Hannah Proctor

Hannah Proctor studied History at UCL and later completed an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London while working full time in theatre production. She completed a PhD at Birkbeck in 2015, where she then took up a short-term postdoctoral fellowship in Medical Humanities funded by the Wellcome Trust. She was subsequently ISSF Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her PhD focused on the Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria.

In addition to her interest in histories, theories and practices of ‘radical psychiatry’ (broadly conceived) she has also published on queer theory, wrinkles, rayon stockings, gender and the death drive, revolutionary motherhood, brain imaging software and communist pedagogy. In future she is interested in pursuing research into the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.

Focused on the figure of the radical psychiatrist, this project aims to conceptualize an apparently contradictory understanding of time: a time of both rupture and healing. Hopeful without being naively utopian, radical psychiatric approaches combine a commitment to care with a commitment to transforming the extant social order, an acknowledgement of individual suffering with an affirmation of collectivity.

The radical psychiatrist acknowledges the damaging impact of past experience while refusing to forsake the future. Through a series of case studies exploring key moments in the history of radical psychiatry in the 20th century, this project will explore the corrosive yet potentially generative aspects of temporal errancy.