The Mourning Cloak

Works Reviewed. Cate I. Reilly Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State. Columbia University Press, 2024, 331 pages.

“What does a scientific picture of the head show?”

Or, again, what remains of the mind when the brain’s territory has been painstakingly and assiduously mapped; neuron by neuron, dendrite by dendrite? The map, Korzybski has reminded us, is not the territory; and yet memory is feeble and this tendency to semantic confusion persists. Enlightenment rationality is not guiltless here, enthralled by the mysticism of numbers it embarked on a cartographic adventure of delirious proportions. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno maintain that the Enlightenment consigns all that cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, to the illusory shadow realm of poetry; philosophy’s nemesis since Plato. Subtly, this is a declaration of war on poetry, which, consigned to the dimension of irreality fights back from its marginal position. Meret Oppenheim’s X-Ray of My Skull, which graces the cover of Cate I. Reilly’s Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State, is a work of art which utilizes the technology of modern medicine to frame an existential and epistemological question; what manner of knowing is this, what insight is the viewer granted into the being that is Meret Oppenheim?

Reilly begins with a barrage of epitaphs. A diagnostic schema for schizophrenia from the DSM-5-TR, the aforementioned Horkheimer and Adorno quote, and additional quotes from Michel Foucault and Mieke Bal. I have recently been reading several works on the subject of literary modernism, and in each one there appears to be a sort of defensive posture; literary ways of knowing are threatened by budget cuts, the increasing commodification and entertainment style delivery of knowledge, and the rising tide of AI slop. “Globalization” wrote Gayatri Spivak, in 2012, “takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control. Information command has ruined knowing and reading.” (Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 1)

It is hard to believe that An Aesthetic Education was published 14 years ago; in the ensuing decade and half, the concerns with which it deals have intensified. Spivak’s observation that ways of knowledge management other than those of the humanities have proven more amenable to the axiomatics of electronic capitalism has proven, if anything, a quaint understatement. No wonder that the humanists are feeling under seige, especially when the survival of humanities departments and programs often depend on their ability to justify their work in precisely the sort of narrowly quantifiable terms which they hope to resist.

Reilly positions her own work within the framework established by Spivak, echoing the importance of an aesthetic education as a repellent to the ‘siren song of habitualized knowledge and preprogrammed learning.” (Psychic Empire, 260) She believes, however, that it merits an important addition, as the mind sciences depend on the mathematical anatomization of the mind as a founding premise. “Psychopower shows that globalization does take place on the level of ‘the sensory equipment of experiencing being.” (Psychic Empire, 261) In a sense this is precisely the territory which Psychic Empire stakes out, but in a way which challenges the interpretive supremacy of the clinical state. Spivak, following Antonio Gramsci, encourages an instrumentalization of the intellectual; a more context specific adaption and use, or ab-use, of the principles of Enlightenment rationality. Reilly’s opening quote from Mieke Bal makes much the same point, reminding the literary scholar that classification is not a self-serving aim, but something to be used as an instrument to achieving insight. The map, once again, is not the territory.

The standardized lexicon of mental disorders, therefore, can obscure as much as it clarifies, particularly when the classification of a particular way in which the brain functions is mistaken for an authentic engagement with a human subject. To use one common example, think of the difference between “an autistic person” and a “person with autism.” The debate around phrasing has to do with how we engage with questions of the mind and human personhood. What Reilly is interested in providing is an “archaeology of psychopathological naming.” (Psychic Empire, 2) Acknowledging that psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, and neuroscientific research offer three very different accounts of mental life, she sets aside the question of which one most accurately depicts mental life in order to “consider the literary, epistemological and philosophical consequences of representing mental life in the lexicon of standardized psychopathological terminology.”(Psychic Empire, 3) At the same time she wishes to address a lacunae in critical scholarship within the humanities, where critiquing the psychoanalytic paradigm and Freudian tradition has tended towards neglect of more globally and clinically dominant understandings of the mind.

This is not entirely new territory for the humanities, Catherine Malabou’s important work on neuroplasticity comes to mind, and Reilly sees herself as engaged in a conversation which includes Malabou, Spivak, and Jacqueline Rose. The conversation is about reading literature diagnostically, that is interpreting works of literature with attention to particular diagnostic terms drawn from the categories of psychoanalysis or clinical psychiatry. Each of these women operate from a slightly different paradigm. She calls Rose’s approach “literary-critical” and notes Rose’s careful centring of the text in a way that resists “pathologizing disease narratives.” Malabou’s approach she names “the critico-clinical paradigm,” uses literary modernism as a diagnostic tool. It is Proust who leads Malabou to consider her own experience of her grandmother’s suffering with Alzheimer, and to question whether the brain also suffers, not just the mind. Spivak employs a “postcolonial psychoanalytic paradigm” which challenges a Freudian interpretation of psychoanalysis from a feminist and postcolonial angle. Throughout this conversation the theme of discussion is narcissism, which Rose challenges through a centring of the literary text as an unsettling of and resistance towards clinical naming. Malabou, through a sophisticated clinical reading which highlights the role of war in driving psychiatric research, challenges the victim-blaming model of Freudian narcissim with an account of post-traumatic stress disorder. Oliver Sacks is also mentioned in this context as someone who situates narrative work as an important aspect of clinical practice. Spivak, drawing on non-European culture as well as a thorough re-reading of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, deepens Freud’s reading to point out that in the original myth Narcissus is male, in contrast to Freud’s centring of female narcissism.

Reilly enters the conversation to point out the heavy emphasis on categories drawn from psychoanalysis. While the “clinico-critical paradigm,” represented by Malabou and Sacks resolve the problem of Freudian universality by turning to the biological brain, they then fail to note that the categories drawn from the DSM “produce their own problems of linguistic and cultural relativism.” (Psychic Empire, 30) The question, for Reilly, is not whether the pathologies of DSM are more accurate than those of psychoanalysis, but how a diagnostic reading can proceed in ways which are more self-critical. Against Spivak she only claims that her attention is misplaced. Psychoanalysis is no longer the dominant cultural paradigm, and nonpsychoanalytic clinical psychiatry is equally, and perhaps more, in need of the resources of postcolonial theory. (Psychic Empire,31)

So, Reilly proposes her own approach, which she names “counterdisciplinarity.” The word suggests a proximity to interdisciplinarity, and Reilly suggests that her own approach is distinctive for its view on conflict between disciplinary approaches as “generative, ethical, and indeed unavoidable.” (Psychic Empire, 33) In her own words:

“In the counterdisciplinary paradigm, close readings of irreducible aesthetic objects (Rose, Deleuze and Guattari) form an ethical basis for illuminating the unseen epistemological presuppositions of empirical research about the mind and brain (Malabou) and therby the diagnostic terms such research creates and deploys to characterize both literary works and people. (Psychic Empire, 35)

Taking her cue from Meret Oppenheim’s X-Ray of M.O’s Skull, Reilly reads the techno-scientific hold of clinical control against itself. “The image outwardly seems to be a techno-scientific exposé of bonde-deep female narcissism. While permitting this reading the image also contests it.” (Psychic Empire, 34.) The image and the title of the piece themselves challenge the readers assumptions about what they see, provoking a crisis of self-representation. And with the crisis of self-representation understood as a monolothic endeavour, the possibility of a return of literary practice and the experience of life.

So, we begin a tour of duty which takes us back to August 27, 1824 and the beheading of Johann Christian Woyzeck. Woyzeck is a pivotal figure for Reilly for he is both the subject of early clinical examination, indeed, the fact that he is declared sane is what allows the execution to take place, but also becomes the subject of literary reflection and early literary modernism through George Büchner’s drama Woyzeck. The drama, which Reilly describes as fragmentary, has come to be as a literary case study of schizophrenia and “exposes that the shift from a transcendental account of mental life to an empirical one generated circumstances that exceed Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. (Psychic Empire, 44.) Where Foucault, in Discipline and Punish had used the execution of Damiens the regicide to argue for a modern encasing of “the soul as the prison of the body,” Reilly treats Woyzeck’s case to make the opposite point. The body remains the prison of the soul, and this imprisonment is facilitated by the rise of German somatic psychiatry and the management of public health based on measurement and metrics. For Reilly this is an important site marking the rise of psychopower as a supplement to Foucault’s biopower.

Chapter two returns us to the scene of psychoanalysis, and to the figure of the Wolf-Man, one of Sigmund Freud’s most famous case studies. Reilly is interested in the man behind the nomenclature, a certain Sergei Pankeyev, who besides being a patient of Freud’s worked with many other clinical practitioners and received various diagnoses, including that of manic depression. Why, Reilly wonders, did the title of Wolf-Man stick but not any of the diagnostic terms which he received? Throughout the chapter she tracks the epistemological shift taking place between psychoanalysis and clinical psychiatry; the Wolf-Man making a particularly apt figure because he is the subject of both. Pankeyev was the patien of Emil Kraepelin before he became Freud’s patient.

Kraepelin, viewing philosophical introspection as altogether too fuzzy and imprecise to ground a scientific study of the mind seizes on the “psychophysics” of Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt to develop a taxonomy of mental illness. The important departure from psychoanalysis is that an apparent scientific rigour, symbolized by the use of number, allows the clinician to dispense with the interpretive work that might allow for some cultural and historical specificity in each case. “Language could be set aside in favor of measure and number, which spoke for themselves.” (Psychic Empire, 104). If I understand the point correctly the Wolf-Man’s adoption of the more literary pseudonym, rather than a diagnosis such as manic depression or infantile neurosis, is part of language’s contesting the epistemological limits of calculability that are privileged by Kraepelinian psychiatry in particular. Reilly derives this from an ambiguity in the Wolf-Man’s presentation of how many wolves were in his famous dream.

No account of modern mental illness and its literary endeavours would be complete without a discussion of Daniel Paul Schreber. While Freud and Jacques Lacan made much of the role of the father in Schreber’s case, Reilly is interested in the way in which Schreber is linked, through his mother, to the Woyzeck case, in which Schreber’s maternal grandfather played a key role as a professor of medicine. Schreber, who suffers from hallucinations, is determined to show that these hallucinations are the result of a nervous condition, and do not compromise his use of reason. (Psychic Empire, 147) Schreber, a prominent judge, will experience his own “silencing” by German imperial law in conjunction with the medical establishment. His fantasies of becoming a woman, as Reilly points out, are by no means feminist or progressive, as they rely on the essential validity of traditional gender roles. (Psychic Empire, 157). For Reilly’s purposes the important link is that Schreber uses a logic to demonstrate his own sanity that was similiar to that used by his grandfather to demonstrate the sanity of Johann Christian Woyzeck, which required him to argue that his visions had a basis in objective reality, even if they could not be recognized scientifically at that time. (Psychic Empire, 158)

From here the tour continues through the story of the German-Jewish expressionist writer Ernst Toller, his short-lived six day rule of the ill-fated Bavarian Soviet Republic, and the play he wrote about it. Toller is yet another person who spent time under the observations of Emil Kraepelin, and Kraepelin’s judgement of Toller which emerges between an unpublished medical report and an article in which Toller is not named but is clearly depicted, presents the author as the paradoxical blend of an anonymous generalized and determinative psychopathy and its paradigmatic representative. Kraepelin has to present Toller as sane, so that he can stand trial, but also mentally defective, a defectiveness which suggests a link to the “social pathology of Judaism.” The play, by contrast, does not resolve the question of guilt and responsibility.

Reilly continues on with a reading of Vsevolod Ivanovov’s satirical novel У, a discussion of Lenin’s body, and a reading connecting the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal to Lucrecia Martel’s film The Headless Woman, before returning to the theme of “An Aesthetic Education in the Wake of the Neurocognitive Turn,” in the afterward. Throughout, the book Reilly offers a compelling argument for the case of “counterdisciplinarity” as a method of diagnostic reading in which “skilled humanists” have the “courage to invest in the legitimacy of their own practices” and use these to challenge the hegemony of an anatomized, quantized, and ultimately quite arbitrary and violent clinical rendering of the possibilities of the life of the mind.

Reilly situates herself as a successor to