| Summary/Abstract |
Based upon fieldwork at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), I trace the contours of hysteria as an enduring, albeit informal, analytic that continues to disturb neuropsychiatric reductionism within psychiatry. I argue that at this historical moment, the political and economic demand for singular identities out of more porous cultural life-worlds (e.g. ethnic, religious, linguistic, occupational) produces clinical subjects incapable of nuance and flexibility, hastening a host of possessive, literalist, legalist and ‘hysteric’ symptoms that overtake India’s most vulnerable modern subjects, fuelling the sense of a crisis in search of a pharmaceutical solution to a psychopathological diagnosis.
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