A History of Immaturity

Author

Felix Bernstein, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Wayne Koestenbaum

Committee Members

Tanya Agathocleous

Joshua Wilner

Subject Categories

Aesthetics | American Popular Culture | Cultural History | Digital Humanities | European Languages and Societies | Literature in English, North America | Performance Studies | Philosophy of Language | Queer Studies | Theory and Philosophy | Visual Studies

Keywords

Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, Sexuality, Critical Theory, Sigmund Freud

Abstract

“A History of Immaturity” expands the boundaries of queer theory to engage with neurodivergence and post-digital identity – foregrounding how latent and archaic intellectual traditions continue to shape power and exclusion through narration and diagnosis. As an author, I become a psycho-junkie – synthesizing a panoply of competing disciplines into newly contorted formulas: running proofs for a sexuality that can never be determined.

I examine how the tropes of individuation and differentiation are used as biological and psychological measures of maturity in opposition to the immature chaos of infancy, synesthesia, and the confusion of boundaries between inside/outside, infant/adult, and subject/object. These metrics of maturity have been taken up as a bio-chronological trajectory across psychoanalysis, attachment theory, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology. I scramble the presumed naturalism of these tropes by pointing to how diagrammatic and rhetorical forms give shape to supposedly empirical narratives. In particular, I show how the rhetorical category of synesthetic schemes (σχήμα) is repeatedly deployed in Western literature and psychology to stage the transition from sensory plenitude to rational differentiation. While schemes (sonic, retinal and rhythmic patterns) were subsidiary to rational clarity in classical rhetoric, they remained an omnipresent, if hidden, thread that always threatened to break down the fiction of narrative clarity. By reversing the rhetorical ordering, I lead with schemes – following illustrations and diagrams and patterns towards unstable and absurd conclusions.

The project also interrogates the appropriation of recapitulation theory—particularly Ernst Haeckel’s claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—in theories of psychosexual development, which are spiked with more or less latent racial, sexual, and gendered hierarchies.

Foregrounding a methodology of threshing, rimming and edging, I parse the unstable boundaries between categorical distinctions—maturity and immaturity, clarity and confusion, sexuality and cognition—mapping their interplay in aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological discourses.

The dissertation unfolds across five chapters: the first traces the trope of infancy in world-historical, aesthetic, and psychological thought; the second theorizes threshing as a method for unraveling developmental binaries; the third introduces a new sexual typology that reframes perverse topologies in terms of the endless search to attribute excess stimulus, which I call stimming; the fourth explores the shell as a metaphor for psychic enclosure and associative memory, culminating in a theory of the syntom/synthome (a synthetic symptom that serves as an artificial rim-barrier for the subject); and the fifth examines how a fixed set of verbal regimes take turns claiming authority over the zeitgeist. An appendix surveys 18^th century philosopher Giambattista Vico’s unacknowledged influence on psychology through his tropological history of humanity (from metaphor to irony in cycles).

Rather than applying psychoanalysis to literature, I apply literary analysis to the works of psychoanalysis and psychology — registering a set of tropes and clichés that psychology consistently deploys to measure maturity.

Recommended Citation

Bernstein, Felix, "A History of Immaturity" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6206