| Summary: | <p>With the publication of W.H. Auden’s <em>The Age of Anxiety</em> in 1947, a range of intellectuals in America converged on the concept of “anxiety” from different disciplines, using it to hammer out vast, unwieldy explanations of civilizational crisis. It was a response to the Second World War or the threat of the atomic bomb; it was the effect of spiritual drift and economic competition, or fast-paced urban living and a culture of conformity. By 1961, <em>Time</em> magazine observed: “Anxiety seems to be the dominant fact—and is threatening to become the dominant cliché—of modern life.”</p>
<br>
<p>This thesis challenges the conventional narratives of the Cold War “age of anxiety,” arguing that a new concept of anxiety was forged in the late 1930s and early 1940s, through literary fiction and the rhetoric of fictionality, to support the growth of a fledgling medical discipline in America: psychiatry. While the “anxiety consensus” is conventionally understood to be the product of “two currents of ideas” that flowed into the U.S. after 1945—psychoanalysis and existentialism—my contention is that anxiety had already gained purchase on the American imagination in the preceding decade through its production as a “psychiatric fiction.” I attempt to
show how fiction writers and psychiatrists retooled the ideas arriving from Europe to endow anxiety with a new indeterminacy that not only helped to expand the institutional footprint of psychiatry but progressively transposed all social and political values into those of “mental health.” With chapters on Richard Wright, Walker Percy, and Elizabeth Hardwick, the thesis ranges from the neo-Freudian revisionism of the 1930s to the biological revolution of the 1980s, and considers how writers and psychiatrists used anxiety to reimagine the genres in which they worked and employed fiction as an instrument of psychiatric reform and practice.</p>
|
|---|