Anthiena wrote:

It certainly fits. Utena is great for Epileptic Trees.

Which is just one click away from Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory, which includes SKU as an example.  Which of you clowns wrote the part about the penises?

Oops, sorry, serious thread deserves serious answer.  I think the first thing to observe is that there's nothing obviously psychotic about Utena's experiences in the structured way tohubohu laid out.  The Mikage arc was not a delusion, or at least not Utena's delusion; it "really happened," at least until it didn't anymore.  Phenomena occurred without a visible cause, but there were perfectly good invisible ones.  If noticing things happening without visible causes was a sign of incipient psychosis, I'd have to question my mental wellness every time my dogs barked at the darkness outside the patio at night.  The Akio Arc would show developing psychosis if Utena were misattributing the events of the Black Rose Arc to leprechauns or something, but she doesn't; she forgets all about it.  She doesn't lose control of her perception of reality; she has no delusions beyond the ones she started the show with, although she is under some illusions as a result of Akio's lies and seductions.  If that were a sign of psychosis, everyone who's ever been sweet-talked into bed would be psychotic.  As for apocalypse, it seems to me that the final arc is indeed characterized by a mental breakdown on Utena's part, but it's a breakdown followed rapidly by a reconstruction as Utena discovers her core values and acts on them in the final episodes.

If we want to worry about Utena's mental wellness, we should instead wonder about the inner tensions she comes to the academy with -- I want to find my prince, but I also want to be a prince, for example -- and how those evolve through the show.  The series might, however, be providing an example of a natural parallel between an individual becoming psychotic and an individual (Akio) manipulating another (Utena) by controlling their exposure to reality.

Last edited by satyreyes (12-11-2009 02:47:55 PM)

I think another way to formulate this question could be, rather than asking whether Utena herself is psychotic, asking whether Ohtori could be understood as a psychotic zone. One need only think of Freud's case study of Senatspräsident Schreber, whose psychosis was fueled and accompanied by extreme paranoia, which tends to be preceded by some degree of narcissism. The narcissistic subject fears persecution and becomes paranoid, and along the way, in the case of Schreber, became convinced that he was chosen by God to fulfill some sort of messianic role. (Is it improper to relate Schreber's delusion of becoming a woman to Utena's conviction of becoming a prince?) That aside, one of the defining traits in psychosis is the delimitation of the ego; by this I mean that the ego ceases to be a mediating space between the id and external world, but rather becomes fused with the external world, so that all thoughts and sensations which affect the subject's psyche are perceived as also occurring in the physical world around him. This is where the schizophrenic hallucinations appear. Rather than thinking something to himself, the psychotic subject believes there are disembodied voices speaking to him, because the line between self and other, self and world, has been either blurred or completely erased. Taking this into consideration, could we describe Ohtori as a psychotic space in which the limits of self and other/world are transgressed or dissolved? Or perhaps could we consider a psychotic space for specific characters (in particular Akio and Anthy)? I'm too tired to try to answer right now, but it's fun as hell to consider.