A number of the former students of psychoanalyst and psychiatric anthropologist Ellen Corin are organizing a fascinating-looking colloquium on the issues which have figured centrally in her work: namely the subjective experiences of psychosis and the relationship between psychosis and “culture”.

Ellen Corin’s work–and particularly her insistence on the significance or meaningfulness of psychotic experience and subjectivity–has been extremely important to anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists interested in these issues.  An especially influential set of papers reported Corin’s finding (based on a study carried out in Montreal) that persons diagnosed with schizophrenia who were not rehospitalized tended to figure their paucity of social ties as a deliberate “attitude of detachment” — which Corin called “positive withdrawal” — while those who were rehospitalized on multiple occasions tended to conceive of and experience themselves as excluded.

The colloquium, which will be held in French – in Montreal on June 11 and 12 – has been organized by Annie Gauthier, Annie Jaimes, and Constantin Tranulis – and includes presentations by other former students of Corin’s, including Somatosphere contributor Sadeq Rahimi.

For additional information, please visit the website for the event: “Un autre regard sur la psychose.”

See also:

Ellen Corin and Gilles Lauzon, “Positive withdrawal and the quest for meaning: the reconstruction of experience among schizophrenics,” Psychiatry 55, no. 3 (August 1992): 266-278.

Ellen Corin. 2007. “The “Other” of Culture in Psychosis: The Ex-Centricity of the Subject,” In Biehl, Good &; Kleinman (eds), Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, University of California Press, pp. 273-314.