Sometime in the past month, Alice Gregory, Jessica Loudis, and Stephen Squibb each attended Cabinet panels related to hypochondria, specifically with regard to the release of Brian Dillon’s book on the same. Gregory and Loudis attended the event at the Kitchen, Squibb, the one at Cabinet’s space in Brooklyn.

Stephen Squibb: Let’s first talk about this heroic reading of hypochondria: the hypochondriac as the supremely sensitive genius who takes to his bed to remake the world in a personal palette. Do we know people like this? Is this a description we recognize?

Alice Gregory: All three speakers – Brian Dillon, Marina van Zuylen and D. Graham Burnett – spoke to there being a genealogy to the concept of hypochondria. In the beginning, it was understood as a purely physical ailment (like melancholia, attributed to imbalances of the four humors). Now, of course, we know that hypochondria is a psychological problem, a certain type of focused anxiety.

I think this conceptual change is important to remember when thinking about the “heroic reading of hypochondria.” That archetype – the supremely sensitive genius who takes to his bed to remake the world in a personal palette – like our old understanding of hypochondria as purely physical, seems antiquated. More than anything, it feels like a 19th century literary trope – easy to romanticize. That said, I think there is a modern version of the sensitive genius, and again, like our newer conception of hypochondria as psychological, the sensitivity of this modern genius is mental and not physical. The modern sensitive genius is not preoccupied with his physical health, but rather with his mental health. These are the ones quick to self-diagnose (I’m so OCD, I’m so ADD), and turn quickly to therapy, or, more often, pharmaceuticals – occasionally for good reason, though often not. Contemporary literature, while lacking in bedridden misanthropes, is full of headcases; Marco Roth’s piece “The Rise of the Neuronovel” in issue 8 of n+1 breaks this down well and provides many fine examples.

I wish that Ethan Watters’s “The Americanization of Mental Illness” from the NYTimes Mag, was invoked for similar reasons. Does it still count as hypochondria if your obsession is with your mental health and not your physical health? This is something I think about a lot, being 22 and not yet fully out of that stage in which mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, etc.) often crop up.

Another thing: the internet. This was brought up in light of self-diagnosis — how easy it is to go online, type in your general symptoms, and freak out when Google says you have AIDS. But the internet also plays a key role in our understanding of “the artist” and “the writer.” Blogs, online magazines, Twitter – all of these provide, for the better or worse, a community that didn’t exist before. Our imaginative “creative type” must no longer be secluded and without social ties.

Stephen Squibb: You’re absolutely right about the shift from anxiety about physical weakness to a fixation on mental disability. Building on your question I wonder: Is hypochondria limited to the physical because we can demonstrate the actual absence of physical malady? I can be shown to be not be sick in a way that is impossible for the more fluid – and therefore more suspect – diagnoses of things like ADHD. My assertions of my own OCD will never, could never, be false in the way that my taking to my bed with a non-existent case of mono is. What in this respect does hypochondria name, exactly; the obsession and endless performance of our own frailty, or the deceit of our self-diagnoses? The latter is no longer possible, really, under the shifting conditions you describe – is hypochondria doomed too, then? It’s demonstrable, material inconsistency swapped for an ever-possible mental breakdown?

It was interesting to see Critchley go out of his way early on to identify himself as a hypochondriac, almost upstaging Dillon’s eventual and entirely expected confession of same. I myself have never been remotely hypochondriac, but I certainly do question my sanity on a regular basis.

Dillon later made an interesting point about Warhol’s hypochondria being a manifestation of his belief in the badness of his own body, a sort of ongoing narrative of his own perceived ugliness. His various professions of illness become the performative equivalent of the ridiculous wigs he glued to head – conscious displays or signals of his own self-disgust, certainly, but also distancing mechanisms. It’s the sort of inverse of the distinct pleasure of exercise, that warm feeling of being-at-home in one’s body that arrives after physical exertion. In the same way that the profound douchiness of body-builders appears as a total lack of distance between self and body – literally the reduction-to or incarnation-of the ego (super-ego?) in the body itself – Warhol was all distance, a sort of human chasm, the perpetual taking place of some originary rupture. Here his work becomes an endless attempt at self suturing; a relationship between selves mediated by image.

AG: Total agreement here. One correction though… I think I mis-wrote when I equated “the modern sensitive genius” to “the ones quick to self-diagnose (I’m so OCD, I’m so ADD).” There is of course a great spectrum here, so I don’t think the people who are truly paralyzed/terrified by the possibility of their insanity are the same people who say, “I’m so OCD.”

That said, the fact that we say these things does indicate just how present the notion of fluid – as you say – mental health is in our daily consciousness.

Also, how about this? In the 19th century, physical weakness = emotional/aesthetic sensitivity; in the 20th/21st century, psychological weakness – intellectual sensitivity. The refusal of creative types to label themselves as healthy seems like nothing more perhaps than a refusal to be normal/unremarkable. Genius must have a symptom.

Jessica Loudis: First of all, Stephen, I like Warhol’s wigs.

Alice, I totally agree with you that “the modern sensitive genius is not preoccupied with his physical health, but rather with his mental health,” and it seems that this is incredibly telling about the scientific assumptions we employ when thinking about disease. If the dominant belief underlying early modern hypochondriacs—i.e. Proust, Darwin—was that pyschology could have real, stigmata-like effects on the body, then the transition of hypochondria from a physical to mental terminus seems to reveal an assumption that physical disease is fallible. In other words, if it manifests itself physically, then there’s probably a pill (or an app) for that.

And Stephen, I’d say that hypochondria isn’t just limited to the physical, and instead is helpful for tracing the boundary between the body and the mind by occupying a space between science and subjectivity. To go out on a limb, it applies the Uncertainty Principle to the discipline of disease. In this sense, hypochondria can be seen as an engine of progress—it’s a mirror that reflects medicine’s perception of itself while also forcing it to continually reevaluate its assumptions about the relationship between health and the psyche. In keeping with this idea—and to return to Alice’s question about whether hypochondria is hypochondria “if your obsession is with your mental health”—I’d say definitely. If there’s one thing that hypochondria is telling us now, it’s that mental health is the new en vogue frontier of unknowable medicine. Think of it as scientific gentrification: the artists get there first, the pharmaceutical companies will be along soon after.

SS: Scientific gentrification! What a wonderful idea. It also gets at something else I wanted to bring up, namely that though hypochondria is a deeply individual, subjective problem – I’m curious would it mean to speak of it on a societal or cultural level? What would the word be for the same phenomenon – the persistent and recurring perception of disease regardless of actual affliction – on a mass scale? Which is to say, could we understand words like ideology or alienation as a collective expression or experience of hypochondria?

Derrida, in a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori immediately following 9/11, compared terrorism to an auto-immune disease, saying:

Here is the first symptom of suicidal autoimmunity… the aggression… comes, as from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon in an American city on the ground of an American airport. Immigrated, trained, prepared for their act in the United States by the United States, these hijackers incorporate… two suicides in one: their own… but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed and trained them… The United States had in effect paved the way for and consolidated the forces of the ‘adversary’ by training people like ‘bin Laden…’ by creating the politico-military circumstances that would favor their emergence and their shifts in allegiance…

Now, almost nine years later, it is possible, even necessary, to speak of two terrorisms. The first ‘actually existing terrorism,’ to detourn a phrase, which, in its limited and provisional existence, no-doubt remains ‘autoimmunitary’ and the other, second terrorism, much more nefarious and dangerous, that circulates as the political weapon par excellence for the American Right and the military-industrial complex more generally. This, second ‘terrorism’ to the extent that it is not simply an ideological blunderbuss aimed at the good sense of Middle America, seems to me profoundly hypochondriac. Millions of otherwise intelligent and thoughtful citizens truly believe America beset on all sides by hordes of Islamic terrorists, whose defeat requires an unprecedented sacrifice of civil liberties, moral standards and public monies, but not – and this, I think is key – an increase in taxes or the re-institution of a draft. Thus the hypochondriac distinction, between illness perceived and disease suffered, is translated to the body politic; whose actions betray the absence of a terrorist threat that is only, only, too clearly perceived.

Hypochondria and Other Pleasantries

Share on Tumblr