The Nervous System

Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham:
Duke University Press, November 2005, 344 pp.

Feeling states have a history too. In fact, according to historian German Berrios, the idea that excessive nervousness indicates a psychological disorder is relatively new.1 In Panic Diaries, Jackie Orr attends to the social and cultural features of the new nervousness: Why did fear come to dominate public and private lives in various ways throughout the 20th century? Why did such a variety of institutions emerge to respond to it? How do individuals gain a language for anxiety? How do they learn to manage it, and to what effect? While many social scientists might take it as a truism that institutions can shape individual lives, Orr gives a chilling demonstration of the intimate depths to which social structure penetrates unconscious processes. At first pass, Orr's argument is familiar. Her topics are the medicalization of panic and of society more broadly, the linking of knowledge to power, and sociology's complicity in that process. By exploring efforts to "make panic truthfully speak" (9), she argues that political attempts to control it, scientific efforts to understand it, and therapeutic efforts to treat it simultaneously produce panic. But the book also integrates first-person accounts with a social history of panic to show that panic as an intimate psychological feeling is also a social event. She is ultimately interested in the unpredictable and destabilizing effects social practices can have on individual psychology.

Because it cast a broad net, this book offers something to clinicians, medical anthropologists, science scholars, and anyone burdened with panic. Orr begins with the account of research conducted in response to the panic generated by the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. She then discusses Cold War governmentality, the fear of the atomic age, the development of cybernetic theory, and the work of Talcott Parsons. She ends by describing how psychiatry cornered the panic market, constructing illness categories that attribute anxiety to individual biology. Linking these stories in both subtle and explicit ways is the most unique contribution of Panic Diaries. In addition, she tells of her own panic attacks and involvement in a clinical trial of Xanax. Juxtaposing a personal illness narrative with scholarship can be clumsy; this reader braced for something too self-indulgent. In Panic Diaries, however, Orr manages the intercalation of personal stories and social history quite beautifully.

Of course, that intercalation is a piece of her argument. Orr warns us of a breakdown of the boundary between emotional and social processes, of an "increasingly informatic control of unconscious spaces" (278). Despite the fact that she cured her panic herself—through "practices of calming and cure. Breath. Dream. Memory. Writing." (221)—Orr is accepted into the clinical trial, functions effectively as an ethnographer of the trial, and yet finds herself "deeply entangled" (223) in the technoscientific tale she's told about herself. As images and pronouncements from the ethnographic site invade her dreams, we see how permeable a mind can be. Since she is a cured patient masquerading as a sick one, Orr is also commenting on the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary neuroscience. Researchers often use representational models of the brain with an awareness that they are not precisely accurate; but researchers' audiences often view these models as factual maps. The play between fact and fiction is explored more fully in her analysis of the research conducted after the War of the Worlds broadcast. There, social science researchers set out to understand why people became so irrationally panicked. But Orr asks: Isn't there something terribly frightening about a report of alien invasion and widespread destruction, given that it was produced to sound like an actual news broadcast? She interweaves the verbatim words of those frightened by the broadcast with the social scientists' official report to demonstrate that people speak for themselves in ways that resist simple categorization. Orr's lucid interpretation of the social production...