Abstract: The Best Minds is a hybrid text that intertwines cultural biography, autobiography, and the history of psychiatry in the United States. This article argues that Rosen’s narrative is structured through a logic of “entanglement,” capturing the intertwined lives of Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor alongside broader sociocultural, political, and psychiatric discourses. The “biographical dialectics” of Jonathan’s and Michael’s lives captures the ongoing, unresolved negotiation of identity in chronic illness. Michael’s life is marked by continuous disruption without narrative closure, contrasting with Jonathan’s retrospective capacity to impose coherence. This asymmetry underscores the narrative power imbalance between subject and narrator, and ultimately raises questions about ethical engagement with, and narrative accountability for stories of mental illness.
Ronja Bodola (Mon,) studied this question.