Before Depression
1660 - 1800
'Get Happy! Romantic Psychiatry and the Addiction to Wellness'
Professor Joel Faflak (University of Western Ontario)
This paper will explore how Romantic psychiatry emerges in
order to addict subjects to the pleasures of psychological wellness
and well-being. I will focus on two texts: Wordsworth's The Ruined
Cottage, first drafted in the late 1790s and eventually published
as part of his 1814 The Excursion, and Mary Shelley's, Matilda (1819),
which she sent to her father William Godwin, but which he found so
reprehensible he refused to return it, so that it wasn't published
until 1959. Between them, these texts constitute what, paraphrasing
Jean-Luc Nancy, one might call 'the inoperative community' of Romantic
psychiatry, a place where individual psychopathology is a condition
to be respected rather than treated or wished away. That is to say,
Wordsworth's poem, but especially Shelley's novella, is rather ambivalent
about the post-Enlightenment model of sympathetic exchange that informs
what I would call the time's emergent psychiatric consciousness.
If Wordsworth's text emerges from the vexed Romantic sensibility of
1790s revolution and reaction, Shelley's novella attempts to deal
with the ghosts of this troubled idealism. Written on the eve of a
Victorian period obsessed with the aftermaths of moral or psychological
management as 'moral hygiene,' Shelley's text, like Wordsworth's before
it, responds to the time's increasing attention to getting people
addicted to the idea of being happy. Or as De Quincey was to realize
just a few years after Shelley's novella: the chance to make rather
cynical hay from one's ongoing traumas, the addiction to making sense
of one's psychological problems and thus to acquiring the kind of
happiness that made one acceptable to the outside world, was rather
more than a personal matter.
This lecture is now available to download as MP3 file
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