The Pains of Everyday Life: Between the DSM and the Postmodern

Simon Gottrschalk

(Studies in Symbolic Interaction Vol.   21: 115-146. 1997)

DIAGNOSTIC COLLAGE

The self-inflicted psychotic pollution by a culture will not respond to any psychiatric treatment as long as its main symptoms (regression, dissociation, de-individualization) are systematically nurtured and encouraged by surrounding cultural milieux ... Those of us who live today in Europe and the US suffer from a chronic psychosis whose intensity is still mild. If the manifestly paranoid and schizoid characteristics of our daily behaviors are not experienced for what they really are, it is simply because we all share them (Laplantine 1973, p. 112 -- my translation).

While a growing number of works discuss the mental disorders 2 most likely to afflict the postmodern self, my always-incomplete list of the diagnoses they propose constructs an annoyingly confusing clinical picture. Among others, the postmodern self is diagnosed as anxious (Massumi 1993), schizophrenic (Jameson 1988, 1983; Levin 1987) multiphrenic and fragmented (Gergen 1991), paranoid (Frank 1992, Burgin 1990), depressed and nihilistic (Levin 1987), self - possessed (Kroker 1992), postnomic (Frank 1992) and anti-social (Gottschalk 1989). Suffering from narcissistic pathology (Frosh 1991, Langman 1992) and schizoid dichotomy (Kellner 1992), s/he oscillates between terror and chronic boredom (Grossberg 1988, Petro 1993), panic and envy (Kroker and Cook 1986, Langman 1992), strained casualness and ecstatic violence (McCannell 1992).

Stretched across a variety of psychiatric categories and torn by several diagnostic axes, it seems that the postmodern self could be afflicted by any one of these disorders and by all of them at the same time. But this might exactly be the point . F ollowing Lasch's suggestion that “every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure” (1979, quoted in Frosh 1991, p. 63), and accepting the assumption of a postmodern moment or age, it seems that the search for a postmodern self and its specific mental disorder might be a contradiction in terms. Accordingly, the disagreements between the various diagnoses may partly result from the utilization of a modern discourse of the self to describe the postmodern self -- an entity which must logically elude it. In the following section, I attempt to explain this contradiction.

FROM MODERN SELF TO POSTMODERN SELFHOOD

What would it be like to have never had these commercialized images in my head? What if I had grown up in the past or in a nonmedia culture? Would I still be “me”? Would my “personality” be different? I think the unspoken agreement between us as a culture is that we're not supposed to consider the commercialized memories in our head as real, that real life consists of time spent away from TVs, magazines and theaters. But soon the planet will be entirely populated by people who have only known a world with TVs and computers. When this point arrives, will we still continue with pre-TV notions of identity? Probably not (Coupland 1996, p.112).

Memories are made of Aunt Jemima ® mornings (commercial).

Over the last two decades or so, the postmodern has become one of the most controversial concepts in the human and other sciences, and the topic of a growing number of articles, books, conferences, seminars, and intellectual skirmishes. 3 Characteristically, the postmodern means different things to different people, and it is rare to find two authors who define it similarly. Whereas many dismiss this concept as the faddish articulation of a crisis among Western intellectuals or worse (Callinicos 1990, Faberman 1991, Huber 1995, Morin 1993, Rosenau 1992), others approach it with more curiosity and intellectual tolerance (Agger 1992, Denzin 1996, Dickens 1995, Dickens and Fontana 1996, 1994, Hall 1996, Seidman 1996, 1994a 1994b). Here, I follow Giddens' (1990) approach, and define postmodern ity as the structural changes characterizing post-World War II Western society (see also Crook et al. 1992, Dickens 1995, Harvey 1989), and postmodern ism as the cultural and psychological articulations of such changes (see for example Connor 1989, Jameson 1983, 1984b, McCannell 1992). Of course, both terms implicate each other. Accepting the postmodern assumption that everyday life in post-Word War II institutions is constantly and qualitatively transformed by an exponentially accelerating pace of change which we do not really comprehend and which traditional sociological models cannot seem to adequately account for (Baudrillard 1983, Denzin 1994, Marcus 1994, Seidman 1996, 1994a, 1994b), the postmodern call for the “abandonment of previous social theory” (Kroker and Cook 1986), although radical, should not be surprising. As Denzin (1996, p. 746) explains:

We inhabit a cultural moment that has inherited (and been given) the name postmodern. An interpretive social science informed by poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, and the standpoint epistemologies aims to make sense of this historical moment called the postmodern ... We seek an interpretive accounting of this historical moment, an accounting that examines the very features that make this moment so unique.

Exploring this perceived gap between the modern sociological models we think through and the postmodern everyday we experience, theorists associated with the postmodern turn have also considerably undermined the sociological project with proclamations such as the end of the social and sociology (Baudrillard 1983), of meaning and Man (Baudrillard 1982), of philosophy and culture (Kaplan 1988), of referentiality (Poster 1988), of the self (Gergen 1991), of time, space, methods, truth (Rosenau 1992), of history, ideology, art, social class (Jameson 1984a), of citizenship (Wexler 1991), and of “the rule of the Enlightenment and its Trinity of Father, Science, and State” (Gitlin 1989a). The reframing of those pivotal modern ideas as obsolete yet powerful ideological constructs has further encouraged those seduced by the postmodern turn to radically question the very epistemological, ontological, methodological and political assumptions guiding their own work. Reactions to such questioning have of course been mixed (Kaplan 1988, Rosenau 1992, Ross 1989) and as Dickens and Fontana (1996) note, often emotional. This questioning of pivotal modern ideas also significantly informs postmodern approaches to the slippery concept of the “self”. As Gergen (1991) observes, the dominant modern view specified that the self was a finite, rational, self-motivated and predictable entity displaying consistency with itself and others across contexts and time (see also Anderson and Schoening 1996, Bauman 1996, Geertz 1983, Gubrium and Holstein 1994, Hall 1996, for example). In the modern view, the self could be healthy or pathological, self-fulfilled or alienated, integrated or anomic, but it could be isolated, observed, diagnosed and preferably “improved”. In postmodern theory, however, this assumption is rejected as ideological and untenable (Erickson 1995, Flax 1990, Frosh 1991, Gergen 1996, Grodin and Lindlof 1996, Jameson 1984b, Kellner 1995, 1992, Langman 1992, Lather 1991, Mouffe 1988, Sass 1992, Stephenson 1988, Weedon 1987). Partly destabilized by a poststructuralism positing the self as a constraining cultural imperative, a narrative, or a “conversational resource” to be deconstructed (Gubrium and Holstein 1994, McNamee 1996), the self caught in the postmodern turn loses its footing and mutates into fluid and protean self hood (Gergen 1991, Kvale 1992). In this new theoretical space, selfhood is approached as continuous processes , the multiple social relationships constructing such processes are given priority over the self-propelled and atomized entity constructed by modern discourses (Gergen 1996, Lyotard 1984), and, as I will elaborate shortly, these processes and relationships are increasingly mediated by technologies of simulation and telepresence. Informed by such assumptions, a postmodern approach to selfhood and its “mental disorders” must obviously proceed differently than a modern one.

PSYCHOSOCIAL PATHS ACROSS THE POSTMODERN LANDSCAPE

Pathology is always metaphorical ( Levin 1987, p. 4).

Psychotizing cultures are those which exact a psychic tension and energy which is absolutely unbearable by the majority of group members ... But a the same time, in order to reduce the pathological effects resulting from their own development, such societies increasingly allow compensatory regressive mechanisms whose role is to buffer the perception of a nightmarish real (Laplantine 1973, p. 112 -- my translation).

Psychiatry has consistently sought to medicalize “mental illness” by locating its causes in biology, or to psychologize it by tracing its roots in restricted family networks. Here, I want to re-socialize mental illness by discussing contemporary macro- and micro-social relations which fundamentally destabilize contemporary selfhood, and drive it to a “normal” madness that the DSM cannot (or does not attempt to) fathom. Adorno's suggestion that “horror is beyond the reach of psychology” (quoted in Levin 1987, p. 519) holds even more so for psychiatry. Informed by this first and not altogether original position challenging the psychiatric discourse, I will not discuss the “mental disorders” of postmodern selfhood by using established diagnoses which reproduce the ideological tenet of private (genetic, biochemical, psychological) dysfunctions. Rather, I will approach them as psychosocial paths : dynamic, interrelated and even sequential strategies individuals develop as they attempt to proceed across the landscape (or labyrinth) of everyday life we call the postmodern. This second position positing mental disorders as psychosocial strategies has a long tradition in critical psychiatry, and has been substantially developed in the works of Delacampagne (1974), Laing (1985, 1969, 1967, 1961), Lasch (1978), and Szasz (1987, 1974, 1970) among others. Ethnopsychiatrists such as Al-Issa (1982), Devereux (1980), Fourasté (1985), Laplantine (1973), and Opler (1967, 1959) have convincingly supported the idea that such strategies are informed by culture, and scholars such as Bateson (1956), Laing (1969, 1967, 1961), Lemert (1962), Watzlawick (1971) and others associated with the Palo Alto School (Sedgwick 1982, Winkin 1981) have also advanced that these strategies constitute responses to incapacitating communication patterns between patients and their significant others. As I'll attempt to show throughout this paper, such assumptions are central to the development of postmodern approaches to “mental disorders”. A third position guiding this work maintains that the exponentially accelerating pace of change spinning the postmodern landscape is risk-laden, anxiety-provoking, and all too often painful. 4 While many sociologists contend that the modern landscape could be similarly characterized (Berger et al., 1974, Callinicos 1990, Giddens 1991, 1990, Hoggett 1989, Kahler 1967, Sass 1992, Van den Berg 1961, 1974), I believe that there are important differences distinguishing between the two. One condition distinguishing the present landscape (both human and nonhuman, both external and internal) from previous ones is its saturation by multiple electronic screens which constantly simulate emotions, events, desires, and thus a certain “reality”. Postmodern selfhood must not only proceed across this hallucinatory landscape, but, perhaps more interestingly, may very well experience it through a consciousness which is always-already contaminated -- encoded? -- by the multimedia logic. Accordingly, whereas the classical sociological literature contains an enormous wealth of compelling insights discussing the psychosocial changes fostered by the shift from a pre-modern to a modern moment, this literature could neither anticipate the incomprehensible saturation of everyday life by the multimedia, nor assess the effects of such a saturation on the everyday -- whether conscious or not. Of course, the postmodern “turn” hinges on much more than just this claim of multimedia saturation. The long list of “ends” mentioned above, the palpable globalization of everyday life, the rise of brutal fundamentalisms, the return of genocides, the awareness of ecological holocausts, and the new forms of warfare (see Bauman 1995) constitute some other important interacting trends supporting the claim that the postmodern is indeed a new moment and, as philosopher Bernard Henry Lévy (1994) suggests, a particularly vicious one. Thus, while the multimedia saturation of everyday life constitutes but one term in the postmodern equation, it is, I believe, a significant one precisely because such a saturation invariably mediates our very experiences of these other trends characterizing the postmodern moment.

Combining these contributions from critical psychiatry, ethnopsychiatry and postmodern theory, I attempt to develop in this paper a tentative synthesis of the various postmodern “diagnoses” suggested by the literature. Approaching these diagnoses as sequential strategies which exaggerate more diluted collective cultural dispositions, this synthesis will hopefully promote a different understanding of postmodern “mental illness” than the one enforced by the psychiatric discourse. Following Sass' (1992) extensive study of modernity and schizophrenia, I do not suggest that the psychosocial strategies (“diagnoses”) I am discussing here are caused by the postmodern moment, but only that they articulate interesting affinities with it. The purpose of this paper is thus neither to offer a comprehensive analysis of postmodern selfhood, nor to provide a definitive diagnosis of what it suffers from, nor even to arbitrate between different theories of this or that diagnosis. I am more interested in asking different kinds of question and in encouraging alternative ways of approaching this topic. In other words, this essay seeks to resonate with the reader's experience rather than to “prove” a particular point.

ASSESSING THE CLIMATE: LOW-LEVEL FEAR

The threats of death, insanity and -- somehow even more fearsome -- cancer lurk in all we eat or touch (Giddens 1991, p. 123).

We may now be entering the era of a continuous and silent holocaust (Bauman 1995, p. 159).

Research conducted by government agencies report that the diagnostic category psychiatrists most often assign their patients is anxiety disorder (Gallagher 1995, p. 252), and conservative estimates find that more than twelve percent of the population is so diagnosed. Acknowledging the endless list of problems plaguing the collection and analysis of epidemiological data, 5 it is still the case that most people who become psychiatric statistics approach mental health workers with complaints about states of body, mind, heart, or relations which they (and others) define as problematic and painful, and for which they seek quick solutions -- preferably in the psychopharmacological form. The finding that anxiety disorder is the diagnosis most often assigned by psychiatrists deserves reflection. If, in Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud (1961) argued that increased anxiety was the unavoidable price of civilization posing as the reality principle, Frankfurt School theorists added that different sociohistorical conditions maneuvered this anxiety, modulated its intensity, and encouraged various “escape mechanisms” (Fromm 1956, Marcuse 1955, 1968). Logically then, the anxieties which torment individuals living in a postmodern moment often described as lacking compelling cultural truths, parameters, center or horizon, must be significantly different from the anxieties which afflict the citizens of more repressive yet seemingly more organized and purposeful societies. As Baudrillard (1993, pp. 42-43) aptly put it, “the revolution of our time is the uncertainty revolution -- an uncertainty which covers all aspects of everyday life, including especially the sense of identity.” [my italics]

What becomes of the Freudian “baseline” anxiety of civilization in the postmodern moment remains uncertain, but it seems reasonable to suggest that its intensities must be considerably amplified by a growing sense of “ontological insecurity” (Giddens 1990), and that its trajectories must be significantly redirected among an increasing number of individuals who have not and will not grow up in the kinds of family structure Freudians, Kleinians, object-relations theorists and others had in mind while assessing the extent to which a modest form of mental health was possible at all in societies such as our own (Elliott 1994, Frosh 1991, Giddens 1991, Silverstone 1993). Thus, not only must a large number of individuals living in contemporary society proceed across a vertiginous sociocultural landscape which is perceptibly anxiety-provoking and risk-laden, but they must also do so without the assistance of a variety of adaptive psychological mechanisms which -- it is assumed -- can only be appropriately developed through a long process requiring the enduring presence of nurturing, stable, and consistent parental figures. As Langman (1972, pp. 73-74) notes:

Freud treated Guilty Man tormented by unacceptable desires; today's patient is Tragic Man, an empty facade seeking ever more problematic confirmation of a fragmented selfhood that anxiously experiences itself without cohesion from either within as legacies of infancy or from without in the pluralistic life worlds.

To add insult to injury, this baseline anxiety which must have been exacerbated early on by parental disappearance, unpredictable presence, replacement and confusion, is also materialized ad nauseum and on screen by compelling electronic texts which obsessively repeat stories of random catastrophe, constant brutality, and insatiable desire. Accordingly, the strategies necessary to deflect this constant assault promoting insecurity, vulnerability and lack may coalesce, if only for a while, into psychosocial dispositions which blur once-distinct psychiatric diagnoses. Massumi (1993, p. 24) for example, observes a condition of anxiety which:

is vague by nature. It is nothing as sharp as panic. Not as localized as hysteria. It does not have a particular object, so it's not a phobia. But it's not exactly an anxiety either, it is even fuzzier than that. It is low-level fear . A kind of background radiation saturating existence ... It may be expressed as “panic” or “hysteria” or “phobia” or “anxiety”. But these are to low-level fear what HIV is to AIDS.

I take this permanent and insidious low-level fear as the given, the very climate of the postmodern landscape. It is in this climate (both internal and external) that postmodern selfhood unfolds, breathes, engages the everyday and Others. The “diagnoses” assigned to postmodern selfhood constitute psychosocial strategies individuals deploy in response to this climate.

MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE: TELEPHRENIC COORDINATES

The screen that provides with information about the world's realities, is also a screen against the shock of seeing and knowing about those realities ... A certain reality is perceived but its significance is de-realized...The weightlessness of the image induces a sense of detachment and remoteness from what is seen ... (Robbins 1994, p. 460).

Roseanne Greco, 52, of West Islip , was charged with second-degree murder for killing her husband, Felix, in their driveway in 1985. She insisted at the time that the cartoon character had taken over her husband's body. Roseanne Greco was found mentally competent to stand trial (Massumi 1993, p. 17).

Ethnopsychiatrists and critical theorists have long suggested that understanding a patient's culture was an essential requirement for the assessment of the mental illness s/he might be suffering from. As indicated above, however, any discussion of postmodern culture must assign a central place to telecommunication media. Altheide (1995, p. 59) expressed this point well:

We regard the mass media as major factors in contemporary social life ... Indeed, culture is not only mediated through mass media; rather, culture in both form and content is constituted and embodied in mass media.

Thus, while Fromm (1956) suggested that the cultural dynamics of a society could encourage “socially patterned” neurotic incapacitations, ethnopsychiatrists Laplantine (1973) and Devereux (1980) argue that in contemporary Western society, more serious incapacitations are systematically cultivated by collective hallucinations which are real ized and authenticated on media screens and, unavoidably, the everyday (see also Chen 1987). Elaborating on such claims, theorists of the postmodern (Baudrillard 1981, Frosh 1991, Jameson 1984b, Kaplan 1987, Kellner 1995, Levin 1987, McCannell 1992) propose that the media saturation of everyday life has radically altered the meaning of central social and psychological coordinates such as time, space, the real, the simulated, the serious, the entertaining, self and Others (see also Meyrowitz 1985). According to them, these changes promote a fragmented and disoriented consciousness which displays interesting similarities with schizophrenia or even multiphrenia (Gergen 1991). Yet, while the schizophrenic diagnosis might at first sound appropriate to describe a person's inability to distinguish between intersubjective and idiosyncratic reality (Laing 1967, Sass 1992), the tentative concept of telephrenia emphasizes that both intersubjective and idiosyncratic reality, the very practices of perception, (self) reflection and interaction have already been contaminated by the multimedia 6:

With the intrusion of television into the socialization process, the relation of self to Other has taken on a new quality ... In the age of television, we learn to see Others as if our eyes were a camera ... [and] self-presentations are increasingly intertwined with popular imagery, at times becoming parodies of media images and celebrities ... the Other may be present and within view or what has been called the “Other of the Imaginary”, the anonymous viewers that inhabit malldom or all those folks out there in the television audience (Langman 1992, pp. 56 & 63).

In telephrenia, then, this media presence is not just “more powerful than the reality principle” (Fiske and Glynn 1995, p. 509) but displaces the reality principle and posits itself as the absolute referent. The whole gamut of defense mechanisms are already informed by past media scenarios or anticipated ones, and unconscious televisual flashes or “moments” randomly discharge into an already disoriented conscious, replacing the traditional Freudian slips. But then, does the reoccurring delusion (?) among Western modern schizophrenics of being invaded and controlled by an omnipotent, omniscient, all-hearing, and all-seeing “machine” (see Sass 1992) sound all that unreasonable in postmodern telephrenics? Further, if “delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and flat or inappropriate affect” constitute the major symptoms of schizophrenia listed by the DSM IV (1994, 295), it seems that such tendencies are systematically nurtured and normalized by the media logic and the “space” it hails spectators in. For Burgin (1990, p. 63),

we are in turn bombarded by pictures not only of hopelessly unattainable images of idealized identities, but also images of past and present suffering, images of destruction, of bodies quite literally in pieces. We are ourselves “torn” in the process, not only emotionally and morally but in the fragmentary structure of the act of looking itself. In an image-saturated environment which increasingly resembles the interior space of subjective fantasy turned inside out, the very subject-object distinction begins to break down, and the subject comes apart in the space of its own making. As Terry Eagleton has written, the postmodern subject is one “whose body has been scattered to the winds, as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation or reflex of desire.”

Thanks to the multiplying sockets linking consciousness to virtual sites of interaction, entertainment, and consumption, the blurring between mind and electronic screen is rapidly becoming a fait accompli whose consequences cannot be presently imagined (Gottschalk 1997). By comparison to the psychiatric description of schizophrenia therefore, telephrenia neither presumes an inability to function in intersubjective reality, nor necessarily an exacerbated “self-reflexivity to the point of dissolution” (Sass 1992). 7 As the schizophrenia of the multimedia age, telephrenia evokes rather a radically altered way of perceiving, self-reflecting and (inter)acting in a reality which becomes increasingly indistinguishable from its simulation. As situationist Guy Debord (1977, p. 1) remarked, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.” [italics mine] Paradoxically then, by comparison to schizophrenic symptoms usually described as dramatically visible and audible 8 , the telephrenic ones appear quite unremarkable in the society of the spectacle. As always, it is a matter of degree.

To low-level fear as the climate of the postmodern moment, I thus add media screens as its constantly shifting cultural coordinates . Because such coordinates and the logic organizing them were absent in previous historical moments and minds, I believe that they must be included in any discussion of the psychosocial strategies (“diagnoses”) attributed to postmodern selfhood.

CHOOSING AN ITINERARY: TENSE AMBIVALENCE

Borderline Personality Disorder: A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts ... (DSM IV 1994, 301.83).

Not only am I unable to decide whether something is beautiful or not, original or not, but the biological organism itself is at loss to know what is good for it and what is not. In such circumstances, everything becomes a bad object, and the only primitive defense is abreaction and rejection (Baudrillard 1993, p. 74).

The postmodern climate and coordinates outlined above may also promote a variety of responses which are not satisfactorily explained by DSM diagnoses. For example, Grossberg (1988), Jameson (in Stephanson 1988), Petro (1993), and others have suggested that postmodern selfhood is characterized by rapidly shifting intensities. It can rapidly oscillate between complete indifference and passionate involvement, between intense idealization and devaluation, between terror and chronic boredom. The DSM IV provides of course a name for such rapid emotional shifts towards self-image, others, relationships, future and values. It organized them as “borderline personality disorder” (1994, 301.83). Awaiting the discovery of biological “causes,” the psychiatric discourse usually traces the roots of such a disorder back to childhood traumas such as incest, physical and sexual abuse, the witnessing of violence (!), and early separation experience (see Schwartz-Salant 1987, Weaver and Clum 1993, for example).

Viewed in a larger cultural context however, it seems that, with or without early traumatic experiences, those unstable and potentially self-destructive dispositions characterizing the borderline personality disorder are reasonably synchronized to a no less destabilizing media logic and the everyday it informs. When yesterday's celebrated products, ideas and desires are today ridiculed in favor of their improved tomorrow, when “spouses are being traded as cheaply and easily as used cars” (Derber 1996, p. 111), when continual uprootedness is normal, when our immediate physical space is constantly being redesigned, and when expert knowledge is instantly obsolete, to remain passionately committed to anything is to obsess. In such a situation, relationships and self-presentation are orchestrated with the single purpose of achieving what Bauman (1995, p. 90) calls “maximum impact and instant obsolescence.” Here, intense seduction expectedly turns into indifference, and commitment binds individuals only until further notice, if at all. Perhaps, the most enduring form of commitment postmodern individuals are increasingly encouraged to develop is the serial kind dedicated to commodity brands whose names and logos are proudly displayed on T-shirts, baseball caps, and bumper stickers. As Bauman (1996, pp. 19-24) also remarks:

And so here the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) identity, but how to prevent it from sticking. Well constructed and durable identity turns from an asset into a liability. The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity building, but avoidance of fixation ... The main identity-bound anxiety of modern times was the worry about durability; it is the concern with commitment-avoidance today. Modernity built in steel and concrete; postmodernity, in bio-degradable plastic.

This normalized and constant assault on any sense of constancy is also complicated by the increasingly common experience of virtual interaction which collapses time and space, reorganizes one's experiences of Others, selfhood and communication (Altheide 1995, Turkle 1995), and thus necessarily transforms their very meaning. For Virilio (1996, p. 46), “the fact that one can be closer to another who is far away than to the one who is close by constitutes the political dissolution of the human species.” (my translation) Increasingly immersed in technologically-mediated and decontextualized interactions, chronically ambivalent engagements and widely shifting intensities easily cross over into an already compromised and disappearing “real”:

The question of telepresence dislocates one's position, the situation of the body. The entire problem of virtual reality is essentially the negation of hic et nunc, to negate the “here” on behalf of the “now” ... Here is no more, everything is now! Technological delays which cause telepresence try to rob us once and for all of our own body on behalf of our infatuation for the virtual body ... We confront here a considerable menace, the loss of the other ... (Virilio 1996, p. 45 -- my translation).

Those tendencies which the DSM IV organizes as borderline personality disorder thus perhaps exaggerate psychosocial strategies which are actually attuned to a “normal” but pathological everyday. In such an everyday, selfhood processes are increasingly informed by the logic of a “throwaway society” promoting constant change as its axial cultural principle, chronic anxiety cum discontent as its reigning psychological mood, and instant obsolescence as its ruling economic imperative. When such processes increasingly also unfold in interaction with “telepresent” others, the psychiatric requirements of constancy, stability and continuity (which the borderline assumedly lacks) seem anachronistic. Such requirements assume a macro-social order, an everyday, interactional parameters, and a consciousness which continue to exist mainly in nostalgic discourses.

TRAFFIC RULES: REASONABLE SUSPICION

Paranoia is the normal state of affairs in the postmodern world, a paranoia well-founded on the activities of eavesdroppers, information-manipulators, liars. Nothing and no-one can be trusted; they may know us better than we know ourselves, and will always put this knowledge to their own use (Frosh 1991, p. 132).

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance ... The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimates feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetics. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval ... What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not at all, had been authenticated and confirmed (De Lillo 1986, p. 46).

Today, the surveillance screen tends to replace the window (Virilio 1996, p. 66 -- my translation).

The conditions discussed above also facilitate distinctive rules of engagement while interacting with Others in the postmodern landscape. Whereas Gumpert and Drucker (1992, p. 90) note that “transactions” increasingly eclipse “interactions,” Bauman (1995, p. 90) elaborates that such transactions are essentially narcissistic, mutually exploitative, and partial. Here, one squeezes out as much pleasure or novel sensation as possible from the other and severs up the bond once the supply has dried out, when sensations fail to live up to their promised intensity, or when the Other starts voicing problematic expectations revolving around notions of responsibility and commitment. Narcissistic recognition by the Other has become a (if not the ) sacred quest in the society of the spectacle (Langman 1992), and as Laing (1969) suggests, it is the fear of social invisibility which, paradoxically, activates paranoid disorders. Interestingly then, what characterizes paranoid transactions in the postmodern moment is not so much a fear of the physical harm the Other might inflict, but of the emotional needs s/he might hide, impose, awaken and predictably frustrate.

But such transactions also unfold between highly mobile and fiercely competitive individuals struggling for scarce resources in societies which, as we are routinely reminded, are technologically unstable, bureaucratically terrorizing, economically predatory, politically delegitimized, and decidedly punitive towards those whose usefulness has ceased to fulfill the needs of a late capitalism gone global, supersonic and increasingly ruthless (see Lévy 1994, Morin 1993). As Massumi also argues, this “capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically inhabitable space of fear . That much is universal” (1993, p. 23). Painting a seemingly realistic social life as “a jungle deprived even of jungle laws,” (Bauman 1995, p. 36), the media also normalize an everyday where most people die young, violently, and victims of another's ill will, negligence, or incompetence. According to social analyst Behr (1995, p. 17), citizens “have abdicated to violence in the same way as they abdicate to natural disasters such as hurricanes, thunderstorms and floods” (my translation). As he (p. 220) also remarks, such overall dispositions are well expressed in recent Hollywood trends depicting a world where the rich and the excluded underclass live in close proximity but never actually meet face-to-face, except to murder each other. Massumi's “low-level fear” thus also interacts with and enables a diffuse “paranoia” which the media routinely incarnate as a variety of threatening Others: extra-terrestrials, mutant organisms, natural disasters, insubordinate machines, unsafe buildings, terrorists, “inner cities” male teenagers, rogue cops, dangerous colleagues or members of one's immediate family.

While an individual overtly displaying such fears of victimization would undoubtedly earn a paranoid label, Burgin (1990, p. 64) reminds us that “to whatever extreme the paranoid process may appear to take the subject, it is never far from ‘normal' psychology.” Paradoxically, if basic trust undoubtedly remains the healthiest disposition for the practice of everyday life (Frosh 1991, Giddens 1991, Silverstone 1993), such a disposition might requires an increasing psychological investment in those processes Freud identified as denial, splitting, and magical thinking. But such investments are invariably costly and, as we have seen above, already compromised.

It might also be interesting to explore whether postmodern “paranoids” (Burgin 1990, Frank 1992, Gitlin 1989b) delude about similar types of villain or predicament. For example, although prediction is always a risky business, I anticipate that “delusions of surveillance” might increasingly appear as a common diagnostic subtype in the psychiatric evaluations of such individuals. Yet, such delusions would only caricature a bizarre everyday requiring that we willingly subject ourselves to permanent electronic surveillance whenever we step into the public realm -- the private one being next. From airports to offices, from parking lots to malls, from banks to campus, we have become the preys of an increasing number of real and simulated monitoring devices (Altheide 1995, Bogard 1996). Our every act performed in public spaces can now become captured and made available for reproduction, analysis, communication, and even morphing. Visits to the doctor's office, cyberspace, the store or the library generate instant flows of electronic traces in virtual data banks we'll probably never access. At the same time, we also know that these traces could , in nanoseconds, be retrieved, organized, and combined in any way judged relevant by the computer logic and its technicians (see Lyon 1994). To some extent, the practice of “cocooning” (Ansay 1994, Derber 1996) -- the noticeable withdrawal from public life, the privatization of leisure, the flight behind the walls of gated communities -- normalizes such a condition through paranoid architectural forms (see especially Davis 1992).

Lemert's (1962) classical research on individuals labeled paranoid is also instructive in this respect. As he remarked, these people had often “become paranoid” following a period marked by disturbing interactional dynamics of exclusion and surveillance with real and visible others. In the postmodern everyday though, constant surveillance and the invisible circulation of private information have become normal, predictable, self-validating, extended to an increasing number of life-spheres, and deployed by anonymous others for unfathomable reasons. Accordingly, in his/her firm conviction of being constantly monitored and investigated by often invisible and overall not benevolent others, the postmodern “paranoid” may be only shamelessly verbalizing what “normal” citizens experience mostly as nagging apprehensions. Worse yet, whereas Lemert's “paranoids” could sense problematic changes in interaction, verbally engage their enemies, ask for feedback, or attempt to rectify misunderstandings, the technological mediation of surveillance is increasingly preventing such interventions.

To complicate matters, this technologically-induced soft “paranoia” must be further intensified by the increasingly normalized experience of interacting with bureaucrats who delegate decisions about complex human situations to computer programs which, as we are often notified, crash, err, are broken in by genius hackers, or fall prey to viral infections (Ross 1991). In the meantime, the kind of disposition that can reasonably be expected to develop under the double imperative of monitoring and investigation as sine qua non conditions of citizenship/consumption has remained largely unexplored. But in such a regime, the very diagnosis of paranoia becomes a farce. As Adorno (quoted in Levin 1987, p. 519) once argued, “whether exaggerated suspicions are paranoiac or true to reality, a faint private echo of the turmoil of history, can therefore only be decided retrospectively.” 

TRAVELING SPEED: SO FAST, SO NUMB 9

Schizoid Personality Disorder: A Pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts ... (DSM IV 1994, 301.20).

Just as an excess of pain causes you to fall into a faint or unconsciousness, and just as extreme danger plunges us into a state of physical and mental indifference which corresponds to the brutal indifference of the world towards ourselves, isn't the disintensification of affects (or “movements of the spirit”) in an artificially animated world a ruse of the species while awaiting a better world? (Baudrillard 1990, p. 170).

Note that in thirty brief years, violence and slaughter had increased at geometric ratio, while the human reaction to it had altered inversely (Mumford, 1954, p. 170).

Characterized by the DSM IV (1994, 301.20) as lack of desire for close relationships, inability to experience pleasure, indifference to praise or criticism, and emotional coldness and detachment, the schizoid diagnosis often assigned postmodern selfhood is usually linked to problematic childhood dynamics. R. D. Laing's (1969) seminal work, for example, approaches the schizoid disorder as a developing process which essentially reacts to -- and perpetuates -- family interactional dynamics which essentially incapacitate and invalidate the patient's emerging sense of selfhood. As a contributor to the work undertaken by the Palo Alto School , Laing (1961) paid particular attention to repetitive “schizogenic” parents-child communication patterns which were believed to promote schizoid disorders in the offsprings. 10 For example, among the six communicative forms people can use to “drive others crazy” noted by Searles (in Laing 1961, p. 121 ), four seem especially relevant:

(1) p repeatedly calls o 's attention to areas of personality of which o is dimly aware, areas quite at variance with the kind of person o considers himself to be. (2) p simultaneously exposes o to stimulation and frustration or to rapidly alternating stimulation and frustration. (3) p switches from one emotional wavelength to another while on the same topic (being “serious” and then being “funny” about the same thing). (4) p switches from one topic to the next while maintaining the same emotional wavelength (e.g. a matter of life and death is discussed in the same manner as the most trivial happening).

Replacing “ p ” with a variety of TV programs or the televisual logic itself, and “ o ” with audience, the case could be made that repetitive schizogenic communicative forms also circulate in “normal” families under the guise of entertainment or “information”. For example, (see points 1 and 2 above), the pervasive numbness and detachment characterizing schizoid disorders might narcotize a media-boosted “pain of inadequacy” (Bauman 1995, p. 157, Sass 1992, p. 79). Alongside the list of childhood dynamics which might have nurtured it, this pain is constantly irritated by televisual voices calling attention to and demeaning every body part or function which has not yet been connected to its appropriate object -- preferably a designer brand. Routinely evoked for commercial purposes, this engineered frustration and pain of inadequacy is predictably resolved through the glorified act of consumption by a simulated alter(ed) ego. Accordingly, remarks Langman (1992, p. 71), this postmodern schizoid indifference is actually propelled by envy . As he adds,

postmodern envy is not so much in wanting your neighbor's spouse or even wanting his/her various possessions ... Envy is a comparison of one's own subjectivity to that of the Other. This creates what might be called a relative deprivation of selfhood.” Such a disposition is importantly fueled by “narcissistic pathology ... the extreme expression of normalcy in amusement society where recognition from others has become problematic and often frustrated.

As another example, the quote by Baudrillard above suggests that the schizoid strategy might very well constitute a “ruse” individuals develop as they become increasingly attuned to a “necrophiliac television” (Robbins 1994, p. 457) which both peddles an obsessive “pornography of the dying” (Burgin 1990, p. 53) while simultaneously encouraging autistic responses to such material (see points 3 and 4 above). Switching effortlessly between Bosnia 's ethnic cleansing and professional ice-skating, “the catastrophic and the banal are rendered homogeneous and consumed with equal commitment” (Robbins 1994, p. 460; see also Postman 1985). Does the TV logic devitalize emotional centers -- a little like electroconvulsive therapy at distance? Does it require that we indeed deploy protective mechanisms which neutralize the full emotional impact of a delirious “real”, and thus prevent a terminal paralysis or breakdown?

The “schizoid” strategy should finally also be examined in light of the brutal speed catapulting everyday life in the present moment -- a condition constantly exacerbated by mind-boggling technological developments. Whereas the 1960s slogan warned amphetamine users that “speed kills”, the sociocultural speed at which we are increasingly required to engage Others, the self and the everyday might also induce addiction, disorientation, inappropriate emotional responses, exhaustion, and accidental death (Morin 1993). As a relatively unexplored dimension increasingly guiding everyday life and interaction, speed could end up being an essential variable for a more critical understanding of postmodern selfhood and its “mental disorders”. Like the general weakness, nausea and vomiting accompanying car-, air- and sea-sickness, a constricting of the heart, a chronic decrease in emotional temperature, and a sullen detachment from Others may be at least partly symptomatic of a toxic speed sickness.

In sum, daily invalidated by moronic mantras constantly criticizing every aspect of one's beingness, desperately seeking (simulated) Others' validation, secretly envious of their subjectivity, confused by the media logic which casually obliterates the difference between the catastrophic and the trivial, and destabilized by the sheer velocity of change, one relatively accessible path is to go blank, to develop emotional anesthesia, to achieve “some form of narcosis of the senses” (Robbins 1994, p. 454). The postmodern shrug replaces the modern shriek, emotional cruise control takes over, and radical indifference is mobilized to ensure performance and emotional stability. To put it in a characteristic 1990s slogan: Whatever.

While this numbing strategy or “adiaphorization” (Bauman 1995, p. 149) might be psychologically adaptive in the short run, its long-range impact remains dubious. McCannell (1992, p. 220) for example, warns that this numbing practice is not fail-proof, and that postmodern selfhood can be characterized by a “kind of intense, strained casualness that sometimes fails to hold and is overturned by euphoric frenzy and ecstatic violence.” As Bauman also remarks (1995, p. 156), “an admixture of violence is now suspected and expected to appear in the most intimate relationships, where love and mutual well-wishing were supposed to rule supreme.” Accordingly, if emotional flatness traces a relatively accessible escape route out of a psychosocial war zone, it can also lead to an emotional minefield which, to the surprise of all concerned, seems to increasingly detonate in the private sphere. More disturbingly perhaps, the radical indifference, the objectification of Others, the chronic coldness, and lack of empathy characterizing the “schizoid” move might also lead to a course which is both more methodical and ruthless.

DEAD-END: THE (ANTI)SOCIO PATH

In sociopathic societies, the clinical effort to dissect the sociopathic personality cannot be separated from an analysis of national character and ideology (Derber 1996, p. 24).

But then, when you've just come to the point when your reaction to the times is one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned into the insanity, and you reach that point where it all makes sense, when it clicks ... (Ellis 1991, pp. 6-7).

Whatever It Takes (TV commercial for Digital ® ).

The various psychosocial strategies outlined above might also lure postmodern selfhood to a region which is alarmingly similar to the condition catalogued by the DSM IV as sociopathic 11 disorder (Derber 1996, Gottschalk 1989, Sanchez 1986). Driven by a fierce individualism which is neither restrained by social bonds nor capable of empathy, the sociopath is characterized by “ruthless manipulation, impulsivity, deceitfulness, irritability, aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the rights of others, consistent irresponsibility, lack of remorse, skillful role-playing, and a high tolerance for excitement” (DSM IV 1994, 304.7). Of course, most individuals living in the postmodern moment cannot be labeled as sociopaths, whatever this label means. I am referring here to more diluted tendencies which may be systematically encouraged and more readily accessible in the current moment. To develop this point a bit, what distinguishes the DSM sociopath from “normal” citizens cannot only be reduced to a fundamentally different psychological, biographical, genetic or biochemical baggage, but should perhaps be explained as an individual's willingness to follow existing sociocultural trends to their fatal conclusions. Similarly, keeping with my sequential approach to psychosocial strategies, the sociopathic condition is not symptomatic of a “disease” that befalls particular individuals, but constitutes perhaps the resolution of a potential already latent in the more passive strategies reviewed above.

More precisely, in a situation where anything can become -- in short succession -- an object of desire, irrelevance and danger, in a situation where distrust guides the normal everyday, where emotional interaction is fragmentary, exploitative, and in any case nonbinding, and where immediate pleasure is the only remaining and much trumpeted game in a crumbling social order, the sociopathic move might become increasingly seductive. In its clear and simple rules, all Others are essentially worthless beyond their immediate purpose, and all ambiguities are resolved by the single-minded logic of the omnipotent self (Reid 1986, 1978, Sanchez 1986, Smith 1978). While Others' emotional validation was a primary -- albeit ambiguous -- concern for the schizoid, it has become, for the sociopath, largely irrelevant except perhaps for a primal need to dominate and be recognized as omnipotent. I am, therefore I am (see Langman 1992, p. 53). In a cultural moment when the most damaging verdict no longer charges another of being unethical, immoral, cruel or heartless but of being a loser (another 1990s term), a diluted antisocial disposition should hardly be surprising. Besides, if the DSM IV lists “compulsive lying,” “manipulation” and “deceitfulness” as characteristic sociopathic modus operandi , I can think of very few commercials which do not engage audiences according to these exact same principles. Whatever it takes , warns Digital ®

Deleuze and Guattari (1977) posited the schizophrenic process as an extreme metaphor of, and reaction to, the social disorganization unleashed by advanced capitalism. Here, I suggest that the “sociopathic” process symbolizes a different kind of reaction to this disorganization. Both the schizophrenic and the sociopath retreat from the social, but the latter controls this departure, keeps his (usually his) bearings and acts with cold rage, impeccable control, superior intelligence, and merciless strategic skills. Most individuals living in postmodern society are certainly not those “classical” sociopathic cases who perpetrate the gory massacres so hypocritically deplored on media screens. At the same time, as Laing (1969, 1967, 1961) and scholars associated with the Palo Alto school (Winkins 1981) remind us, coercion, abuse, humiliation, and mutilation are more likely to be experienced -- or perpetrated -- through verbal and emotional interactions between “normal” individuals than through dramatic physical confrontations between ax-wielding monsters and their victims.

Finally, while the sociopath directly and physically victimizes Others in order to achieve certain psychosocial pleasures, Bauman suggests that our fascination for necrophiliac television might fulfill similar gruesome functions: “We live through the deaths of the others, and their death gives meaning to our success: we have not died, we are still alive” (quoted in Robbins 1994, p. 458). If this is indeed the case, the dispositions characterizing the sociopath have become much less distinct than was traditionally believed.

TENTATIVE SYNTHESIS

In truth, what we are calling individual “psychopathology,” and are treating as such, are only the more extreme cases of a collective suffering in which we all take part in accordance with our individual constitution and character (Levin 1987, p. 482).

I believe in invisible dissolutions -- withdrawal among some, sudden regression among others, also a certain absence, a distance, a madness in everyday gazes (Lévy 1994, p. 131 -- my translation).

In this paper, I have attempted to synthesize various suggested diagnoses of postmodern selfhood as dynamic, intersecting, and sequential psychosocial strategies individuals develop as they engage an increasingly pathogenic everyday. As I emphasized throughout this essay, these strategies or paths cannot be explained by advancing individualizing theories of biochemical, genetic or psychological dysfunctions. They are private and perhaps exaggerated articulations of, and reactions to, collective trends which are systematically normalized, albeit in a more diluted form, in the present cultural moment.

To recapitulate, postmodern selfhood proceeds across a landscape constantly shaken by “low-level fear” and saturated by compelling media voices which obsessively recite stories of permanent catastrophe, random brutality, and constant dissatisfaction. Increasingly encoding both conscious and unconscious processes, television and other technologies of telecommunication also cultivate a radical ambivalence and disorientation vis-à-vis, any object, person, environment, and the very experience of selfhood (“telephrenia”). Accordingly, any object can -- often unexpectedly -- become a “bad object”, a source/target of violence, fear, hostility, or abandonment (“borderline personality disorder”). Informing relationships between fiercely competitive and permanently threatened individuals, such a volatile orientation is also mobilized by an unhealthy dose of suspicion, a free-floating and diffuse “paranoia” exacerbated by the experience of constant and anonymous surveillance. While a radical detachment (“schizoid personality disorder”) manages to maintain some control and allows for a “modicum of pseudo-functioning” (Kovel 1988, quoted in Frosh 1991), it sometimes fails to hold and explodes in unpredictable violent outbursts in otherwise seemingly well-adjusted individuals. In others (“sociopaths”), this violence is more successfully controlled, more strategically deployed, and released from all anxiety or guilt.

Viewed in isolation, each of the suggested DSM diagnoses tells only a part of the story -- a particular strategy or “moment” in postmodern selfhood processes. In some ways, if Gergen (1991) suggests that the postmodern self is “multiphrenic” and “fragmented,” I have gathered some of these fragments and have tentatively organized them as an unfolding process. This synthesis-as-process does not seek to comprehensively explain postmodern selfhood and its “pathologies” but seeks to promote an alternative approach to this topic. Further, the strategies discussed here are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. They combine with other ones, inform each other, may produce new ones, and coalesce, if only for a while, into clinical pictures that the DSM IV freezes as static diagnoses. In so doing, the psychiatric discourse reaffirms its fundamental assumptions positing the self as an isolated entity, mental illness as a private trouble located “within” that entity, and the “normal” as equivalent to the “sane”.

Throughout this paper, I have discussed the psychosocial strategies of postmodern selfhood without distinguishing between gender groups. While undoubtedly problematic, such a choice constitutes a response to a theoretical situation not unlike Bateson et al.'s (1956) “double-bind”. On one hand, readers might interpret my lack of attention to gender specificity as a sexist failure to appreciate the significant differences in the experiences of men and women, and the necessary implications of such differences for the development of distinctive psychosocial strategies or “diagnoses”. Criticizing the psychiatrist discourse, many provocative feminist writers such as Broverman (1974), Chesler (1972), Miles (1988), Russel (1995), Showalter (1985), Tavris (1992) and Wenegrat (1995) for example, have suggested that the diagnoses women are most likely to receive (anxiety disorders, depression, multiple, histrionic, and dependent personality disorders) do not articulate mental disorders but express reactions to the fundamental powerlessness they experience in patriarchal society. On this basis, it would then seem appropriate to discuss my psychosocial strategies by also exploring how gender enables or inhibits their development.

For example, are women more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety (or borderline) disorders because they “really” do suffer from such disorders more than men? And if this is the case, should this “real” overrepresentation be explained in social, psychological, biological or linguistic grounds? As an interaction of all four? Should we instead explain this overrepresentation as an effect of a sexist psychiatric discourse which ignores -- and reproduces -- women's social, political and economic oppressive conditions? Alternatively, do both men and women suffer equally from anxiety but express it differently and with different diagnostic and social consequences? Or do gender differences in these disorders result instead from a complex interaction of all these forces? Conclusions are generally ambiguous.

On the other hand, however, differentiating between men and women and exploring how gender inflects psychosocial strategies would tacitly support the no-less problematic assumption (see Irigaray 1993, Wittig 1993) that there indeed exists an essential “woman” and “man” experience, and that such an experience accounts for gender-specific strategies or diagnoses. But if individuals can be differentiated on the basis of gender, they can as (un)justifiably be differentiated on the basis of variables such as race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, profession, and physical condition. These variables might be as important as gender, in any case modulate its effects, and always interact together in complex ways (Brah 1993, Carby 1993).

Dismissing gender as a significant variable might thus be criticized as sexist, but differentiating individuals according to gender can also be attacked as somehow essentialist and insensitive to other differences which may count as much as, more, or differently than gender, in the development of psychosocial strategies. As always the approach one takes with regard to such questions depends on the author's purposes. Here, I have decided to follow the approach characterizing the literature on mental disorders in the postmodern era -- a literature which generally does not distinguish between social groups. It goes without saying however that, being located at the intersection of multiple social positions, individuals will experience the everyday differently and will therefore respond to it by developing strategies which will inevitably be inflected by gender as well as by a host of other subjectivities.

A brief discussion of feminist contributions to a critical understanding of “mental disorders” would not be complete without also mentioning the important parallels ecofeminists have drawn between the pathogenic gender relations enforced by patriarchy and the pathogenic human-nature relations imposed by anthropocentrism (Carlassare 1994, Mathews 1994). Informed by Ecofeminism (Merchant 1994, 1989) and Deep Ecology (Devall 1988), the concluding remarks attempt to ground a critical approach to “mental disorders” in an ecological context, or more precisely in the relationships we enforce upon it, and hence upon ourselves.

CONCLUSIONS: ECOLOGICAL SELFHOOD

Thus, the metropolitan type of man -- which of course, exists in a thousand individual variants -- develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart (Simmel 1965, p. 411).

When you think about the incredible neurotic complexities of millions of individuals and about the cumulative effects of all those problems, you realize that the psychic pollution of the planet is much worse than the biological or technological one (Baudrillard 1995, p. 47 -- my translation).

Precisely because we have acquired the power to work our will upon the environment, the planet has become like that blank psychiatric screen on which the neurotic unconscious projects its fantasies (Roszak 1995, p. 5).

Ecopsychologists and deep ecologists have long suggested that the pathologies for which we get individually diagnosed result from the problematic reactions humans will unavoidably develop upon finding themselves uprooted from their natural environment which they then proceed to destroy. In the Deep Ecology view (Conn 1995, Devall 1988, Devall and Session 1985, Dickens 1992, Maines 1990, Merchant 1994, Shepard 1992), this uprooting constitutes a painful physical, emotional and cognitive exile which in turn provokes ruinous distortions in human consciousness, dispositions, and relations. For psychologically-oriented deep ecologists (Roszak 1995), this uprooting constitutes the underlying neurosis; for radical ecofeminists (see Merchant 1994), the first false consciousness. Experiencing the everyday through unearthly landscapes, frenetic rhythms and inhuman noise, we have come to define the unnatural as normal and then mistakenly equated it with the “healthy.” (see also Milgram 1970) Unfortunately, according to Roszak (1995, p. 2), psychologists and therapists have typically ignored this critical fact as “their understanding of sanity has always stopped at the city limits.” Following Metzner's (1995, p. 64) remark that “the entire culture of Western industrial society is dissociated from its ecological substratum,” I would add that the taken-for-granted belief that mental health and harmonious psychosocial processes can flourish in an everyday which is so ostensibly alienated from and destructive of its natural habitat is itself delusional and symptomatic of this very dissociation. As Hillman also suggests (Roszak 1995, p. 5), we should “bring asbestos and food additives, acid rain and tampons, insecticides and pharmaceuticals, car exhausts and sweeteners, television and ions within the province of therapeutic analysis.” Despite accusations of essentialism (see Zimmerman 1994) and epistemological impurity (see Manes 1990) ecopsychologists also maintain that de-naturation dehumanizes, devitalizes, and extinguishes fundamental understandings -- ways of knowing -- which may not always be socially constructed (Searles 1960, Spretnak 1991). 12 As many thinkers associated with these perspectives also argue, the recovery of such understandings is a vital means and ends of accomplishing the double project of digging out the psychosocial roots of our demented assault on the environment, and of mending our collective psyche. As Bergman (1996, pp. 282-284) aptly puts it,

The issues we face in nature are essentially issues about relationships, and in our own relationships with nature, the same issues apply as in our relationships with other people ... A culture writes its own values into nature...

Synthesizing findings generated through a variety of experiments, therapeutic encounters, theoretical development, and pedagogical practices, several ecopsychologists (Cahalan 1995, Fox 1990, Greenway 1995, Harper 1995, Sewall 1995, Thomashow 1995) advance that ecologically-informed shifts in the definition/experience of selfhood often produce epiphanic changes in individuals' experience of self, of human and nonhuman Others. Although the precise temperament of such a selfhood is not altogether clear, scholars interested in the topic agree that its distinctive traits include mutuality, reciprocity, cooperation, a nurturing ethic, complementarity, empathy, the experience of permeable boundaries between inner and outer processes, and an all-inclusive identification with both human and non-human Others (Naess 1989). 13 If this is indeed the case, the development and fostering of such a selfhood should constitute a particularly important project for a symbolic interactionism intersecting with a critical postmodernism (Agger 1992, Denzin 1996, Michael 1992, Rosenau 1992), a feminist-postmodern psychology focusing on relatedness and process (Flax 1990, Gergen 1996, Kvale 1992, Russel 1995), and an emergent ecological postmodernism (Bordessa 1993, Ingalsby 1996, Spretnak 1991, Zimmerman 1994). Whereas the often-noted spiritual inclinations of this selfhood might sound uncomfortable to some, such inclinations seem especially fitting Denzin and Lincoln's (1994, p. 583) call for the project of a “sacred science.” At the same time, though, the reciprocal projects of developing both ecological selfhood and sacred science can only proceed if such a science not only “links all its practitioners and participants in bonds that are respectful of our humanity,” but if it also extends those respectful bonds to the biosphere at large . Failing to do this, this sacred science would remain literally groundless (see also Catton and Dunlap 1978). In the meantime, it seems clear -- to me at least -- that an ecological selfhood could engage environment and Others in radically different manners than the ones evoked in this paper. On this basis alone, it deserves our attention.

NOTES

(1) DSM refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth Edition. 1994. Washington , D.C.: American Psychiatric Association. For a better appreciation of the psychiatric definitions of paranoid, anxiety, antisocial, borderline, schizoid, and schizophrenic disorders, the reader is encouraged to consult the original version.

(2) Right from the start, I want to specify here that by “mental disorders” I am referring to those behavioral, emotional and cognitive patterns which (a) are judged abnormal, bizarre, undesirable, and odd by either the individual experiencing them and/or by those around him/her, and (b) which are not demonstrably caused by organic or genetic dysfunctions. In this paper, I will focus on anxiety, psychotic, delusional, and personality disorders. This definition thus excludes all those mental conditions judged abnormal but attributed to causes squarely located in the individual's organism. Thus, although discourses about the latter category are no less socially constructed than discourses about the former, there is, until further notice, little controversy between psychiatrists and social scientists about their etiology.

(3) Agger (1992), Anderson (1990), Bauman (1995, 1988), Best and Kellner (1991), Connor (1989), Crook et al., (1992), Denzin (1994, 1993, 1991), Denzin and Lincoln (1994), Dickens and Fontana (1994), Featherstone (1991, 1988), Flax, (1990), Foster (1983), Gane (1991), Gergen (1991), Gitlin (1989a), Gottschalk (1997, 1995a, 1995b, 1993), Grossberg (1988), Harvey (1989), Hassan (1987, 1983), Hebdige (1988a, 1988b), Hollinger (1994), Huyssen (1990, 1986), Jameson (1988, 1984a, 1984b, 1983), Kaplan (1988, 1987), Kellner (1995, 1992), Kroker (1992), Kroker and Cook (1986), Kvale (1992), Lyotard (1984), McCannell (1992), Marcus (1994), Pfohl (1990, 1992), Poster (1995, 1990, 1988), Rosenau (1992), Ross (1991) Seidman (1996, 1994a, 1994b), Smart (1990), Tyler (1986), Vattimo (1992), Venturi et al. (1977), Wolin (1984). Of course, this list is but a minuscule sample of an exponentially growing body of texts which address a multiplicity of postmodern topics from a wide variety of angles.

(4) As Freud argued, “the avoidance of unpleasure may be a more significant motivating force in human behavior than the obtaining of pleasure” (Robbins 1994, p. 454). Support for the assumption of a painful everyday abounds in a growing variety of sources. See for example Bauman (1995), Burgin 1990, Frosh (1991), Gergen (1991), Gottschalk (1995a, 1995b, 1993), Jameson (1984a), McCannell (1992), Virilio (1996).

(5) See Banton et al. (1985), Broverman (1974), Brown (1986, 1984), Chesler (1972), Conrad (1980), Costerich et al. (1975), Delacampagne (1974), Foucault (1965), Ingleby (1980), Laing (1985, 1969, 1967), Rosenhan (1973), Scheff (1984, 1975), Showalter (1985), Szasz (1987, 1974, 1970).

(6) See also Agger (1992), Baudrillard (1993, 1990, 1983), Chen (1987), Denzin (1992), Gergen (1991), Gottschalk, (1993), Hartley (1992) Kellner (1995), Langman (1992), Meyrowitz (1985), Mitroff & Bennis (1989), Morley (1992) Poster (1990), Postman (1987, 1985), Silverstone (1994, 1993, 1989). Note also that this literature focuses only on television. More recent works also address the possible effect of other technologies of telecommunication and simulation such as videos (Gottschalk 1995b), computers (Poster 1995, 1990; Turkle 1995), and Virtual Reality (Chayko 1993, Robbins 1994, Virilio 1996).

(7) Sass (1992). Even though he makes a compelling argument that schizophrenia exacerbates the modern cultural trend toward self-reflexivity, today, it seems impossible to talk about self-reflexivity without, again, asking oneself about the influence of media texts in such an activity.

(8) Scheff's (1984, 1975) work is especially relevant in this respect since he approaches schizophrenia and other mental illness as “residual deviance” -- visible, audible and quasi-palpable violations of unwritten norms of interaction.

(9) R.E.M. 1996. “So Fast, So Numb.” New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Warner Brothers, Inc.

(10) More specifically, the three main schizogenic forms are: disconfirmation (failing to validate an actor's self, actions, intentions and communication), mystification (denying that what an actor thinks, feels, perceives, believes is valid, and attempting to convince him/her that what seems untrue and unreal in fact is), and double-binds (self-contradictory messages). See especially Laing (1961) and Watzlawick (1971).

(11) The terms “sociopath,” “psychopath,” and “anti-social personality disorder” are used interchangeably in the literature and esentially point to the same diagnostic picture.

(12) See also Marcuse (1972), Roszak (1995) and Searles (1960).

(13) Simmons (1993, p. 134) summarizes Naess' Deep Ecological view as follows:

1. The value of non-human life is independent of the usefulness of the non-human world as resources.

FOOTNOTES

2. The diversity of life-forms has a value in itself and humans may reduce this variety only to satisfy vital needs.

3. The flourishing of non-human life requires a diminution of the size of the human population.

4. The increasing manipulation of the non-human world must be reversed by the adoption of different economic, technological and ideological structures.

5. The aim of such changes would be a greater experience of the connectedness of all things, and enhancement of the quality of life rather than an attachment to material standards of living.

6. Those who agree with this have an obligation to join in the attempt to bring about the necessary changes.

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