Madness and Subjectivity

Dhar, Ayurdhi

doi:10.4324/9780429203237

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…After all intelligence tests were performed on migrants entering Ellis Island which showed their clear intellectual inferiority. The tests will always find something which indicates the presence of universally occurring underlying psychological phenomena, but those results become invalid because they do not consider the phenomenological experience attached to those “symptoms.” The experience of hearing voice, for example, is culturally defined—the presence of distress, dysfunction, and danger mediated by the culture and context one is a part of (Dhar, 2020; Luhrmann et al, 2015; Romme & Escher, 2012). Not everyone who hears voices wants to get rid of them or is terrified of their presence; some live fulfilling lives and have warm relationships with these voices.…”

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is by renovating and re-interpreting the relationship between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims. Their hatred for each other—justified, their desire for each other—understandable, their sense of love or betrayal all exists in in-between spaces—between individuals and groups, especially in a culture where subjectivities are radically enmeshed and slippery (Dhar, 2020). Even within the same person, these contradictory feelings exist simultaneously.…”

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We can easily garb this story in second order judgments (Kendall & Wickham, 1998) and call it depression or trauma causing psychosomatic reactions and her eventual death, but if we don’t hurry into re-interpretation, we find a discourse of materiality, or radical enmeshment and material affect (Dhar, 2020)—a discourse where the mind and body are not divided and then re-connected through psychosomatic symptoms, but where betrayal and heartbreak (intense affect) can directly have material ramifications (death) as seen in research on hearing voices on the people in rural Uttarakhand (Dhar, 2020).…”

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Making of a crisis: The political and clinical implications of psychology’s globalization.

Dhar¹,

Dixit²

2022

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines how the discipline of Psychology creates certain forms of crises, often in the service of fundamentalism and neoliberal capitalism. We trace Psychology's neoliberal allegiances in order to show how uncritical psychologization, through the dual process of interiorization and individualization, has contributed to a re-interpretation of the Kashmiri Pandit refugee crisis in India. The discourse of the Psy-disciplines, most uniquely trauma theory, retroactively re-created the experience of Kashmiri Pandits, and reproduced conditions leading to increased Islamophobia across the nation. The article then explores how similar processes are reflected and negotiated in clinical practice, and how unthinking utilization of psychological discourse can overpower the therapeutic space to reproduce its own ideology at the cost of the client's experience and priorities. These investigations are done via a self-reflective analysis undertaken by the two authors, Ayurdhi Dhar (AD) and Sugandh Dixit (SD), in their respective areas of expertise: the renarrativization of the Kashmiri exodus and Psychology's clinical recuperation of the experience of early orphan-hood, respectively. It is then suggested that in exporting Euro-American theories of trauma, ideas of health, concepts of healing, and values such as resilience and individual responsibility, Psychology intentionally or unintentionally creates certain forms of internal crisis through retroactive meaning-making. We then propose the concept of aproductive suffering, a meaning (less) form of distress which acts as revolutionary practice and as an antidote to this recuperation. Public Significance StatementThis article reveals how the Psy-disciplines are co-opted by neoliberal policies and nationalist ideology in order to reshape people's experience of themselves. This is done through a critical investigation of the "trauma" and the "hero" narrative as applied to the refugee and orphan conditions. The concept of aproductive suffering is forwarded as a way to understand devastation and distress while resisting neoliberal ethics.

show abstract

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conjuring Ghosts: Psychology’s Recuperation Of the Kashmiri ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Making of a crisis: The political and clinical implications of psychology’s globalization.

Dhar¹,

Dixit²

2022

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…But our subject is born in a familial-community matrix which produces permutations of desire vastly different than a capitalist society with nuclear families. The Indian subject is not forced to make binary choices and “in the absence of this triangulation (mommy-daddy-me), the fixed subject whose desire is captured in a reified configuration and who is asked to make an impossible choice, is nowhere to be found” (Dhar, 2020, p. 132). Instead this familial-community matrix consists of one’s immediate family and extended family who share a house (aunts, uncles, cousins), and the whole village.…”

Section: Structural Differences and Need For Decolonizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This type of socio-familial set-up creates external and extensive connections of desire, connecting with numerous partial objects (Dhar, 2020). The people I interviewed, those that the MGMH accuses of shunning their troubled, were vehement about the importance of the family to explain why someone would experience hallucinations, and asserted that family and community were essential to treatment.…”

Section: Structural Differences and Need For Decolonizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The slippery and the sane: Decolonizing psychology through a study of the Indian girl-child

Dhar

2020

Feminism & Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article makes a case against the export of psychological intervention, as developed and practiced in the Global North, to the Indian sub-continent. It is based on the premise that differences between these places are not only sociological and cultural but also at the level of the structure of subjectivity. Leaning on my theoretical understanding of the Indian female subject’s constitution and my empirical work on participants in rural Uttarakhand, India, I posit that our call for decolonization cannot be partial.

show abstract

Hearing voices, but whose? Constructions of schizophrenia in introductory psychology textbooks

Senior,

LaMarre

2024

Theory & Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introductory psychology courses have a broad reach; their textbooks are instrumental in disseminating information about mental distress. In this study, we present the theoretical implications of a Foucauldian discourse analysis of constructions of schizophrenia in six introductory psychology textbooks assigned in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. We identify three interconnected discursive constructions within the textbooks: object-for-study, social problem, and unrecoverable illness. These constructions converge to position people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (PWDS) as sites for biomedical intervention and generate biomedical treatment as necessary but non-curative. Notably, the voices of PWDS are absent from the texts. We contend that amplifying counter discourses and the voices of PWDS is essential to provide the context, meaning, and hope that is missing from these textbooks, and broader society. We work with Mad Studies to present potential ways of theorising otherwise around these experiences—and leveraging this theory in textbook writing.

show abstract

Madness and Subjectivity

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Making of a crisis: The political and clinical implications of psychology’s globalization.

Making of a crisis: The political and clinical implications of psychology’s globalization.

The slippery and the sane: Decolonizing psychology through a study of the Indian girl-child

Hearing voices, but whose? Constructions of schizophrenia in introductory psychology textbooks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About