist in one body and one mind due to the different roles that one is taking in that moment of time and space.