Unfortunately this event has been postponed. The Department of English looks forward to welcoming Don James McLaughlin from the University of Tulsa at a later date. Please watch your email for more information.
When did phobias begin to be diagnosed in American medicine and culture? Which ones attracted the most attention, and how did people go about treating them? In attempting to answer this question in the history of psychology, scholars tend to start with the coinage of agoraphobia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, then jump toward the contributions of psychoanalysis and behaviorism in the twentieth centuries. But, in fact, centuries of inquiry precede these turns.
This lecture offers a new history of phobia’s rise as a framework for understanding the human mind and political life from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. I show how phobia first acquired familiarity through “hydrophobia,” the historic name for rabies. Transliterated from the Greek, hydrophobia referenced a fear of water understood to be the disease’s telltale symptom, emanating from painful throat convulsions induced when trying to drink. Not until the late 1700s did physicians, politicians, and literary figures alike begin to attach the -phobia suffix broadly to an array of objects, situations, and ideas. How did this happen exactly? And how did phobia’s meaning grow flexible enough to encompass medical, political, and satirical forms all at the same time? In piecing together this story, we discover that a tradition of exploring the nature of fear in American literature prompted attunement to the influence of the written word on the psychophysiological wellbeing of democratic subjects.
Blending introspection, comedic play and experimental prophylaxes, the literature on phobia devised an accessible paradigm for positioning therapeutic texts as foundational to the advancement of pluralist democracy.
Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of 19th-century American literature at the University of Tulsa. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in English from Villanova University. His book manuscript, "Reading Phobias: The Therapeutic Imagination in American Liberalism," traces the emergence of the -phobia suffix in early American and 19th-century print culture as a medical diagnosis, political metaphor, and aesthetic sensation.
Please join us in the Gund Gallery Community Foundation Theater on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 5 p.m.
This event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Faculty Lectureships Committee.