Tactical authenticity in the production of mad narratives

WRIGHT, COLIN; CLARKE, SIMON

Abstract

First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress. The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept: a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology, where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension - between the value of narrative methods as a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the ‘authentic’ self on the other - can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity based on Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, especially when modified by Michel De Certeau’s (1984) distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’.

Citation

WRIGHT, C., & CLARKE, S. (2019). Tactical authenticity in the production of mad narratives. Social Theory and Health, 17(2), 15. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-019-00092-2

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 16, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 13, 2019
• Publication Date: Feb 13, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 14, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 14, 2020
• Journal: Social Theory & Health
• Print ISSN: 1477-8211
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-822X
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 15
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-019-00092-2
• Keywords: Authenticity. Madness. Autoethnography. Narratives. Positive Psychology
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1649778
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41285-019-00092-2
• Additional Information: First Online: 13 February 2019