ABSTRACT
Studies in psychopathy take different trajectories to account for its causes in societies. The first school of thought attributes pathology to personal causes and, therefore, singles out individual weaknesses such as heredity and personality as its prime cause. Benard Hart and Thomas Szasz belong to this school that medicalises aspects of pathology and shifts all focus on the patient in their treatment of madness. The second school of thought points out the cultural conditions as predisposing factors to pathological conditions. These experts hold that cultural conditions such as othering have far-reaching psychological effects on individuals. Ronald Laing, Frantz Fanon and Donald Roberts are major exponents of this school of thought. This chapter extends the second school of thought by interrogating modernism as the cause of othering conditions that possibly result in pathological conditions in characters in selected works of East African prose fiction. It is the contention of this chapter that strains of pathology such as self-alienation, personality disorders and schizophrenia stem from modernist binaries rather than heredity and personal causes. This analytical study is, therefore, a close textual reading of the primary and secondary texts while Fanon (1961) and Laing (1960) serve as theoretical frameworks for the interpretation.
