“In fact I am an animal”: Mental Illness, Vulnerability and the Problem of Empathy in Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece

Abstract

This article explores Anna Kavan's critique of psychiatry in Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of stories which draws from her struggle with mental illness and her internment in a psychiatric clinic in the late 1930s. In this work, an aestheticization of vulnerability and a perplexing model of empathy are established. Kavan's conception of mental illness as a state of powerlessness leaves society–and by extension humanity–complicit with the psychiatric regime of oppression, and so she turns to non-human and “subhuman” subjectivities for safety and compassion. Unlike Derrida, then, for whom the gaze of the non-human other precipitates the deconstruction of one's identity, for Kavan the gaze of the non-human is restorative. The article examines the ethical implications of this gesture and proposes that Kavan's mentally ill be read as an other whose radical alterity demands to be acknowledged empathetically and unconditionally.