Towards Post-Institutional Individualism: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the Therapeutic Politics of Dissent.

This article examines Ralph Ellison's engagement with social psychiatry in his novel *Invisible Man*, focusing on psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory of psychiatry. It argues that Ellison transforms traumatic experiences of psychiatric violence, particularly electric shock treatments, into a form of political expression that challenges institutional psychiatry's role in shaping subjects for Fordist industrial production. Ellison's depiction of deinstitutionalized psychiatric subjects anticipates later mental health consumerism and post-institutionalization trends beginning in the 1970s, which shifted treatment from institutional care to individualized, market-driven therapy. The essay also highlights Ellison's involvement with the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic in Harlem and his use of social psychiatry to render African American psychological experiences intelligible within their social context, thereby fostering political consciousness and dissent against racialized psychiatric and sociological pathologies.