02 - American Association of Comparative Literature,
March 26-29, 2015

Session: Mental Illness in the literature of the Symbolist Movement
Organizer: Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois at Springfield


Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was a medical doctor who was especially interested in neurology and made a considerable contribution to this field. Modern psychiatry owes him a great deal. While studying neurology
Charcot realized that neurology is closely connected to psychology. He was the one who was the first to state the importance of studying the subconscious. He perceived neurological disorders and mental illness, as
a kind of invisible pathologies that inhabit the human unconsciousness and manifest themselves at the time of psychological traumas. Charcot was also a discoverer of hypnosis, which was not used before him as a
treatment. Mental pathologies that lay invisible within the human psyche became the center of attention of Charcot's studies. He was interested in dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, madness and obsessions because he believed they were linked to the secrets of the unconscious and that studying them was a way to unlock it. Freud, who invented the psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, was Charcot's student.
Following Charcot's interest in the study of the invisible world of the human psyche, works of art and literature began to search for ways to represent the subconscious. The second part of the 19th beginning of the 20th centuries international and interdisciplinary movement of Symbolism was especially representative of these attempts. The artists, writers and poets who were the part of that movement believed in the idea of
suggestion, in the ability not to describe but to evoke. Hence they began to look for ways through language and through artistic representations to evoke the subconscious. Attempting to discover and to understand, and to depict a subconscious was one of the ways to go beyond conscious human experience, which was appealing for Symbolist artists, poets and writers. Describing in literary works and representing in art different manifestations of mental illnesses or mental disturbances starting with nightmares and dreams and going as far as the manifestations of paranoia and other serious mental troubles was one of the ways to depict the mysterious world of the subconscious. Redon was one of the artists who endeavored to find a pictorial language to represent it. Huysmans in his novel Against Nature created a character, Des Esseintes, an aesthete from aristocratic family in the process of degeneration, who makes all kinds of psychological experimentations first with himself and then with others. Fedor Sologub 's character Peredonov, in his novel the Petit Demon, suffers from paranoia through which we as readers can have a glimpse into his subconscious. It is possible to cite many more literary works and works of art, in which principal characters are victims of various mental disturbances.
In this section we will examine mental disturbances described in literature in the second part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we will inquire into the connection between those verbal representations and the Symbolist movement.


Place: the Sheraton Seattle in Seattle, Washington

Rosina Neginsky's paper:

"Charcot's and Redon's Writing"