Abstract
This article examines Anton Boisen’s political negotiations within the identity categories of ministry and madness in the aftermath of his own repeated episodes of psychosis. In conversation with contemporary queer theorists Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lee Edelman, the article characterizes Boisen’s negotiations between dominant and marginalized identity spheres as a political performance of disidentification in which a subject moves and negotiates between disempowered and hegemonic social spheres, simultaneously displacing but also, as Boisen’s example demonstrates, reifying the norms of the latter. The article illustrates how Boisen sought to change many of the practices of pastoral care for those consigned to madness, while at the same time his actions also reestablished the very boundaries and exclusions he sought to displace.
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Notes
For the purposes of this article, I am restricting my definition of “political” to that which pertains to the working and effects of institutions, discourses, and practices that function in a given society toward the allocation of power and resources. The focus on the alignment between the distribution of power and one’s social location as signified and grounded in one’s identity has its roots in French and second-wave feminism (e.g., Beauvoir 2009; Friedan 1963). Black feminism and womanism further root political consciousness in the analysis of the intersections between the identity categories of gender, race, class, and ability (see, e.g., Hooks 1984, pp. 26–33; Grant 1989; Williams 1993). Finally, this essay is closely aligned with the work of critical and queer theorists who analyze the discourse of identity and its fluid ways of interpellating the subject into political power or disadvantage through the identity categories she or he performs (see Foucault 1978; Butler 1990/2006).
While the notion of the individual person preceding and being impacted by discourses, practices, and institutions is an important and helpful paradigm in the humanities and especially pastoral theology, this article will follow the post-structural account of the individual as multiple, fluid, and formed contextually in order to explore the relationships between identity and power. For a full explanation of contextual and relational accounts of subjectivity and their use in pastoral care, see Cooper-White (2004, pp. 35–60).
“Madness,” “mad,” and “madman” are used throughout this article to designate an identity category historically employed to denigrate and consign people who do not fit into certain dominant social norms of able-bodiedness. In contrast, “mental illness” and “psychosis” are used to designate the dis-ability Boisen struggled with throughout his lifetime. The terms “madness” and “mental illness” are therefore not to be equated. For a history of the identity category of madness, see Foucault (2006).
In speaking of those consigned to madness, Boisen consistently used the masculine pronoun. Though, as suggested below, he may have been referring as much to himself as the patients he wrote about and cared for, his case studies report observation and care of both women and men. An archive of Boisen’s unpublished case studies may be found at http://www.metro.inter.edu/facultad/esthumanisticos/anton_boisen.asp, Universidad InterAmericana de Puerto Rico (n.d.), Accessed 7 September 2013.
As with his references to those consigned to madness, Boisen only used the masculine pronoun to speak of pastoral caregivers. However, this too does not coincide with Boisen’s history. His autobiography (1960b) recalls women as well as men participating in the founding CPE groups, including Helen Dunbar (pp. 154–160, 170–171), a psychiatrist who later lent critical support to Boisen’s theories of mental illness during his disagreements with another founder of the CPE movement, Richard Cabot (Holifield 1983, pp. 246–247).
Interpellation is a term popularized by the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser (1971) in his work on the “reproduction of the conditions of production” (p. 123). Althusser explains that the subject is “always already” called into being or interpellated in an ideology that reproduces socio-economic conditions (p. 164). This “always already” aspect of formation originates in family expectations, social rituals, and cultural codes handed down through generations, all of which conform—and thus conform the subject—to the present conditions of labor, therefore enabling their reproduction. Ideology then comes to exist as a series of ideals given to the subject in its very formation, which then are enacted and reenacted in its practice.
For an overview of the sexual mores of Boisen’s time and their evolution in religious discourse, see Capps (2003).
Other tensions between Cabot and Boisen over the theories and purposes of CPE were also behind Cabot’s response. In the text, Boisen attributed the response both to their theoretical disagreements as well as Cabot being “particularly aroused” by Boisen’s relapse (1960b, p. 171). See note 5.
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I am thankful to Kathryn Schwarz for her feedback and suggestions on multiple drafts of this work.
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Coble, R. Maneuvers in the Depths: The Politics of Identity in Anton Boisen’s Pastoral Care. Pastoral Psychol 63, 405–418 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0566-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0566-0