Sarah Kane’s World of Depression

The Emergence and Experience of Mental Illness in 4.48 Psychosis

  • Anna Ovaska University of Helsinki
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2016.1096
Keywords: Sarah Kane, experientiality, emergence, depression narrative, phenomenology of de-pression, psychiatry

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how the experiential world of depression is constructed and conceived of in Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis. Kane’s depiction of severe, psychotic depression is in line with phenomenological accounts of the illness, in which depression is understood as an emergent phenomenon that gives rise to alterations in the embodied being-in-the-world of the subject. The text refers to common cognitive-affective experiences and folk-psychological understandings of the mind and employs different intertextual, narrative and poetic strategies to convey the phenomenal world of depression to its readers. In addition, Kane emphasizes that to treat depression a deeper understanding of this ‘state of emergency’ is needed than what medicalizing psychiatry is able to provide.

Author Biography

Anna Ovaska, University of Helsinki

Anna Ovaska is a doctoral researcher working on fictional illness narratives. She investigates the relationship between first-person narrated stories of mental illness and clinical approaches of psychiatry: the ways experiencing, detecting and diagnosing psychiatric disorders become tied together in fiction, and how stories can also challenge the ways mental disorders are conceived. Her broader research interests include modernist literature, cognitive narratology, phenomenology of illness, and narrative medicine.

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Issue
No 1 (2016): Emergence/Emergency
Section
_Articles