The Psychic Life of the Poor

About

THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF THE POOR: A CITY UNSEEN IN MUMBAI, LONDON, AND NEW YORK

Supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant (January 2017- June 2018), this project will examine the institution of psychoanalysis in its inadequate engagements with urban poverty, race, and migrancy, as seen in the specific context of six global cities (Mumbai, London, and New York, primarily, with references, in the Mumbai chapter, to Kolkata, Bangalore, and Delhi). The proposed study considers literary and aesthetic representations of poverty in relation to each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, as that culture is manifested in public attitudes toward the psychic life of the poor. The project charts the afterlife of Freudian psychoanalysis in an international frame and in the multiple forms in which it is transmitted: psychotherapy, counselling, group psychology, trauma-based cognitive behavioural therapy.

The project will generate two key areas of scholarly inquiry. The first is a critical interpretation of literary and cultural representations of urban poverty, with its constitutive nexus of vulnerable habitations, environmental crises, histories of displacement and migration, and racism. The second is related to the tracing of the history and afterlives of the "free clinic," a term coined by Freud in 1918, which I use to delineate clinics where psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically oriented services are provided to poor populations for free. What interlinks these seemingly disparate fields is the psychogeography of the urban slum, shantytown, council estate, ghetto, or barrio.

Method

This project will break new ground in comparative theory, combining literary criticism with psychoanalytic theory and the history of medicine, anthropology, architectural history, and urban geography. The book chapters - "Mumbai," "London," "New York" - will have two parts. The first will bring into dialogue cultural discourses on poverty and mental health, while the second part will outline reigning mental health paradigms in each world city, discussing the outreach of related services to impoverished populations. My literary examples are contemporary British, American, and Anglophone works of fiction and narrative non-fiction that implicate race, class, migrancy, and gender in the endemic poverty of the geopolitical region in question. I will also use cinema, art, and image archives.

The literary/cultural discussion will connect with a survey of the provision of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy for poor populations in different cities. This interdisciplinary component of the project involves collaborations and knowledge-sharing. I will work with prominent figures in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis in each country. The project will also entail extensive engagement with local and global initiatives working in the interface of urbanism, poverty, and mental illness. Aided by travel grants from the Wellcome Trust and the John Fell Fund (in summer 2014 and summer 2015, respectively), I have completed scoping exercises with four non-profit organizations in Mumbai: URBZ and PUKAR, leading urban research collectives; SNEHA, which works on domestic violence in slums; and "Ummeed," which treats children with developmental disabilities. I have also worked with "Samadhana," a free (psychotherapy) clinic in Bangalore, and two mental health rights organizations in Kolkata, namely "Anjali" and "Iswar Sankalpa."

During the period of the AHRC fellowship, I will be actively collaborating with the George Institute (Oxford), the WHO (World Health Organisation) Collaborating Centre for Global Health Histories (York), and the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. Collaboration with these three bodies, which are associated with universities (Oxford, York, and UCL, respectively), involves participation in workshops and seminars, and interviews of relevant health professionals. I will visit New York for two weeks during the fellowship period to study the model of psychodynamic psychotherapy clinics in the city that are either free or have sliding fee schedules.

Dissemination and Outcomes

The disciplinary and interdisciplinary scope of my research will be showcased in the graduate workshops held during the tenure of the fellowship. Titled "Humanitarian Fictions," these workshops (to be held in 2018) will invite Masters and DPhil candidates to examine the revived idea of humanitarianism in English, Anglophone, and World literary studies and raise specific questions about how the novel in particular embraces the discourse of human rights to address global modernity’s emergences and discontents. This will allow graduate students to examine a range of socio-economic, cultural, and political issues: endemic poverty; racism; international warfare; environmental crises; disability and mental illness. The one-day workshops will be held at Warwick and King's College London, institutions renowned for their excellence in the field of postcolonial and area studies.

At the end of the fellowship (in June 2018) I shall hold an international conference, "Global Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in Postcolonial Literature," which will link my research with extant work in the field of postcolonial, comparative, and world literature. The hunger in question is both material deprivation and socioeconomic suffering and a self-fashioning of subaltern identity and space through refusal and non-assimilation. Key themes to be addressed at the conference include: poverty and the limits of aesthetics; poverty, class and gender; the colonial and postcolonial manipulation of hunger as an ideological battleground; "subaltern public spheres," as Paul Gilroy termed it, alternative metropolitan spaces opened up through performative strategies; the "power geometry" (to use Doreen Massey's term) of impoverished and migrant populations in world cities.

I have presented papers or taught classes on themes pertaining to this project at Duke University (USA), the Australian National University (Canberra, Australia), the University of Sydney, Oxford University (at the Leverhulme-funded "Planned Violence" workshop), Hong Kong University, and Kings' College London. In 2017, I will be giving invited talks on this topic at several North American universities: University of California, Berkeley, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, and Princeton University.

The primary outcome of this project is an illustrated monograph (100,000 words), titled The Psychic Lives of the Poor: A City Unseen in Mumbai, London and New York. In addition to this, I will edit a collaborative volume based on the proceeds of the "Global Hungers" conference.

Professor of English and World Literatures Ankhi Mukherjee

Photo Credit: Dithi Mukherjee.

Images Below from Ankhi Mukherjee's Global Hungers Conference