Linda C. Middleton

Translation and its role in processing psychological suffering are addressed in this paper, with an emphasis on how individuals in pain are often lost in translation between medically-determined diagnostic labels and self-constructed narratives designed to counter the medical models. William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is offered as a standard literary critique of the “semantic damage” observed when the modern-day diagnosis “depression” is contrasted with Sir Robert Burton’s melancholia; and Styron’s Miltonic title is, itself, a suggestion of his request for recognition of the “dreadful . . . raging disease” inadequately coded as “depression” by the medical establishment. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the writer provides her own translations and narratives for, respectively, depression and grief, will be considered as a more current critique of the insufficiency of treatment-supplied vocabularies in psychic crisis.

Finally, the paradoxical conflation of medically-generated interpretations of suffering and “selfinitiated” narratives will be considered in the media packaged versions of consumer-centered, selfhelp translation directives, usually accompanied by the marketing of pharmaceuticals. Sponsored websites provide translation and narrative options for sufferers, and often the mere names of psychogenics, such as Cymbalta, have achieved iconic resonance, fostering a consumer base for the therapeutic community as it occasionally engages—but for the most part, deceptively supplements— the sufferer’s participation in the cathartic translation and translation of her dis-ease.

Biography

Linda C. Middleton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She has published critical essays on Jane Austen and Angela Carter, and delivered conference papers on a diversity of topics, the last of which was a psychobiographical treatment of Emily Dickinson. Her research and teaching interests are in nineteenth century women writers, feminist theory, and the psychology (and psychopathology) of creativity.