Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression
By Jennifer RaddenIn Moody Minds Distempered philosopher Jennifer Radden assembles several decades of her research on melancholy and depression. The chapters are ordered into three categories: those about intellectual and medical history of melancholy and depression; those that emphasize aspects of the moral, psychological and medical features of these concepts; and finally, those that explore the sad and apprehensive mood states long associated with melancholy and depressive subjectivity. A newly written introduction maps the conceptual landscape, and draws out the analytic and thematic interconnections between the chapters.
Radden emphasizes and develops several new themes: the implications, theoretical phenomenological and moral, of recognizing melancholy and depressive states as mood states; questions of method, as they affect how we understand and characterize claims about melancholy and depression; and the persistence and force of cultural tropes linking such states to brilliance, creativity, and sagacity. Insights from literature and the history of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are woven together with those from the more recent disciplines of feminist theory and cultural studies. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best-part analytic philosophy, and part history of ideas.
Radden emphasizes and develops several new themes: the implications, theoretical phenomenological and moral, of recognizing melancholy and depressive states as mood states; questions of method, as they affect how we understand and characterize claims about melancholy and depression; and the persistence and force of cultural tropes linking such states to brilliance, creativity, and sagacity. Insights from literature and the history of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are woven together with those from the more recent disciplines of feminist theory and cultural studies. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best-part analytic philosophy, and part history of ideas.
THIS BOOK IS REALLY -REALLY GOOD - MAYBE THE ONE I LOST???
Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural ...
By Arthur Kleinman, Byron GooYES IT IS CHECK PAGE 56 - THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROTESTNAT AND CATHOLIC - ACEDIA BECOMING REPLACED BY SLOTH!!!!
FANTASTIC HISTORY...
Women and depression.
I don't find really interesting except for the chapter 12 - Social suffering, gender, and women's depression. interesting things about gilman, about how women were treated by a friend of Frued's - infantilizing and passive
also notes the gender gap is culture specific - western europe and north america
"Cultural Politics of Diagnosis" interesting as well
psychiatric discourses informing norms
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RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY AND PROTESTANT EXPERIENCE IN EARLY AMERICA
melancholy, neurotic exercises.
The puritan saint was not equivalent to the forgiven Catholic sinner, pardoned, but yet expected to sin again (p. 57)
p. 59 - how they treated their two-year-olds - crushing wills and emerging autonomies (sounds like that disgusting movement I heard about recently about making children conform to their parents' will)
god and parents indistinguishable - to be approahced with fear and trembling
60 - autonom - felt guilty, sinful and vile when acted this way
(would be interesting to do a freudian - lacanian analyses of these things)
p. 60 very interesting
62 - dolorous legacy of evangelical child-rearing (biblical supports etc)
adult consequences
also p. 63
REVIEW:
Book overview
This original examination of the spiritual narratives of conversion in the history of American Protestant evangelical religion reveals an interesting paradox. Fervent believers who devoted themselves completely to the challenges of making a Christian life, who longed to know God's rapturous love, all too often languished in despair, feeling forsaken by God. Ironically, those most devoted to fostering the soul's maturation neglected the well-being of the psyche. Drawing upon many sources, including unpublished diaries and case studies of patients treated in nineteenth-century asylums, Julius Rubin's fascinating study thoroughly explores religious melancholy--as a distinctive stance toward life, a grieving over the loss of God's love, and an obsession and psychopathology associated with the spiritual itinerary of conversion. The varieties of this spiritual sickness include sinners who would fast unto death ("evangelical anorexia nervosa"), religious suicides, and those obsessed with unpardonable sin. From colonial Puritans like Michael Wigglesworth to contemporary evangelicals like Billy Graham, among those who directed the course of evangelical religion and of their followers, Rubin shows that religious melancholy has shaped the experience of self and identity for those who sought rebirth as children of God. _________________________________________________________________________________-- |
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