Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Michele Moghrabi is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation research attempts to trace a genealogy of “diseases of the soul.” Starting in a web of Ancient Greek philosophy, medicine, and tragedy, he hopes to explore how the very birth of the notion of a “soul” or “psyche” shifted the Greek conception of madness away from an illness that is the product of external possession, and toward a true disease of the order of this nascent structure conceived to be the soul. Tracing this development of conceptions of mental illness through the history of Greek medical and philosophical reception, he hopes to place the contemporary culmination of this particular tradition within psychoanalysis. By emphasizing alternative psychoanalytic traditions in phenomenology and German existential philosophy, he aims to show how the Greek birth of the thinking of “disease of the soul” comes full-circle in a lesser-read psychoanalytic tradition that, in its deeply Greek inheritance, strives to conceive of psychopathologies as dysfunctions in the psyche’s distinctive spatiotemporal order. He was raised between France and Italy before starting university in the United States.