Diagnosing Modernity

Mania and Authenticity in the Existential Genre

Bibliographic Data

ID3856463
AuthorsSusan Lanzoni (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume12
Issue1
Pages107-131
Publication date2004-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueConfigurations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1063-1801 • E-ISSN: 1080-6520
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/con.2005.0004
OpenAlexW2168781371
LanguageEN
References cited11

Diagnosing Modernity:Mania and Authenticity in the Existential Genre Susan Lanzoni (bio) In his 1930 essay "Dream and Existence," the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, director of the elite Bellevue asylum, wrote: Modern man must build his world in his own heart, after making himself lord and master of his own life and death; and the external world, ruled by nonspiritual, economic, and technical powers, can no longer offer him support. Ancient man, in contrast, neither while awake nor dreaming, knew such primal loneliness in the cosmos.1 According to this view, which Binswanger shared with numerous critics of modernity in Central Europe, the lack of viable communal structures to support the modern individual necessitated a turn inward. This turn inward carried with it a normative dimension, advocating a rejection of superficial and instrumental exchange with the external world, in order to discover the truths of authentic selfhood within. For critics of modern life such as Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer, the self was dispersed, distracted, and fragmented, and only the values of unity, integration, and attention could amend this condition.2 For the phenomenologists Henri Bergson and Max [End Page 107] Scheler, the central self was the locus of authenticity, in distinction to the peripheral, or more incidental, self. Even Martin Heidegger's Being and Time advocated an authentic form of human existence—an angst-ridden grasp of one's own finitude—instead of the everyday, falling mode of human existence with its idle talk, curiosity, and a compulsion for the new.3 One year after declaring the locus of truth in the individual self, Binswanger began publishing a series of case studies on the manic flight of ideas (Über Ideenflucht), which effectively launched the existential psychiatric tradition.4 This tradition brought the tools of philosophical anthropology and a critique of the modern self into the domain of psychiatry, and created a hybrid genre of philosophical anthropology and psychopathology. In this genre, pathology became unique ways of "being-in-the-world," fleshed out through depictions of the experienced temporal, spatial, and material dimensions of the patient's world, or existential structures. For Heidegger, [End Page 108] "being-in-the-world" was an ontological term, a necessary condition for Dasein, or human existence.5 In contrast, Binswanger's use of "being-in-the-world" described the particular manner of existence of an individual subject, or group of psychopathological subjects, and thus was an anthropological interpretation.6 Binswanger's project not only described diverse forms of "being-in-the world," but also evaluated these styles of existence as authentic or inauthentic. Binswanger had ambitious aims for his case studies on mania; as he put it, "'manic-depressive insanity' does not teach us anything anthropologically new about humans, but much more than that, in a conspicuous form and obvious extreme, gives us an answer to the question, 'What is human being?'"7 Mania was not simply a cognitive dysfunction, but a manner of existing, emblematic of the modern way of being. The manic flight of ideas was a vortical or turbulent array of thoughts and rapid utterances that jumped from topic to topic in a superficial and often nonsensical manner. The manic patient lacked a consistent, steady integrating ability, a way of ordering his thoughts and his life in line with his most deeply felt truths. Binswanger's case studies thus demonstrated a new method for assessing the broader existential structures of psychopathology, and at the same time they proffered a cultural politics that revealed the manic as a mirror and indictment of the modern condition.8 [End Page 109] In broadening the context for understanding pathology, Binswanger firmly rejected methods that reduced the complexity of psychological and pathological experience to narrow causal explanations or mechanical interactions. He viewed associationist psychology and its assessment of mania in this light, along with aspects of psychoanalysis that sought causal explanations.9 His training in descriptive psychopathology under Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli hospital in Zürich led him to value depictions of patient experience, and he included psychoanalysis among treatment options at his asylum—a highly unusual practice in Central European psychiatry at the time. After 1927, however, Martin Heidegger's

Aesthetics · Art · Dream · Epistemology · Existentialism · Literature · Modernity · Psychoanalysis · Medical History and Research · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Social Critique · Psychology

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