Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

General electionSomatic diseaseSocial failureWorryOverstrainDivorceHusband’s unemploymentSexual conflictOnly child’s deathChild out of wedlockFeeling of isolationHusband conscriptedFiancée’s previous recordFrightThe warFireChanged lifecircumstancesRapeFear of pregnancySexual actBomb attackAbortionScareLonelinessBroken engagementHard work and night watchHomosexual abuseGrief over a brother’s death inthe warGrief over having beengiven noticeHarassment by former fiancéeSuicide in the familyRelative’s insanityThe definitions in the above listing are collected from theSwedish mental hospitals’ annual reports to the Board ofHealth for the years 1940 to 1954. The seemingly randomnessof the compilation is typical of the category of ‘psychogenicfactors’.Up until 1954, the printed forms of the annual reports containeda box with the heading psychogenic factors, i.e. various factorswith an affective influence, that were considered to either leadup to or to be linked to the outbreak of psychiatric disorderin an individual. Whether they originated within the patient’sbody, psyche or close environment, or rather in society or theworld at large, does not seem to matter. I find this apparent lackof boundaries between society, outer events and the individualquite remarkable.What the concept of psychogenic factors does is to providediagnostic room for something which I, for the time being,term the trans-individual. This room or space may seem to be inconflict with the modernistic concept of the body and the human56