E. Deidre Pribram - A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders: Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations

In her latest contribution to the growing field of emotion studies, Deidre Pribram makes a compelling argument for why culturalist approaches to the study of emotional disorders continue to be eschewed, even as the sociocultural and historical study of mental illness flourishes. The author ties this phenomenon to a tension between two fundamentally different approaches to emotion: an individualist approach, which regards emotions as the property of the individual, whether biologically or psychologically, and a culturalist approach, which regards emotions as collective, social processes with distinctive histories and meanings that work to produce particularized subjects. While she links a strong preference for the individualist construct in Western culture to the rise of the psychological and psychiatric disciplines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pribram also engages with a diverse set of case studies tied to psychological and aesthetic discourses on emotions. These range from Van Goghs status as emotionally disordered to the public, emotional aesthetics of nineteenth century melodrama to the diagnostic categories of the DSMs and the fear of globalizing emotional disorders in the twenty-first century. This genuinely interdisciplinary approach makes for a text with potential application in a wide range of disciplines within cultural studies, including sociocultural and historical analysis of psychiatry and psychology, gender theory, subject and identity theory, popular culture studies, and history and theory of the arts.

E. Deidre Pribram is, most recently, the author of A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders: Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations and Emotions, Genre, Justice in Film and Television: Detecting Feeling, as well as co-editor of Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader. She writes on cultural emotion studies, media studies, gender, and popular culture. She is a professor in the communications department of Molloy College, Long Island, New York.

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49 Reading Beyond the Book
The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture
Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo

51 Digital Media Sport
Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society
Edited by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe

52 Barthes Mythologies Today
Readings of Contemporary Culture
Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

54 Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century
Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction
Edited by Micha Gowacki and Lizzie Jackson

55 Transnational Horror Across Visual Media
Fragmented Bodies
Edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer

56 International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies
This World is My Place
Edited by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton

57 Comics and the Senses
A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels
Ian Hague

58 Popular Culture in Africa
The Episteme of the Everyday
Edited by Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome

59 Transgender Experience
Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility
Edited by Chantal Zabus and David Coad

60 Radios Digital Dilemma
Broadcasting in the Twenty-First Century
John Nathan Anderson

61 Documentarys Awkward Turn
Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship
Jason Middleton

63 Gender and Humor
Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives
Edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini

64 Studies of Video Practices
Video at Work
Edited by Mathias Broth, Eric Laurier, and Lorenza Mondada

65 The Memory of Sound
Preserving the Sonic Past
Sen Street

66 American Representations of Post-Communism
Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives
Andaluna Borcila

69 Media Independence
Working with Freedom or Working for Free?
Edited by James Bennett and Niki Strange

70 Neuroscience and Media
New Understandings and Representations
Edited by Michael Grabowski

72 International Perspectives on Shojo and Shojo Manga
The Influence of Girl Culture
Edited by Masami Toku

73 The Borders of Subculture
Resistance and the Mainstream
Edited by Alexander Dhoest, Steven Malliet, Barbara Segaert, and Jacques Haers

75 Spanish-Language Television in the United States
Fifty Years of Development
Kenton T. Wilkinson

76 Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games
Cognitive Approaches
Edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach

77 Critical Animal and Media Studies
Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy
Edited by Nria Almiron, Matthew Cole, and Carrie P. Freeman

78 The Middle Class in Emerging Societies
Consumers, Lifestyles and Markets
Edited by Leslie L. Marsh and Hongmei Li

79 A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders
Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations
E. Deidre Pribram

First published 2016
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Names: Pribram, E. Deidre.
Title: A cultural approach to emotional disorders: psychological and aesthetic interpretations / by E. Deidre Pribram.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies; 79 | Includes bibliographical references and index.