ABSTRACT
Existentialism has a prickly relationship to ethics. In Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher confronted the absence of an alternative political ontology that can oppose neo-liberal capitalism. He emphatically correlates the regulatory function of capitalist ideology with ‘mental health’, writing, ‘the current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization’. The therapeutic professions are indebted to second-wave feminism’s critique of the patriarchal constitution of psychoanalysis and of the psychiatric profession’s ever-increasing stronghold on conceptions and treatments of ‘mental illness’. Social critique and conjecture are necessary to both individual and social transformations. Carol Hanisch has been attributed with providing the feminist movement with one of its core political ideas: the personal is political.
