Article Summary by Sarah Hagaman
Two fictional therapy sessions are at the heart of my article, “(Post)confessional Mode and Psychological Surveillance in The Crown and Fleabag.” In Season 4 of The Crown, Princess Margaret—the Queen’s younger sister—discovers she may suffer from a hereditary mental illness. The second, Season 2 of Fleabag shows a short, bizarre therapy session in which Fleabag reveals nothing authentic about herself, frustrating the therapist. Instead, she tells her most intimate thoughts to the audience by breaking the fourth wall. Psychological surveillance, which I define as a mode of observing and monitoring someone’s mental health for prognostic purposes, often occurs in a clinical or therapeutic setting, but it can be a social phenomenon, conducted by family or friends, or deployed through formal state apparatuses, as it is in The Crown. In Fleabag, the psychological surveillance is performed by us: the audience. The postconfessional is my second key term. In The Crown, Margaret’s therapy session operates like a Catholic rite—she reveals an authentic sense of self, and confesses to be absolved, or healed. Fleabag does something different; instead of confessional, she engages in the postconfessional. She uses parody and evasion while pretending to share intimate details about herself. At times, she seems self-reflective, but then smiles and tells the audience that she’s good at therapy. By using a postconfessional mode, Fleabag refuses to enter the therapeutic process. Instead, we the viewers psychologically surveil Fleabag: we assess her mental state. I contrast these scenes to show how therapy is understood and enacted in increasingly de-centralized ways across mediums like social media and television in our contemporary moment. This article explores audience-driven therapeutic effects and asks ethical questions about surveillance, therapy, and its cultural enactment.
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Sarah Hagaman is a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include transmedial 20th- and 21st-century portrayals of mental illness, psychiatry, and mad aesthetics. In her forthcoming dissertation, The (Post)confessional Mode, she traces how feminist confessions favor of parodic and performative modes when portraying complex medical conditions, especially mental illness. She has a forthcoming article in Literature and Medicine on 1990s memoirs about hereditary mental illness, and her writing also appears in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and ASAP/J. She currently researches the intersections of privacy, genetics, and culture with Vanderbilt’s NIH-funded transdisciplinary project, GetPreCiSe: The Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings.