Speaking Flesh – Literature, Mental Health, and the Body

First part of a 4-part webinar series exploring how mental illness has been understood, represented, and experienced across history, with attention to gender, power, and culture.

Through historical case studies, literature, and visual culture, we’ll trace how medical knowledge has been constructed and contested—from seventeenth-century ideas of disordered appetite to the cultural afterlife of hysteria and the voices of women who resisted psychiatric authority.

Led by Dr Tanya Lecchi, the series invites participants to reflect on how cultural narratives shape our understanding of psychological suffering, and how these histories can inform and enrich contemporary clinical practice.

Seminar Content

Speaker: Dr. Tanya Lecchi

As an introduction to the webinar series, Dr Tanya Lecchi will explore the often uneasy relationship between literature and psychoanalysis – two disciplines frequently assumed to share interpretive ground, yet whose encounters more often reveal disjunction than convergence. Rather than collapsing one into the service of the other, this session invites participants to consider how friction, rather than affinity, can become a generative site of inquiry – where the resistances, contradictions, and asymmetries between clinical thinking and literary form open up new ways of reading both text and psyche (Freer, 2019).

Psychoanalysis often seeks to restore meaning to symptoms by decoding the hidden logic behind them, treating the body as a site where unconscious conflict is made manifest and may be interpreted. By contrast, poetics celebrates the opacity and irreducibility of language, emphasising how meaning fractures and multiplies in the spaces between words. Rather than aiming for clarity and resolution, poetics embraces ambiguity, silence, and metaphor as forms of resistance to total interpretation.

The session will focus on how to cultivate a disruptive dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis, allowing their fundamental differences to illuminate how psychic pain is expressed when language fails. Here, the body is not simply a bearer of symptoms, but a poetic text – an enigmatic expression of desire, fear, and loss that resists full translation into discourse. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein powerfully exemplifies this intersection. Through Victor Frankenstein, Shelley dramatises the limits of language and explores how repression, guilt, and the constraints of gendered emotional expression produce a fractured self. Victor’s pain is articulated through hysterical symptoms, revealing the embodied nature of mental distress and the difficulties of emotional expression shaped by cultural and gendered norms.