Encountering Madness. Intercultural and Decolonial Approaches to the Phenomenon of Mental Illness

Organization: Cristina Chitu, Manu Sharma & Murat Ates

Lecture 13.01., 15.00 (3:00 pm CET) via zoom. Please register under: office@wigip.org

Siby K. George (Mumbai): The Disrupted Self: Madness, Modernity and Context
 
Phenomenological accounts associate ill conditions of the psyche/soul with disturbance in its habitual ways of being in the world (Heidegger) or disruptions of the intentional arc (Merleau-Ponty) that envelops the body and connects it with the world. All illnesses involve varying degrees of disruptions of our embodied-enworlded way of being. However, because ill conditions of the psyche cannot be pinpointed to be located specifically in the body, cultural understandings of their meaning, character, and even reality have varied that much more starkly (Foucault). In this talk, my focus will be on how the disruptions of madness are looked at in India after the arrival of modern medicine, and how such an account could contribute to contextualize and decolonize psychopathology.