Hypochondria By: Will Rees

Author: Will Rees

The Empathy Exams of health a personal, literary, and cultural examination of hypochondria from Kafka to Seinfeld.

A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria combines incisive contemporary cultural critique, colourful literary history, and the author’s own experience of chronic health anxiety to ask what we might learn from the hypochondriac’s discomforting experience of their body.

Hypochondria is unashamedly capacious in its range of references, from the writings of hypochondriacs such as Franz Kafka and Charlotte Brontë to novel yet accessible readings of theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Maurice Blanchot. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne, Robert Burton, Susan Sontag, FitBits, sleep ‘hygiene,’ or the so-called narcissism epidemic, Rees treats his topic with a mixture of humour and seriousness while revealing himself to be an astute reader of all sorts of texts – not sparing even himself with his own astute and irreverent takes on this popular ailment.

An exercise in what Freud calls ‘evenly suspended attention,’ Hypochondria demonstrates the rewards – and perils – of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our lives.