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Why do Americans write memoirs about mental breakdowns, about escaping from crazy mothers or about dysfunctional families? This course seeks explanations mainly in the Puritan tradition of self-examination and in the popularization of psychoanalysis in America, both of which contribute to a tradition of introspection. The status of individualism and the elevation of the “common man” and woman through the ideals of American government, the glorification of independence and the pursuit of happiness, the dogma of American exceptionalism, create an atmosphere conducive to proselytizing the self, such that memoir is king in the American democracy. American life writings about loss of sanity follow traditions of self-examination found in Calvinism as well as forms of psychotherapy, which dovetail in the madness memoir.
For additional perspectives, I’d recommend (but these are not required!) Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010) and Clifford Beers’s A Mind That Found Itself (1908) available free on the Internet.
Students should purchase the following from the university bookstore or an Internet source.
- William Styron, Darkness Visible (depression) 1988
- Daniel Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety (2013)
- Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (1995) OR Kate Millett, The Loony Bin Trip (2000) (manic depression)
- Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold (schizophrenia) (2007)
- Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors OR Nancy Bachrach, The Center of the Universe (2009) (crazy mothers)
- Susannah Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (1993) OR Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy (2001) (adolescent collapse and life in a psychiatric hospital)
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