Hermeneutic Competition: what it is and what can it explain?

Description

These seminars were a wonderful way to feel anchored in the institutional life of CRASSH
(Dr Mary Augusta Brazelton, Early Career Fellow, Easter Term 2021)

 

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work-in-Progress Seminar Series. All welcome but please email fellowships@crassh.cam.ac.uk to book your place and to request readings.

Dr Jessie Munton

The history of psychiatry is marked by a chronic inability to agree on a conceptual paradigm for making sense of its subject matter. What is the nature of a psychiatric problem? Is it a brain based, disease-like phenomenon, or is it a psychogenic ‘problem in living’? Is the word ‘illness’ even appropriate? Over the course of the 20th century, a specific conceptual framework for understanding mental illness has become widely accepted, and familiarity with various diagnostic categories, such as ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘schizophrenia’ or even ‘depression’ has vastly increased. But according to a significant population of mental health clinicians, user-groups and activists, far from reflecting a natural reality, these terms are at best confused, at worst tools of oppression wielded by mental health professionals against those to whom they are applied. The debate is intractable and heated, and yet both sides have as their goal the interests of the same population. What explains this impasse?

I propose that this is a case of hermeneutic competition– when different members of a group endorse two or more incompatible hermeneutic frameworks, that is, frames for making sense of a certain experience or identity, which make or imply claims that are inconsistent with one another such that the success of one threatens the resources of the other. This project will elucidate the nature of hermeneutic competition, and then use it to shed light on a number of intransigent cultural debates. I aim to come to a better understanding of the ways in which dominant ideologies subordinate certain groups in part through the restriction of their hermeneutic resources and the subsequent generation of competition between their members.