An Aesthetics of Relating and Its (Therapeutic) Potentials

Abstract

Abstract In light of ongoing biomedical processes of globalization closely linked with the emergence of ‘medicoscapes’, the proposed article focusses on issues of transcultural psychiatry and intercultural psychotherapy from the viewpoint of literary criticism. Drawing on the importance (Critical) Medical Humanities recently attached to culture—and its crucial impact on (mental) illness experience—the main purpose of this paper is to relate, in a postcolonial theoretical framework, Western and non-Western conceptions of mental illness, health, and cure in order to explore the emerging contact zones and to overcome the unproductive ‘othering’ of medical exoticism considering non-Western forms of healing and therapy as mere curiosities. As key link we will consider the (trans-)cultural technique of narrating (life) stories as it appears in an anglophone and francophone corpus of (not only migrant) literature. As some sort of ‘third space’ or ‘contact zone’, literature, especially when governed by a migratory aesthetics of relating, can be seen as a constant reminder of the irreducible heterogeneity of (medical) cultures as well as a negotiating space that not only builds bridges between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ but encourages to undertake a salutary ‘self-limitation’ of hegemonic (bio-)medical paradigms, as can be shown, for instance, by productive fictional ‘sinicizations’ of Western psychoanalysis.