References by page number: Foucault, Millard,Schmitt, Others
References: Madness and Civilization, Foucault
Self harm
longing to suffer 209
Methodology
categories a la Millard 45
the interpreted body 150, 159
dialogue with unreason 187
organizing empiricism, phenomenology 135, 175
monologue
Madness and the Political Subject
original dimensionality, xi
The sacred circle, exclusion 6-10
self-relation, self interest, unreason 13, 14, 24, 30
self-discourse 100, 183, 245
the human 240
transitionary moments
positivist protection 221
the authority of the doctor 269-278
liberty
mercantile liberty 213-215
co-constitutive liberty and guilt 182, 250, 252
absolution 216, 247
paradox of innocence 219-220
freedoms of madness 234
justifications of of confinement: social security and usefulness 235
madness is childhood 252-255
A History of Self Harm in Britain, Millard
theory as such
“the ways in which we make sense of our worlds, the categories and concepts that are available to understand human behavior (such as self cutting) resonate and correspond to larger political constellations 2-3
presentism 24
law and morality: the Hard-Devlin Debates
empty center — “distress” as an agreeably vague term 124 , 129-
good articulation--maybe quote in bulk at the beginning of Millard section
“this move from socially embedded to internally self-regulating self-harm has particular salience given the political fracturing of consensus around welfare and the ascendancy of a neo-liberal rhetoric of self-reliance” 155
history of self harm generally (stages and transitions)
three phases: uncomplicated wish to die, pathological communication, internal regulation 2
shifting sites: (millard emphasizes location) work houses and hospitals; later general hospitals increase in the 50s, critical but undercovered prior to Millard in the asylum to community model in england and, to a lesser extent, the US 21-22
ideas of communication are not banished wholecloth, but “become bound up in negative stereotypes about ‘attention seeking’ behavior, which is seen as unhelpful by many express on self-harm.” 23
religious self harm, victorian cases 24
victorian self mutilation 41
hysterical communication/manipulation in hopkins, women 59
stengel and appeal-theory vs Batchelor’s and Napier’s broken home theory 92
the politics of appeal, spread, malignering 97
physical injury into social disturbance (transubstantiation) 99
legalization of suicide: philosophical, political-personal, and jurisprudencial 105-106
Kessel’s self-poisoning: clearest ideas of intent (and deception)
1. self conscious appeal,
gendered archetype call for attention
amorphous distress 124, ideas of stress 130
distress
(di)stress projected onto the social situation 129-130
fabricating social constelations 132
genuine distress, genuine manipulation, manipulative drama 134
whole situation 135
mutual constitution and begging the question 150-151
helpful summary of Stengle, Batchelor-Napier, and Kessel (125)
back to childhood 142, 146
definite self harm
emerges in north america, young attractive female impatients under high surveillance, feelings of intolerable psychological tension, often carefully considered and ritualistic 157
OD to DSH
general assertions linking tactics to intentions (drugs can mean death, help, or respite from distress
motivational ambiguity (drugs are ambigious, cutting is a coping mechanism)
visibility (drugs are invisible)
clinical management <O> (some safe cutting, zero tolerance for overdosing 160)
not all british lit makes this distinction
///
secondary gain: prestige, attention, competition, anger
(D)SH: tension, emptiness, and depression, but still social--learend, and stemming from failure of communication
internalized or “suppressed interpersonal aggression occuing in a personality that has a low threshold of boredom and feelings of frustration’. The social environment is very important here, but in a way that bears much more explicitly upon individual, psychological needs--unlikeMcEvedy’s analysis, where the social setting functions more to explain the transmission and imitation of the behavior. 171
DSH and suicide
suicidal gestures vs attempts 163
anti-suicide
bizzare, possibly means of expressing the impulse 165
grouped with window smashing, screaming, swallowing objects 166,
violent activity becomes essential, broad range of female violence 169
anti-suicide: “Reintegration, repersonalization, and an emphatic return to reality from the state of dead unreality.’
“more psychic then social”
survival/hopelessness dichotomy 185
psychic-social interactions 186
emptiness numbness contra tension 181, 187
observation sites
the cry for help must be heard before it can be voiced (31)
importance of observation wards 59,
asylum records and coroner statistics 27-28
the war triumvirate and social work help to produce the social object (chapter 2)
Napier and Batchelor’s: mixed observation, frustration theory (with a few temperamentally disposed appeal patients 81-82
asylum-community-hospital shuffle 99 (see also 101 on decarceration, or lack thereof)
suspect objects 109, 117
standardizing the abnormal 113-117. see also 144
the Greer appeal: internal conflict, environmental stress, childhood and current situation, 147
restraint/confinement
mind (violence, restraint) vs somatic needs 42
gender
hysteria and women 59
casualty department and the self-harm stereotype 69
distress is gendered female 125-126
genuine distress, genuine manipulation, manipulative drama 134
commentary
the dead stillness, the awful skin of anger (shedding skin, shattering, sirens, dissociation) 2
does intent to appeal require a recipient? 92
cannary in a coal mine theory of mental illness, weakness, etc. 98 vs my politicization of self harm as a transformative subject
The Concept of the Political [reference page] (Carl Schmitt)
reference
the individual
romanticism, absolute individualism xiii-xiv
impasses and clustered alliances 43
friend/enemy
definition of political 26
association and dissociation 26
independent of beauty, morality, etc 26-27
the stranger 26-27
no third party 26-27
only the actual concrete people can decide/perform 40-41
Hegel, the enemy is negated otherness 63
public enemy 28, see public self harm 103
contra
concrete, not a metaphor 28
liberal reduction to competition 28
real possibility of killing, not symbolic inner struggle 33
{there is nothing abstract about trying to kill yourself}
re-politicized
regardless motivations, is the demarcating struggle at hand 36
all other dichotomies, if strong enough, become political 37
the decisive entity, regardless..psychic motivations 43-44
[under liberalism] the individual may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish…decided upon freely. 48
die for economics is “sinister and crazy” 48
///
Quotes
the individual
Schmitt’s concept “of ‘political romanticism...is characterized as a stance of occasionalist ironism, such that there is no last word on anything. Political romanticism is the doctrine of the autonomous, isolated, and solitary individual, whose absolute stance toward himself gives a world in which nothing is connected to anything else. Political romanticism is thus at the root of what Schmitt sees as the liberal tendency to substitute perpetual discussion for the political. On the positive side, Schmitt’s conception of the political stands in alliance with the subject of his subsequent book, Political Theology. There he elaborates a conception of sovereignty as the making of decisions which concern the exception. The political is the arena of authority rather than general law and requires decisions which are singular, absolute and final. xiii-xiv, Tracy B Strong
their pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entitieas and associations. He is a member of a religious instituion, nation, labor union, family, sports club, and many other associations. these control him in different degrees fromc case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign. 40-41
[on impasses and clustered alliances] 43
friend/enemy
the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. 26
the distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation {dissociation …} ibid.
it can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. but he is, nevertheless, the other, the stanger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. these can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgement of a disdinterested and therfore neutral third party. 26-27
Only the actual participants can correctly recognize [perform], understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. emotionally the enemy is easily treated as beign evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political , as the strongest and most intense of distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. This does not alter autonomy of such distinctions.
Hegel, the enemy is negated otherness 63
public enemy 28, see public self harm 103
contra my purposes
The friend and enemy conceptas are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. they are neither normative nor spiritual antitheses. liberalism in one of its typical dilemmas...of intellect and economics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary. in the domain of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating adversaries. it is irrelevant here whether one rejects, accepts, or perhaps finds it an atavistic remnant of barbaric times that nations continue to group themselves according to friend and enemy, or hopes that the antithesis will one day vanish from the world...the concern here is neither with abstractions nor with normative ideals, but with the inherent reality and the real possibility of such a distinction. 28
Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely when they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. 33
re-politicized.
the soul remaining question...is always whether such a friend-and-enemy grouping is really at hand, regardless of which human motivations are sufficiently strong to have brought it about 36
every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently storng to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy 37
the political entity is by its very nature the decisve entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives its last psychic motivations 43-44
Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations. to justify a demand on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order and could the individual may voluntarily die for whatever reason he may wish. that is, like everything in an essentially individualistic liberal society, a thoroughly private matter--decided upon freely.
{there is nothing abstract about trying to kill yourself}
{schmitt is allergic to ambiguity, to the impasse, to the internal contradiction...
exception
other quotes
politics cannot be made safe xv
Misscelanius
A&E Responses
unspeakability 755
{an aesthetic exaltation}
“Mackay and Barrowclough assessed qualified A&E doctors’ and nurses’ care of patients presenting with self-harm. The found that the greater the attributions of the individual’s controllability for self-harm, the more negative the A&E staff’s emotional responses toward the person, and the less willing the staff wer to help. Furthermore, the higher the ratings of belief that self-harm would likely be repeated, the less optimistic the staff were about the success of their input. The doctors expressed greater irritation, less personal optimism, less willingness to help, and saw less of a need for training. Furthermore, Friedman et al. found that in A&E doctors and nurses without previous training in self-harm, longer experience of working in A&E was correlated with higher levels of anger toward patients who self-harm by cutting, and less sympathy. Because doctors working in A&E often hold overall responsibility for treatment decisions, it is of importance to understand the relationship between A&E’s responses and the decisions they make. 757
psychiatric diagnosis and belief that the patient was incapable of making rational decisions led to higher rates of belief that they could not be held responsible, feelings of sympathy and empowerment, as opposed to those who self harm in response to those responding to “social difficulties [such as] poor relationships, bereavement, poverty, poor housing”
manipulation and repeated trips to the ER led to irritation, spending less time with that patient, feeling unable to make objective medical decisions 760 {negation/alienation of work}
fear of contagious insanity 761
personal exp.--knowing friends or family who have self harmed leads to more empowerment, satisfaction {non alienated} 761
hyper-management of ““sad” people...from poor backgrounds” leads to them not experiencing stress, falling back on old habits 761
Being Sane in Insane Places
note: in recent years the validity of Rosenhan’s research, like much of the psychiatric and psychological community, has been called into question. however, this does not diminish the essay’s widely influential status as a piece of culturally formative literature, in that it continues to present and contributed to the creation of a specific idea of insane sites.
“If sanity and insantiy exist, how shall we know them? The question is neither capricious nor itself insane. However much we may be persoanlly convinced that we can tell the normal from the abnormal, the evidence is simply not compelling.” declaring states of exception 179
patients recognized that a given person was normal long before doctors dismissed them, and the patients themselves were never detected as false positives 180-181
all abberative behavior is assumed to be rooted “wiothin the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him.” 182
wiritng notes was interpreted as “pathological behavior” 182
patients were beaten for initating verbal contact or expressing affection 183
powerlessness, unable to move, speak without being spoken to, no privacy over posessions, history, anguish, or bodily functions
{simultanious feeling of being under increibdle observation and being of extreamly minimal concern}
abuse behavior occured in open site of patients but not staff, who “are credible witnesses. patients are not” 183
Adolescent Unit
“release” “cope” “get emotions out” 192
copying was widespread but derrided 193
validation of self harm linked to secrecy, severity, not doing it for attention seeking. linked to competition 193-195
conflicted views--what counts as self harm (OD?), attention seeking (‘I’m not doing it for attention, others copying me are’. ‘its for you, except no its for attention’ 195-196
Multiple Meanings
taboo, violation of “core human values” , “cotravene the most basic of human drives—self preservation.”178
coexistence and competition with suicidality {c.r. my note (where???) on language of DSM-5, “non” suicidial self harm.}
trauma becomes normalized, one learns self hate 180
groups at risk: women, though the myth of it being a men only phenomona is obviously false. “besides young people, groups of people considered at-risk of self harm include homeless people, prisoners and in particular, Aboriginals in custody. While motivations mamy differ in these groups they share being marginalized and silenced.” 181
double bind not being believed/not believing oneself/having one’s social environment invalidate you, punished, trivialized, not believed. “the person finds themselves in a double bind—they cannot leave this environemnt, it is the only one they have yet they cannot stay within it because it is invalidating. in this double bind, they feel anxiety and the need to cope.” 182
body as a discursive site 182 (Crowe)
repeated self injury and its management
usually to redcuce tension not kill self, though parasuicid=OD can occur
Uncanny The management of repeated self-harm is never easy. One of the difficulties is that the patients are often articulate and apparently abalnced, and yet carry out acts of self-mutilatin which horrify their carets and seem to require measures to protect them from themselves. this can have the effect of raising anxieties of the staff, and may result in splits between those staff members whom the paitents treat as sepcial ‘allies’ and the others who are trying to treat all patients fairly and equally 2-3
self harm as always problem, the friend enemy divide cutting through the patient, discipline equated with fairness
interpeting the unconcious 3
trying to create innappropriate dependency, alliance against the world 3
alliances
prokaleptic therapy: counter-manipulative, non time limited, pessimism (allows/forces the patient to take the opptomistic position. in my own case this was explicitly stated, and will be admitted to (in this or the other article on prokaleptics) if accused. its not simply a reverse psychology trick.) 3
two strategies:
-retention of responsibility” i.e. not a totally safe environment, build self control
-“therapeutic risk taking” 4
key paragraph: self harm will not be fixed through close supervision, as they will either harm themselves secretly or through conflict with staff and revert upon release. its not about death, but a way to keep living 6
Prokalectic measures derived from psychoanalytic technique