Cover Journal of Psychosocial Studies
Journal of Psychosocial Studies

Reanimating the plague

Authors: Tom Fielder1 and Lizaveta van Munsteren1
View author details View Less
  • 1 Birkbeck, University of London, , UK
Article Category:
Research Article
Copyright:
© Policy Press 2021
Online Publication Date:
02 Sep 2021
Pages:
203–215
Publisher:
Policy Press
Volume/Issue:
Volume 14: Issue 3
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1332/147867321X16285375806758
Restricted access
Get eTOC alerts
Rights and permissions Cite this article
Add to cart (GBP  £25.00)

The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of COVID-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, for example, through Albert Camus’ () The Plague and Sophocles’ () Oedipus The King. It is, moreover, a word that is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work through the disorders and dis-eases of COVID times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and in this article we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical, resonances of such an implication.

  • Baraitser, L. (2015) Temporal drag: transdisciplinarity and the ‘case’ of psychosocial studies, Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5–6): 207–31. doi: 10.1177/0263276415592039

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Barrett, R. and Armelagos, G. (2013) An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Becker, E. (1997) The Denial of Death, New York: Free Press.

  • Butler, J. (2020) The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind, London: Verso.

  • Camus, A. (1970) Selected Essays and Notebooks, P. Thody (trans), Harmondsworth: Penguin.

  • Camus, A. (2013) The Plague, R. Buss (trans), London: Penguin Classics

  • Das, V. (2020) Facing COVID-19: my land of neither hope nor despair, American Ethnological Society website, https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/covid-19-and-student-focused-concerns-threats-and-possibilities/facing-covid-19-my-land-of-neither-hope-nor-despair.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Defoe, D. (2001) Journal of the Plague Year, New York: Dover Publications.

  • Falzeder, E. (2012) ‘A fat wad of dirty pieces of paper’: Freud on America, Freud in America, Freud and America, in J.C. Burnham (ed) After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America, London: University of Chicago Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Freud, S. (1900) The interpretation of dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol 4, pp ix–627.

  • Freud, S. (1911) Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning, in The Standard Edition, vol 7, pp 213–26.

  • Freud, S. (1914) Remembering, repeating and working-through (further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II), in The Standard Edition, vol 7, pp 145–56.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Freud, S. (1915) Thoughts for the times on war and death, in The Standard Edition, vol 14, pp 273–300.

  • Freud, S. (1917) Mourning and melancholia, in The Standard Edition, vol 14, pp 237–58.

  • Frosh, S. (2013) Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions, London: Palgrave.

  • Frosh, S. (2018) Rethinking psychoanalysis in the psychosocial, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 23(1): 5–14. doi: 10.1057/s41282-018-0072-5

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • García Marquez, G. (2007) Love in the Time of Cholera, E. Grossman (trans), London: Penguin.

  • Heeney, J. and Friedemann, S. (2017) Foreword, in Plagues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 196–212.

  • Homer (1998) The Iliad, R. Fagles (trans), London: Penguin.

  • Jenkins, D. (2020) COVID-19 – a new plague year, https://www.rcpath.org/profession/publications/college-bulletin/july-2020/covid-19-a-new-plague-year.html.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Judt, T. (2013) Afterword, in A. Camus, The Plague, London: Penguin Classics, pp 239–49.

  • Kenny, C. (2021) The Plague Cycle: The Unending War between Humanity and Infectious Disease, New York: Scribner.

  • Newson, L. (2003) Pathogens, places and peoples: geographical variations in the impact of disease in early Spanish America and the Phillipines, in G. Raudzens (ed) Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories, Leiden: Brill Academic.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Otis, L. (1999) Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Overy, R. (2010) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization 1919–1939, London: Penguin.

  • Ramsay, S. (2021) COVID-19: Brazil crisis like ‘medieval plague’ as patients suffocate without oxygen, https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-brazil-crisis-like-medieval-plague-as-patients-suffocate-without-oxygen-12198178.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Rose, J. (2020a) Pointing the finger, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger.

  • Rose, J. (2020b) To die one’s own death, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/jacqueline-rose/to-die-one-s-own-death.

  • Snowden, F. (2020) Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, London: Yale University Press.

  • Sontag, S. (1979) Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Strauss.

  • Sophocles (2015) Oedipus the King, in Oedipus the King and Other Tragedies, O. Taplin (trans), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Spinney, L. (2018) Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, London: Penguin.

  • Taplin, O. (2015) Introduction to Oedipus the King, in Oedipus the King and Other Tragedies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Tracy, S.V. (2009) Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader, ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com.

  • Truthout (2020) Mourning is a political act amid the pandemic and its disparities, https://truthout.org/articles/judith-butler-mourning-is-a-political-act-amid-the-pandemic-and-its-disparities/.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Varlık, N. (2020) Rethinking the history of plague in the time of COVID‐19, Centaurus, 62(2): 285–93.

  • Vernant, J.P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1990) Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, J. Lloyd (trans), New York: Zone Books

  • Williams, R. (2017) Plague as metaphor, in J. Heeney and S. Friedemann (eds) Plagues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 196–212.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Wootton, D. (2006) Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • World Health Organization (2020) Antibiotic resistance, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antibiotic-resistance.

Content Metrics

May 2022 onwards Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 0 0 0
Full Text Views 10 10 10
PDF Downloads 7 7 7

Altmetrics

Dimensions