Towards Post-Institutional Individualism: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the Therapeutic Politics of Dissent

Abstract

This essay explores Ralph Ellison’s engagement with social psychiatry in Invisible Man as it pertains to psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of psychiatry. The novel renders traumatic experiences of psychiatric violence into a comprehensible form of political expression and dissent. Ellison’s representation of violence, particularly through electric shock, constitutes a deinstitutionalized psychiatric subject that challenges the role of institutionalized psychiatry in adjusting subjects to Fordist production through a form of deinstitutionalized, individual therapy of withdrawal and self-regulation. However, this deinstitutionalized therapy would later be appropriated by mental health consumerism in a post-institutionalization era beginning in the 1970s.