Cold War Therapeutic Formations: Reconfiguring Political Subjectivity in American Literature

This dissertation considers how American fiction from the years of 1947-1967 that engages with psychiatric treatment responds to the expanding cultural authority of psychiatry and its place in constituting Cold War political and economic relations. Moreover, it examines how fiction from this period considers the possibilities for political agency that psychiatric knowledge and treatment enable. By examining novels by Mickey Spillane, Charles Willeford, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, this project identifies how multiple psychiatric approaches, in particular military psychiatry, social psychiatry, and anti-psychiatry, and their place in fiction, theorize political, economic, and sexual alternatives to Cold War liberalism. Reading fiction along with the works of influential figures including sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and psychiatrists including Harry Stack Sullivan, Fredric Wertham, Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, demonstrates how psychiatry became a prominent terrain for post-World War II writers to debate the prevailing etiological factors of mental illness and theorize new political formations through therapeutic approaches.

The primary texts considered in this dissertation share a skepticism and ambivalence towards biological explanations of mental illness and draw on psychiatric knowledge and treatment methods to disrupt Fordist economic relations and reformulate relations of production and reproduction. These texts, this dissertation argues, consider how pathologized forms of affect can be rechanneled into alternatives to Cold War liberalism and Fordist production in the 1950s as well as the challenges posed to such political alternatives in the midst of the faltering of consensus culture and the transition to post-Fordism that was emerging in the late 1960s.