Madness: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Scull

Madness: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Scull

Author:Andrew Scull [Scull, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science, Mental Illness, History, Nonfiction, Psychology
ISBN: 9780199608034
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2011-08-24T23:00:00+00:00


13. A hysterical spasm of the entire body of Paule G, provoked by stroking her right forearm. Her rigid body spans two stools. An image taken from Leçons cliniques sur I’hystérie et I’hypnotisme (Paris, 1891)

Hysteria had been joined in the 1880s by a new mental malady of the affluent professional classes, neurasthenia - literally, weakness of the nerves - a mental disorder brought on, so its proponents claimed, by overwork and the pace of modern civilization. Overdrawing their stock of nervous energy, running down their batteries, bankrupting their brains - or so the theorists of marginal madness put it, in metaphors sure to flatter those they sought to attract and treat - the rich and the successful also succumbed to mental distress and breakdown. Naturally enough, these captains of industry and finance, these representatives of the best and the brightest, did not look kindly upon suggestions that they were a biologically inferior lot. Nor did they relish confinement in the warehouses of the unwanted that asylums had now become. Much more palatable was an alternative vision of the sources of mental disturbance that some now began to advance, among neurologists and other ‘nerve doctors’ on both sides of the Atlantic, one that sought explanations in the realm of human psychology, and treatment by psychodynamic means, preferably on an out-patient basis.

It would be wholly wrong to attribute this challenge to biologically based psychiatry as the product of one person. On the contrary, men like George Beard and Morton Prince in the United States, Paul Dubois in Switzerland, and Pierre Janet in France (to say nothing of religiously based mind-healing cults, like Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science) were busy inventing their own explanations and interventions for these protean forms of mental upset. But nowhere were these innovations developed more powerfully and effectively than in Vienna, where Sigmund Freud began to proclaim that madness had meaning - indeed, was produced at the level of meaning, and had to be cured at the level of meaning.

Based on the first few cases he treated with his older colleague Josef Breuer in the 1880s, Freud had largely abandoned what he came to regard as the somatic prejudices of his youth. His hysterical patients, he thought, were suffering from repressed traumatic memories, memories that provoked the symptoms they now manifested. And their symptoms, he initially surmised, could be relieved by recalling what had been driven underground. Utilizing hypnosis, as earlier repressed experiences surfaced, a process of emotional catharsis ensued, and the patient could be pulled back from the brink of insanity.

Freud rapidly lost his faith in hypnosis and the cathartic method, but not his conviction that the sources of the mental disturbances among his patients lay in ‘murdered memories’, or rather in thoughts too disturbing to admit to one’s consciousness. In the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, he gradually developed an ever more elaborate model of human psychology, one largely based on clinical encounters with a small number of, mostly female, patients drawn from the ranks of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie.



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