Power, Self, and Psychosis: Examining Political Subjectivity Through Schizophrenia

Abstract

A meaning‐oriented approach is employed to analyse recurring themes in the psychotic speech of a young woman inpatient diagnosed with schizophrenia in Istanbul, Turkey. The analyses aim to investigate the form and nature of the relationship between the subjective content of psychosis and the local sociocultural context. This article illustrates the significant role played by semiotic processes in embedding the individual sense of self and identity within collective systems of meaning. More specifically, this article highlights the ways in which local structures of power and meaning become intertwined with the sense of self at the deepest levels of the organisation of subjective experience. The notion of political subjectivity is proposed as a descriptive term for that process. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cultural spaces of popularized psychological knowledge: Attachment parenting in Turkey

“…Rather than assuming that Turkish culture is Western or non-Western, modern or traditional (Mardin, 2008), collectivist or individualistic (Hofstede, 2017), the present article analyzes how appropriations of attachment parenting are accompanied by discussions or statements about an individual’s own cultural belonging. How do the dualisms of independence/interdependence, nature/modernity, or individualism/collectivism unfold when the concept of attachment is transferred to a country—Turkey—that is “typically described by foreigners and Turks alike as a nation in between: between East and West, between the modern and the traditional, and between numerous other variations of that binarism” (Rahimi, 2015, p. 31)?…”