Abstract
This paper offers a critical response to Fredrik Svenaeus’ use of the Heideggerian uncanny to analyse the experience of illness. It is argued that the uncanny is part of a culture of concepts through which the condition of modernity has been analysed by philosophers, social theorists, writers and artists. All centre upon the idea of alienation, and thus not being at home in the society that should be one’s home. This association will be exploited to offer a reinterpretation of Svenaeus’ thesis as a sociological and political, rather than an ontological, one. By reviewing the work of Hegelian philosophers, Georg Simmel, and novelists, represented by Mann, Camus and McCullers, it will be argued that illness is bound up with social alienation, both as something that is caused by conditions of alienation and as an interpretative response to alienation. Seeing illness as a metaphor of the human condition in modernity allows the medical humanities to inform therapy, that would allow the patient to understand their illness, not as the ontological condition of Dasein, but rather as something mediated by modern social, economic and political conditions.
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Notes
‘[D]er Genius der Krankheit sei menschlicher als der der Gesundheit’ (Mann 1967, p. 490).
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw offers a similar sense of the uncanny, in the ambiguity between Quint’s existence as a ghost or a mere figment of the governess’ imagination.
This reading of Freud might be contrasted to that of Habermas (1972). Habermas suggests that at least the young Freud presupposed the possibility of overcoming neurosis. As will become clear below, such a reading places Freud more exactly within the tradition of Hegel and Marx (which is, after all, Habermas’ intent).
To pursue the example of The Turn of the Screw, we may be frightened by Quint, but it is the ambiguity of his status that causes anxiety and a feeling of the uncanny.
The young Lukacs was part of Simmel’s circle in Berlin in the 1890s, and notes his ‘youthful enthusiasm’ for the work of Simmel and Max Weber (Lukács 1971b, p. 12).
It may be objected that the above labelling of a social environment as alienating is vague. The argument requires that there is not merely a social causality, but rather that specific forms of social environment are associated with the prevalence of disease. Such forms would be those that give the individual little or no control over their social and working environment. This impotence may be reinforced through an ideological perception that presents illness and disease as biological (and personal) phenomena, rather than as socially mediated.
As Svenaeus notes (2000a, p. 11), “the limits of the mission of medicine” are at stake here. The sociological argument proposed here would suggest that clinical medicine be influenced by (but not reduced to) sociological research and a critical hermeneutics (perhaps on the model proposed by Ricoeur (1981)), and complemented by a public health medicine that addresses the social, cultural and political conditions of illness and disease. Something of this is found inn critical gerontology.
Svenaeus does note the ‘psychological, social and political factors that might make life unhomelike’ (2000a, p. 11). However, the focus on the experience of the individual patient may distract from the malleability of social and political structures that constitute the nature of disease and the experience of illness as such.
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Edgar, A. The uncanny, alienation and strangeness: the entwining of political and medical metaphor. Med Health Care and Philos 14, 313–322 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9302-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9302-z