Hysteria on the borderline [Ressource électronique] : psychiatry, cultural change, and subjective experience among women in Morocco / Charlotte Emma van den Hout

Bibliogr. p. 400-454

Doctor of philosophy : Anthropologie : University of California : 2013

This dissertation ethnographically examines the dynamic relationship between cultural change, psychiatry, and subjective experience among women in Morocco. Over the past fifteen years, unprecedented socio-economic reform in this postcolonial Muslim society has unsettled local gender norms: a lively public debate now questions what place "traditional" female roles should have in a "modern" civil society, and what constitutes "authentic" Moroccan womanhood. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in the political capital of Rabat, including a fine-grained clinical ethnography of a psychiatric hospital in the city's outskirts, I analyze popular media discourse, clinical treatment practices, and subjective experiences of illness among female inpatients to ask: 1) how Moroccan psychiatry engages with this media-driven debate about modernity and authenticity, 2) how this engagement in turn shapes clinical approaches to the treatment of female patients, and 3) how these patients experience the confluence of psychological and social upheaval in their lives. Taking these three levels of analysis together, I argue that psychiatric diagnoses create a space to question normative notions of cultural authenticity and offer an opportunity for the construction of new meanings and moralities that are both "modern" and "authentic." Both in the public realm of popular media and in the private realm of clinical treatment, psychiatrists employ diagnostic categories not only to identify individual suffering, but also to question the health of society as a whole. While claiming psychiatry as an authentic part of Morocco's cultural heritage, these clinicians offer scientifically validated notions of mental health as the basis for new, "modern" definitions of moral and authentic personhood. By analyzing therapeutic approaches to hysteria and borderline personality disorder, two diagnoses that are commonly and near-exclusively applied to women, I show that treatment becomes an opportunity to cultivate new traits that are defined as "modern" and "healthy," yet also culturally "authentic." For female patients, too, illness creates an opportunity to negotiate with normative moralities. Given few acceptable resources to resist social expectations and pursue alternative identities, the pain of illness can in fact offer women an agentive way to voice protest and claim identities that are both personally and culturally meaningful.