Abstract
M.Tech. (Fine Art)
This study interrogates a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder through a critical engagement with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory and an auto-ethnographic reflection of my lived experience, and presents an artistic exploration of my experience of amplified emotions, affects and feelings. My self-reflection on mood episodes prior to my study inspired and motivated me to pursue an in-depth investigation into the transformative possibilities of bipolar mood episodes. My research explores bipolar mood episodes as transformative cycles vital to personal growth rather than as symptoms of mental illness. Whether or not psychiatric drugs delay or desensitize these cycles is part of a complex discourse that I do not discuss in this dissertation. The medical model is one way to approach mood episodes. However, I am concerned rather with self-transformation as narrated through a detailed and descriptive account of emotion, affect and feeling, which I engage with through Kristeva’s (1982) theory of abjection. I expand on Kristeva’s discourse on abjection by applying it to my experience of bipolar affective disorder.
My research highlights the therapeutic role of the creative process. It contributes towards the academic validity of the exploration of personal lived experiences as a research domain in terms of emotion, affect and feeling. I investigate, through my reading of psychoanalytic theory and through my painting, what, for me, triggers the mood episodes from which transformation is aroused.
Auto-ethnography allows for my reflective voice, my poetic voice and my visual voice to parallel my academic voice throughout my dissertation. I document my lived experience during a significant two-year period of my life and delve into the present and the past. Stigma forms a counterpoint to my journey. I explore themes of stigma and shame associated with diagnoses of bipolar affective disorder and consider how emotion, affect and feeling may be alternatively approached through an auto-ethnographic study, making use of creative writing and photographs, and an engagement with psychoanalytical theories. Through my writing and exhibition of my art, I intend to open a conversation about the ways in which emotions, affects and feelings alter us, about the ways in which we experience them, and about the experience of emotional metamorphosis. Although my stance is not an activist one, nor is it one of identity politics, my experience might open up the possibility of destigmisation for others. My work...