Why do Americans write so many memoirs about going nuts, about escaping from crazy mothers or about dysfunctional families? This course seeks explanations mainly in the Puritan tradition of self-examination and the popularization of psychoanalysis, both of which contribute to a tradition of introspection. In 1630, the Puritan preacher John Winthrop gave a sermon on board a ship transporting future Massachusetts Bay colonists in which he warned that their new community would be a "city upon a hill", watched by the world. That idea inspired a need for self-examination along with the belief that America would be God’s country (so the more you watch your behavior, the better; you fulfill God’s will or you avoid doing the reverse). The American Jeremiad, the Calvinist self-examination, dovetail with the rigorous self-study and self-condemnation that enter almost any form of psychotherapy in America. The status of individualism and the elevation of the “common man” and woman through the democratic ideals of American government, the glorification of independence and the pursuit of happiness, if not the idea that happiness itself is a right, remain some of the important sources of American autobiography in general, but in particular autobiographies about mental crises. To go crazy in America means to undergo an experience—and often to write about it—in the ways that religious persons undergoing conversions tended to write about that experience in the 17th century and beyond. For additional perspectives, I’d recommend (but it is not required!) is 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 here: https://archive.org/stream/mindthatfoundit00beer/mindthatfoundit00beer_djvu.txt
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 (manic depression) 1995
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) |
