Psychosis as a Social Relation: Phenomenology, Ecology, and the World We Create- 11-11:30pm Can We Live Together?: A Phenomenological Perspective on the Sociogenic Roots of Psychosis and the Soteria Model for Community Liberation - Drew Madore, Sebastián Hernández-Del Valle, Yveton Isnor
- 11:30-12pm An Ecological Approach to Generalized Psychosis: Emancipatory and Reactionary Potentials - Caleb Scott
Can We Live Together?: A Phenomenological Perspective on the Sociogenic Roots of Psychosis and the Soteria Model for Community Liberation - Drew Madore, Sebastián Hernández-Del Valle, Yveton Isnor
To render as alien realities which are distinct from the consensual - to render madness meaningless in what we commonly call "psychosis" - is to render illegible that which can be understood. This panel will discuss a phenomenological understanding of psychosis as a disruption at the level of the self-world relation, with particular attention to the ways in which the social matrix itself can create psychic suffering and become a pathogenic - or, sociogenic - force. We will highlight the ways in which this sociogenic force is enacted both at the level of the social and at the level of the institutional within biomedical/psychiatric systems, particularly within coercive models of treatment that fuel epistemic injustice and ontological harm. We will draw upon this understanding to elucidate the basis for a social “treatment” for psychosis and to provide an overview of the history of such treatments, with particular emphasis on the contemporary example of soteria communities. We will also discuss the empirical basis for soteria as a treatment model that has been found to be more effective than “treatment as usual” within the biomedical/psychiatric system.
An Ecological Approach to Generalized Psychosis: Emancipatory and Reactionary Potentials - Caleb Scott
Drawing on Lacan’s structural account of psychosis, Guattari’s three ecologies, and a critical analysis of social reproduction, this presentation proposes a framework for understanding psychosis not as evidence of an individual brain disease but as a condition traversing the mental, social, and environmental registers simultaneously. Beginning from the structural distinction between the facilitative and symbolic functions, the argument extends this logic across registers — treating capitalism as a determining force that actively fragments autonomous communities and subordinates heterogeneous social drives and symbolic expressions to the single logic of wage labor and financial extraction. This produces at the social level the same rigid objectification and collapse of symbolic anchoring that precipitates breakdown in the subject. Psychosis, on this account, is neither celebrated nor demonized but understood as a structural opening: the dissolution of a foreclosed symbolic order creates conditions for new meaning-making and new political possibilities, even as the same rupture invites paranoid closure and reactionary reconsolidation. Both potentials are visible across registers. The presentation grounds this framework in the concrete situation of New York City’s fragmented, underfunded, and carceral mental health system, issuing a call for a movement organized around care and freedom — one that centers those rendered surplus by the economic order, not as objects to be managed and abandoned under the sign of care, but as subjects whose liberation is the measure of any serious politics. The question animating the conclusion is: what would it mean to work with the
