NWO Free Competition awarded to team including dr. Gaston Franssen
NWO has awarded a grant of €740.000,– in the Free Competition Humanities for the research proposal 'Management of the Self: a Humanities Approach to Self-Management in Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine', submitted by an interdisciplinary research team that includes Prof. Dr. Marc Slors, Prof. Dr. Jan Bransen, Dr. Derek Strijbos (all Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen), Prof. Dr. Gerrit Glas (Free University, Amsterdam), Dr. Stefan van Geelen (Karlstad University, Sweden), and Dr. Gaston Franssen, assistant professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
The project offers a new perspective on the notion of ‘self-management’ in mental health-care. Self-management implies that patients play an active role in the management of their own care. This proves to be problematic, however, in those cases where the self itself is at issue, as in psychiatric and psychosomatic disease. This project tackles precisely that problem: by facilitating a dialogue between the humanities and psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, it lays the groundwork for a thought-through approach to self-management in mental health-care.
Franssen’s sub-project starts from the assumption – widely accepted in psychology and medical science – that the self requires a form of coherence and self-understanding through a life story or self-narrative. Yet what if that narrative is disrupted, incoherent, or delusional, as in the case of schizophrenia? Insights from narratology and literary studies, Franssen argues, can lead to a better understanding of such self-narratives and, ultimately, result in strategies for self-management in mental health-care.
Franssen is member of the research groups Literature in the World (ASCA) and Emotion & Subjectivity 1300-1900 (ASCH).