y separately published work icon The Treatment single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1980... 1980 The Treatment
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Affiliation Notes

  • Writing Disability in Australia

    Type of disability Mental illness.
    Type of character Primary.
    Point of view Second person.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Other Formats

Works about this Work

Big Father is Watching You : A Postcolonial Reading of Peter Kocan's Total Institution Novellas Jean-François Vernay , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 61-66)
'Born in 1947, Peter Kocan went down in the history of Australian fiction for having written a pair of companion novellas that are largely inspired from his experience as an inmate when he was incarcerated at Long Bay Correctional Center (Sydney) and then confined in Ward 6 for the Criminally Insane in Morrisset Psycological Hospital (New South Wales). When he turned 19, he attempted to shoot dead the then-leader of the Australian Labor Party Arthur Calwell with a sawn-off .22 rifle. At the time of the trial he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic and condemned to life imprisonment, a sentence that was commuted to ten years of treatment that gave him and insiders knowledge of psychiatric institutions. Published after a time when asylum narratives were starting to make their mark in Australian fiction with novels such as David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972) and Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), The Treatment (1980) and its sequel The Cure (1983) chronicle Len Tarbutt's institutionalisation - a nineteen-year-old youngster confined in the maximum-security cell of a mental hospital to serve a life sentence. On another level, these two second-person semi-fictions can also be interpreted as a national allegory of Australian penal settlement, which explicates the ruler-ruled relationship through the establishment of a panoptic repressive system.' (Author's introduction)
The Art of Penning the March Hare In : The Treatment of Insanity in Australian Total Institution Fiction Jean-François Vernay , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Aumla , November no. 118 2012; (p. 87-103)

'The treatment of psychological disorders of all kinds and, more largely, of the deterioration of the mind, gradually made its mark in Australian novels in the early 1970s and gave rise to a series of books concerned with mental health issues. The six narratives I have selected for this study-David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972), Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), Peter Kocan's two you-narration novellas The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), Carmel Bird's The White Garden (1995), and Amy Witting's Isobela on the Way to the Corner Shop (1999)-all partake of this new trend. This belated literary awakening to insanity is all the stranger seeing that creativity and madness have often been paired, both being particularly apt at articulating the relationship between freedom and constraint, mental representation and reality, the individual and society.' (Author's introduction)

Emeritus Award for Peter Kocan 2010 single work column
— Appears in: Artery , no. 14 2010; (p. 16)
When You is Me : Sustained Second-Person Narrative Voice in the Works of G. M. Glaskin and Peter Kocan Jeremy Fisher , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing , May no. 1 2010; (p. 37-77)
This paper explores the use of sustained second-person narrative in G. M. Glaskin's No End to the Way and Peter Kocan's The Treatment.
非理性的光辉,疯癫中的诗意–对小说《治疗》和《痊愈》的福柯式解读 A Foucaltian Reading of Peter Kocan's The Treatment and The Cure Li Feng , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Contemporary Foreign Literature , vol. [2005] no. 2 2005; (p. 84-88)
When You is Me : Sustained Second-Person Narrative Voice in the Works of G. M. Glaskin and Peter Kocan Jeremy Fisher , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing , May no. 1 2010; (p. 37-77)
This paper explores the use of sustained second-person narrative in G. M. Glaskin's No End to the Way and Peter Kocan's The Treatment.
Emeritus Award for Peter Kocan 2010 single work column
— Appears in: Artery , no. 14 2010; (p. 16)
Big Father is Watching You : A Postcolonial Reading of Peter Kocan's Total Institution Novellas Jean-François Vernay , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 61-66)
'Born in 1947, Peter Kocan went down in the history of Australian fiction for having written a pair of companion novellas that are largely inspired from his experience as an inmate when he was incarcerated at Long Bay Correctional Center (Sydney) and then confined in Ward 6 for the Criminally Insane in Morrisset Psycological Hospital (New South Wales). When he turned 19, he attempted to shoot dead the then-leader of the Australian Labor Party Arthur Calwell with a sawn-off .22 rifle. At the time of the trial he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic and condemned to life imprisonment, a sentence that was commuted to ten years of treatment that gave him and insiders knowledge of psychiatric institutions. Published after a time when asylum narratives were starting to make their mark in Australian fiction with novels such as David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972) and Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), The Treatment (1980) and its sequel The Cure (1983) chronicle Len Tarbutt's institutionalisation - a nineteen-year-old youngster confined in the maximum-security cell of a mental hospital to serve a life sentence. On another level, these two second-person semi-fictions can also be interpreted as a national allegory of Australian penal settlement, which explicates the ruler-ruled relationship through the establishment of a panoptic repressive system.' (Author's introduction)
The Art of Penning the March Hare In : The Treatment of Insanity in Australian Total Institution Fiction Jean-François Vernay , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Aumla , November no. 118 2012; (p. 87-103)

'The treatment of psychological disorders of all kinds and, more largely, of the deterioration of the mind, gradually made its mark in Australian novels in the early 1970s and gave rise to a series of books concerned with mental health issues. The six narratives I have selected for this study-David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972), Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), Peter Kocan's two you-narration novellas The Treatment (1980) and The Cure (1983), Carmel Bird's The White Garden (1995), and Amy Witting's Isobela on the Way to the Corner Shop (1999)-all partake of this new trend. This belated literary awakening to insanity is all the stranger seeing that creativity and madness have often been paired, both being particularly apt at articulating the relationship between freedom and constraint, mental representation and reality, the individual and society.' (Author's introduction)

非理性的光辉,疯癫中的诗意–对小说《治疗》和《痊愈》的福柯式解读 A Foucaltian Reading of Peter Kocan's The Treatment and The Cure Li Feng , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Contemporary Foreign Literature , vol. [2005] no. 2 2005; (p. 84-88)
Last amended 7 Feb 2019 16:24:37
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