The Lament of the Subject

It is already recognized that collective clinical pictures are interwoven with the cultural and social relations of an era, with its knowledge systems and forms of ideology. The way in which this connection comes about, and how it is organized from the side of experience, are open questions that are dealt with here. The new as well as the old illnesses of the soul that choose the female body as a venue offer information about the social and cultural demands that individuals soak up in pathological amounts. They offer information in the form of manifold pathogenic bodily articulations (psychosomatic expression) such as eating disorders as well as borderline complexes, phobias, and depressive exhaustion. The female body, as part of the reflective project of subject formation under postmodern conditions, symptomatically reflects the lament of the subject (the lament of the loss of the subject). The female body, in a historically specific way at the turn to the twenty-first century, as previously at the turn to the twentieth, plays out alliances and differences between the "spoken about" and "speaking" woman. What differentiates the psychopathological descriptive forms and gender-typical clinical panoramas of ca. 1900 from those of 2000, and also what binds them, is what will be investigated. The formation of socio-biological medical knowledge that underwent a virtual explosion at the turn of the twentieth century will be analyzed as a specific discussion about the female body. This body of knowledge will be examined for the effects it has had in the twentieth century, against the background of two powerful processes of normalization - the constitution of the rational subject as the reverse of insanity in the eighteenth century, and its gender-specific constriction in the pathologizing of the female in the nineteenth century. At the center of investigation are the clinical case histories, in which various gender discourses of the human sciences meet, mutually define, and regenerate one another (the material will be examined on the basis of discourse analysis interpretation). For contemporary developments, women who have the background experience of a mental illness of the body will be asked for their spoken contribution (individual case studies will be compiled on the basis of hermeneutic as well as scenically understood interpretation of the narrations/statements). At the center of the investigation, in the end, is the narrative organization of one`s own stories and those of others and their significance in the production and presentation of subjectivity.