Inside Out: A Study of Haunting, the Otherworld, Trauma, and Psychiatry

Abstract

The central theme of this thesis is haunting. Every culture has an Otherworld, an exclusion zone where some individuals, things, or ideas are banished, made taboo and repressed. This felt space exists at the margins of society, arising from the social conditions of its history and the circumstances of contemporary life. The past haunts the present, ghostly connections that bind us to what went before. We are all tied to these invisible historical and social effects, haunted by echoes and murmurations that hint at the uncanny rumbles of existence that hide behind dominant ways of knowing. Psychiatric recognition of the effects of violence on victims, whether suffered in warfare or in the home, has long been marked by an oscillation between fascination with and denial of trauma as a cause of mental disorder, especially in the case of child sexual abuse (CSA). This thesis is an interdisciplinary work that makes a contribution to the sociology of mental health. It begins with an autoethnography, a work of sociological introspection and evocative storytelling that enters through the other door to describe my embodied journey with my son through the lifeworld of the psychiatric diagnostic process. This painful narrative of survival and recovery after sexual assault shows that CSA is linked to a wide range of emotional and behavioural problems, including the autistic-like symptoms that drove my son into the Otherworld. The thesis then turns to a history of the present, exploring historical alternatives that still haunt psychiatry as subjugated knowledges and subversive forces. I trace the contingent ways that psychiatric knowledge has become dominated by theories that privilege the inner world, whether of intrapsychic conflict or brain disease, and speak to an alternative approach grounded in the outer world: that terrible things actually do happen and trauma really can drive people mad.