Nadia’s Case Revisited: Beauvoir’s Extended Phenomenology of Psychosis

In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir sketches a severe moralist view on the feminine existence by considering the woman’s consent to becoming other than the authentic phenomenological subject a moral fault. We may ask what happens within this view to altered existential modes that could elicit from the woman’s situation of oppression in patriarchal societies, as it is described by Beauvoir, and, in the case of psychological fragility, could develop into painful psychotic conditions. In this article, I show that Beauvoir directly addresses this question by engaging in an innovative approach to specifically feminine psychoses. By focusing on the case of Nadia, first described by Pierre Janet (1903) and later interwoven by Ludwig Binswanger with the better-known case of Ellen West (1944–45), Beauvoir puts forward an extended phenomenology of psychosis. She takes account of the patient’s overall situation that integrates the latter’s lived experience with the political and social factors implicated in the constitution of this experience. Thus, I highlight, Beauvoir significantly challenges Binswanger’s diagnosis of Nadia and Ellen as untreatable schizophrenics.