Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons^™

A Cultural Approach To Emotional Disorders: Introduction, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Works: COM (1993-2016)

In her latest contribution to the growing field of emotion studies, Deidre Pribram makes a compelling argument for why culturalist approaches to the study of emotional "disorders" continue to be eschewed, even as the sociocultural and historical study of mental illness flourishes. The author ties this phenomenon to a tension between two fundamentally different approaches to emotion: an individualist approach, which regards emotions as the property of the individual, whether biologically or psychologically, and a culturalist approach, which regards emotions as collective, social processes with distinctive histories and meanings that work to produce particularized subjects. While she links a strong …