How should we theoretically understand patient voices in psychiatry? Patient voices in psychiatry refer to the inclusion of patients’ lived experiences, perspectives, and narratives in the understanding, research, and shaping of psychiatric care. This presentation focuses on the writings of psychiatric patients, including letters, diaries, and pamphlets (Nielsen et al., 2025). In recent years, there has been growing interest in patient voices within psychiatry; however, the field remains divided between particularism and institutional functionalism. Particularism examines individual patient voices in isolation, while institutional functionalism interprets them as parts of broader institutional practices (Bacopoulos-Viau et al., 2016; Condrau, 2007). The presentation draws on a research project analyzing more than 250 letters and several pamphlets written by psychiatric patients at Jydske Asyl, the first asylum in Denmark, between 1851 and 1920. The material demonstrates how the writings of psychiatric patients have evolved over time, developing shared themes and concerns. Adopting a historical perspective, the presentation argues that connecting voices from the asylum period to present-day patient voices reveals both continuities and ruptures in how patients describe their experiences (Rancière, 1995). Theoretically, the project employs a practice-oriented framework (Lave, 1991), suggesting that patient voices constitute a historical practice that has gradually challenged the hegemonic, doctor-centered view of psychiatry. This process has opened new epistemological spaces in which psychiatric patients can develop new modes of expression and new ways of engaging with psychiatric care (Rose, 2019).

In the context of dark times defined by acceleration and compulsive optimization, this article problematizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a dogmatic temporal regime. It posits a structural conflict between two logics: back-propagation, formalized by Werbos (1974) and Rumelhart et al. (1986), and front-propagation, characteristic of the human psyche. While the algorithm operates via a reinforcement learning loop that adjusts the future to minimize error relative to an accumulated past (Skinner, 1938; Goodfellow et al., 2016), human experience requires the irreversibility of time and durée for meaning construction (Bergson, 1910; Valsiner, 2014).

The discussion unpacks this antagonism by analyzing the microgenesis of the pause. It is argued that algorithmic urgency fuses the domains of As-Is and As-If, eroding the boundary tensegrity of the Self necessary for ethical imagination (Tateo, 2016; Vaihinger, 1924). Unlike the stochastic variation of generative networks, which achieve similarity without transcending the original model (Goodfellow et al., 2014), human persistent imitation generates genuine novelty through future-oriented affective hypergeneralization (Baldwin, 1892; Valsiner, 2007). The paper concludes by proposing theorizing as temporal resistance: recovering the thickness of the present through zones of semiotic buffering is the ontological condition to sustain political agency.

In this presentation, I will attempt to theorize and conceptually explore two psychological processes related to change in human consciousness, the on-set of sleep and waking up from it. To this end, I will employ both cultural-historical activity theory (Leont’ev 1978) and cultural psychology (e.g, Valsiner 2014) as my main theoretical frameworks. Specifically, I suggest that both falling asleep and waking up could be understood as spontaneous but also deviced liminal experiences (Stenner 2017, 2021), (un)organized temporary suspensions of the limits between consciousness and sleep and movement between these states as a world of its own. Importantly, in this world the direction of the passage possibly impacts the potentiality of the experience and which, in turn, can also disrupt the passage altogether. I will enrich my exploration with philosophical readings of sleep (Morgan Wortham 2013), especially Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep (2009).

In my presentation I will use observational and interview data to illuminate and challenge my conceptual explorations. These data come from a microethnography of the sleep practices of two Finnish kindergarten groups I recently conducted. The presentation contributes to my overall goal of trying to understand various cultures of sleep in early childhood and to employ the educational sciences to invent and develop novel practices for better sleep in the age of the Anthropocene.

References

Nancy, J-L. (2009). The Fall of Sleep. Fordham University Press

Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall.

Morgan Wortham, S. (2013). The Poetics of Sleep From Aristotle to Nancy. Bloomsbury

Stenner, P. (2017). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinarity approach to the psychosocial. Palgrave.

Stenner, P. (2021). Theorising Liminality between Art and Life: The Liminal Sources of Cultural Experience. In B. Wagoner & T. Zittound (Eds.) Experience on the Edge. Theorizing Liminality. pp. 3 - 42. Springer.

Valsiner, J. (2014). An Invitation to Cultural Psychology. SAGE.