Abstract

The article is an attempt to characterize and define a possible generic framework for the literary phenomenon of female autobiographies and memoirs of hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital or experience of mental illness that are of interest both to the humanities (the theory of autobiography, anthropology of literature, somatopoetics, etc.) as well as the areas related to medicine (narrative medicine or sociology of medicine). To the historical analysis of the phenomenon and an attempt to reconstruct this kind of discourse from the narrative of hysterics produced in the psychoanalysts’ offices, the author added the case study, which is a memoir Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinician suffering from manic depression.