Faculty Bookwatch: New Books in the Mind Sciences

Great minds think about the mind! Join us for a roundtable discussion with three faculty authors who have just published new books about the history of the mind sciences that raise provocative questions about what it means to study the psyche in the twenty-first century. Their unique but intersecting work shows how psychoanalysis and the classification of psychological disorders not only reshaped clinical treatment but also transformed ideas about politics, economics, and even consciousness, while changes in the modern world, in turn, changed psychoanalysis in theory and practice. Part of a clinical turn in critical thought, these books highlight the surprising implications of changes in the way mental life has been scientifically studied and represented, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their insights complicate and challenge scholarly work in a range of disciplines from literary theory to the history of science to political philosophy.

Accompanying the three authors to participate in the conversation are three Duke graduate students working in related humanities fields.

The conversation will continue in a Q&A session, book signing, and reception to follow the roundtable.

SPEAKERS

Cate Reilly, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor, Program in Literature, author of Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State (Columbia University Press, 2024). Examining the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, in this work Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. She focuses on modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe that historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity.

Nima Bassiri, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor, Program in Literature, author of Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (University of Chicago Press, 2024). In this book Bassiri shows how norms about economic value came to be embedded in psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the north Atlantic World, such that even today, some mental disorders are seen as economic liabilities whereas others have been redeemed and even revered as financial assets. In this strange way moral value, medical value, and economic value appeared equivalent and interchangeable.

Carolyn Laubender, Associate Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex; Visiting Professor, Program in Literature; and author of The Political Clinic: Psychoanalysis and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2024). In this book Laubender delves into the clinical work of some of the British Psychoanalytic Society’s most influential practitioners, arguing that they transformed the clinic into a laboratory for reimagining race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By taking up the clinic as both a site of inquiry and realm of theoretical innovation, she traces how political concepts such as authority, reparation, colonialism, decolonization, communalism, and security at once informed and were reformed by each analyst’s work.

RESPONDENTS

Britt Edelen, PhD candidate in English literature. His work focuses on what he calls the "pneumatic crisis" of modernity—the discovery of thermodynamic principles and their subsequent application to and governance of human life.

Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan, PhD candidate in the Program in Literature and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. Her research looks at the relations of fantasy, sexual violence, and the colonial encounter through postcolonial literatures, torture cases, psychoanalysis, and theories of violence and desire in Algeria and Palestine.

Mike Sockol, PhD candidate in the Program in Literature and Media Studies. His work engages media studies, theories of accumulation within the Marxist intellectual tradition, regimes of accumulation as a periodizing and historical analytic, and processes and practices of 'digital accumulation'. He has also published a translation of Oskar Negt’s “The Entrepreneurial Man.”

Co-hosted by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and the Duke Libraries. Co-sponsored by the Publishing Humanities Initiative.

Host or Publisher Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University