Name: Nataša Polgar | Fantastic beings in a madhouse
Start: 2025-11-27T16:30:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-27T18:00:00+00:00
Location: Seminar Room 4, Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh

$Nata\u0161a Polgar | Fantastic beings in a madhouse$

Visiting Lecturer talk for the Traditional Cosmology Society and the Temporality Research Cluster, School of Art, University of Edinburgh
About this Event

'Fantastic beings in a madhouse: patients' narratives and psychiatric discourse'

by Nataša Polgar (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb) in association with the Traditional Cosmology Society and Temporality Research Cluster, ECA

This presentation explores the patient narratives recorded in the medical files of the first Croatian Psychiatry Clinic, the former Royal Land Institute for the Mentally Ill “Stenjevec,” founded in 1879, with particular attention to the period of transition from the 19th to the 20th century. This period in Croatia was marked by an enlightened, rationalist movement that gradually disenchanted the magical worldview and began to pathologize it. Drawing on archival material from the Stenjevec Institute for the Mentally Ill in Zagreb, the talk examines the functions of a specific type of narrative—fragments of patients’ accounts in which fantastic or supernatural beings (including new forms of the monstrous) appear and which folkloristics most often recognize as belief legends.

These recorded narrative fragments reveal how the fantastic and terrifying imaginary becomes supplemented by new, hybrid forms that reflect both old and emerging fears. Patients in the mental hospital shaped these forms narratively by relying on oral genres, but within psychiatric discourse they were not interpreted as expressions of fear or anxiety. Instead, they were treated as symptoms that served as the basis for diagnosis and often for long-term hospitalization.

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Nataša Polgar is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia. She studied comparative literature and French language and literature and earned her PhD in comparative literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She previously worked as an editor in a publishing house, where she edited numerous books on mythology, literary theory, historiography, and related fields, and she served as editor of Narodna umjetnost, the Croatian scientific journal for ethnology, cultural anthropology, and folkloristics.

Her main research interests include psychoanalytic readings of phenomena such as witch-hunts; cultural representations of monstrosity in literature and film; the history of cultural constructions of madness; and the genre of the autobiography of madness. She is currently conducting research in the archive of the first Croatian institution for the mentally ill – today’s Psychiatric Clinic –focusing on patients’ narratives. In 2022, she published the book Witch on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Essays on Witch Trials in Croatia.

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FREE but donations requested: £5/£8

TRADITIONAL COSMOLOGY SOCIETY | https://thisisthetcson.wordpress.com/

Issues of The Traditional Cosmology Society's journal Cosmos on sale at the event for a special price of £20 (usual price £40)

TEMPORALITY RESEARCH CLUSTER | https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/research/temporality-entropy-being

PLEASE NOTE: this is a live in-person event only, not hybrid or live-streamed. An audio recording will be made available on TCS website after the event.

The venue & seminar room is wheelchair accessible and on the lower-ground floor. Paid parking outside the building at George Square is possible but very limited.