In the introduction to The Pastoral Clinic, Angela Garcia writes, “A central theme in this book is how loss and mourning provide more than a metaphor for heroin addiction: they trace a kind of chronology, a temporality of it. They even provide a constitutive power for it (Garcia 2010:7)… Ultimately, my goal is to show how a desire for escape and its local forms (getting high, overdose, even suicide) delineate a set of vulnerabilities that are common and shared… (Garcia 2010:21).
What are the kinds of losses Garcia refers to in the quote above? How does she use Freud and his article, “Mourning and Melancholia,” to support her argument about addiction in the Espanola Valley and to explain the need to forget or to escape? Do you consider Garcia’s book a work of hauntology, and if so, why?
The Pastoral Clinic is a critique of a narrowly conceptualized medical model of addiction. Do you find the critique convincing? Why or why not?
PLEASE NOTE: To answer this question well, you must make direct reference to passages in The Pastoral Clinic and include the page numbers where you found those passages (or quotes) so that we can refer to them when we grade your essay. You will get a better grade for integrating ideas or concepts from the other class readings or lectures into your essay, but these must be truly integrated into your essay. If you cannot truly integrate these other ideas or concepts, you are better off trying to make your essay as detailed, specific, and coherent as possible. FYI: the prompt is meant as a prompt only! You do not necessarily have to answer every part of it. It is only meant to stimulate your thinking about the book and what you might write.
We expect an essay of no more than 5 pages.
The essays will be graded on a 35 point scale so that the combined scores of two essays represent 70% of your overall grade, as promised in the syllabus.