Psychic Standards: Psychiatry, Classification, Literature

Dr. Reilly argues that the birth of psychiatry as a medical specialization in the late nineteenth century participated in an original mutation of the relations between psychic, cultural, and social structures. A critical analysis of psychiatry helps enrich and supplement prevailing psychoanalytic interpretations of such relationships. Psychoanalysis is central to our accounts of the biopolitical standardization of embodied human subjectivities and collective formations in modernity. The more socially embedded prevalence of institutionalized psychiatry, on the other hand, is both condition and effect of a wider range of mechanisms for control, measurement, systematization, training, and self-constitution. Dr. Reilly addresses the complexity of this situation, asserting the importance of literary fiction's intervention in the development of a standardizable subject.