Carol-Ann Farkas's Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular Culture: PDF

Pain. persistent digestive signs. bad sleep. Neuropathy. Sensory disturbances. Fatigue. Panic. consistent disorder and pain. widespread hassle dealing with paintings, university, relationships.

Despite the typical adventure of being instructed that it’s all of their heads, that they’re just making themselves sick, people with those indicators are experiencing a truly actual, occasionally debilitating, disorder phenomenon. yet what's it? actual or psychological affliction? Political or social identification? Cultural, narrative, or discursive development? whilst whatever is going awry on the intersection of brain and physique – the psychosomatic – what's occurring?

Widely famous, but tricky to categorise, diagnose, deal with, and clarify, psychosomatic problems are seriously stigmatized, and the linked syndromes became the positioning of controversy and antipathy within the provider–patient courting. In pop culture, phrases comparable to medically unexplained signs, hysteria, neurasthenia, hypochondria, sensible disease, and malingering are misunderstood, unknown, or rejected outright. in the meantime, views from cultural and textual experiences concentrate on the psychosomatic as a metaphor in artwork, literature, and renowned media, the place disruptions of the physique and brain are on a regular basis made to face in for person alienation and cultural malaise. Bringing jointly a number of views, this demanding quantity tackles factors, and cutting edge, humanistic strategies, to conflicts within the provider–patient courting; makes use of the psychosomatic as a lens for theorizing the self in tradition; and examines the metaphorical strength of the psychosomatic in fictional narrative.

Providing a distinct assemblage of interdisciplinary, overseas techniques to realizing the matter of the psychosomatic in either specialist and lay discourses, this pioneering edited assortment is geared toward scholars and researchers of healthiness, pop culture, and the well-being care humanities.