Discovering the History of Psychiatry

Front Cover
Mark S. Micale, Roy Porter
Oxford University Press, 1994 - Medical - 466 pages
The field of psychiatry has exercised enormous influence in our century, not only among scientists and mental health professionals, but also in the arts, humanities, and social sciences which shape the cultural life of millions. This vitality has been accompanied by a profusion of historical material. Yet, while growing rapidly, the documented history of psychiatry has been ridden with controversy due to the great variety of interpretive nuance among different writers. This book brings together leading international authorities - physicians, historians, social scientists, and others - who explore the many complex interpretive and ideological dimensions of historical writing about psychiatry. The book includes chapters on the history of the asylum, Freud, 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. It 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. The audience includes every person interested in the state of discussion and reflection taking place in the compelling science of the human mind.
 

Contents

Early Developments
14
Germany
39
19101960
53
History between Psychoanalysis
83
George Rosen and the History of Mental Illness
95
The History of Psychiatry as the History
112
The History of Psychiatry as the Cultural History
135
A History of Freud Biographies
157
A Century
248
Personal Reflections
260
German Psychiatry Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis during
282
Recurring Themes in the Historiography
297
Thomas Szasz
311
Michel Foucaults Phänomenologie des Krankengeistes
331
Feminist Histories of Psychiatry
348
History and AntiPsychiatry in France
384

Rewriting the History
174
The Critic of Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theorist
191
Les mythes dorigine in the History of Psychiatry
219
The History of a Psychiatric Myth
232
Psychiatry and AntiPsychiatry in the United States
415
Index
445
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Roy Sydney Porter was born December 31, 1946. He grew up in a south London working class home. He attended Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell, and won an unheard of scholarship to Cambridge. His starred double first in history at Cambridge University (1968) led to a junior research fellowship at his college, Christ's, followed by a teaching post at Churchill College, Cambridge. His Ph.D. thesis, published as The Making Of Geology (1977), became the first of more than 100 books that he wrote or edited. Porter was a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1972 to 1979; Dean from 1977 to 1979; Assistant Lecturer in European History at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1977, Lecturer from 1977 to 1979. He joined the Wellcome Institute fot the History of Medicine in 1979 where he was a Senior Lecturer from 1979 to 1991, a Reader from 1991 to 1993, and finally a Professor in the Social History of Medicine from 1993 to 2001. Porter was Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994, and he was also made an honorary fellow by both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Roy Porter died March 4, 2002, at the age of 55.

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