Literature and Medicine

Abstract:

Since its 1975 release, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Milos Forman) has maintained an intertextual relationship with the psychiatric discipline, serving as an icon of anti-authoritarianism and a barometer of the state of the field. The film’s popularity in the 1970s drew on a context of youth protest on one hand and anti-psychiatry mobilization on the other, both of which it also spurred. Yet how might One Flew read in a different historical moment? Here, in dialogue with my students’ reactions and analysis, I argue that the aftermath of dehospitalization and contemporary gender and racial politics have rendered One Flew a more ambivalent cultural artifact. Changing responses to the film in turn reflect the ways in which we draw on the discipline’s past in confronting our psychiatric present.