This volume contains essays which trace the evolution of scientific writing about psychiatry. It explores individual historical figures and movements as well as the history of the asylum, the biographies on Freud and popular opinion regarding psychiatry, both now and in the past.
Psychiatry and psychology, including psychoanalysis, have
exercised enormous cultural and scientific influence in our
century, and an important part of the growth of these fields
has been their attempt to construct accounts of their own
disciplinary pasts. Yet these accounts, which form the
collective memory of the psychiatric profession, have varied
greatly. In fact, the history of psychiatry has emerged as
one of the most rapidly-growing and controversy-ridden areas
of commentary in recent years. This book brings together
twenty studies by a cast of eminent authors--physicians,
social scientists, and humanists from Europe and North
America--who explore the many complex interpretive and
ideological dimensions of history writing about the
psychological sciences. It includes chapters on the history
of the asylum, Freud biography, anti-psychiatry in the United States and abroad, feminist interpretations of
psychiatry's past, and historical accounts of Nazism and
psychotherapy, as well as discussions of many individual
historical figures and movements. This book represents the
first attempt to study comprehensively the multiple
mythologies that have grown up around the history of madness
and the origin, functions, and validity of these myths in
our psychological century.
This is in the best sense also a handbook, the book is essential reading The Society for the Social History of Medicine
