From paranoia querulans to vexatious litigants: a short study on madness between psychiatry and the law. Part 1
The first part of this two-part paper presents a comparative history of paranoia querulans, also known as litigants’ delusion, in German-speaking countries and France from the nineteenth century onwards. We first focus on two classic literary works which describe litigious behaviours that were later pathologized, then give an insight into the history of Querulantenwahn (litigants’ delusion), a term coined in 1857 by Johann Ludwig Casper and adopted by German-speaking psychiatrists and forensic experts. The last section is devoted to its French equivalent, the delusion of the litigious persecuted-persecutors. We...
Source: History of Psychiatry - August 11, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Levy, B. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'The world is full of big bad wolves': investigating the experimental therapeutic spaces of R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson
In conjunction with the recent critical assessments of the life and work of R.D. Laing, this paper seeks to demonstrate what is revealed when Laing’s work on families and created spaces of mental health care are examined through a geographical lens. The paper begins with an exploration of Laing’s time at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1960s, and of the co-authored text with Aaron Esterson entitled, Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). The study then seeks to demonstrate the importance Laing and his colleague placed on the time-space situatedness of patients and their worlds. Finally, an account is ...
Source: History of Psychiatry - August 11, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: McGeachan, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Death of an alienist: Louis-Victor Marce's final year
The cause of death, at the age of 37, of Louis-Victor Marcé (1828–64), one of the most innovative alienists of the nineteenth century, was concealed by his contemporaries and colleagues. Recently it has been discovered that he committed suicide, but the circumstances and reasons for this were unknown. Information has now been found about his family, the events of the last year of his life and an unprecedented correspondence from his father-in-law, the chemist and academician Jules Pelouze, describing Marcé’s condition during the last month of his life. All of these point towards a diagnosis of mel...
Source: History of Psychiatry - August 11, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Luaute, J.-P., Lemperiere, T., Arnaud, P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
On 'The bones of the insane' (letter received 23 December 2013)
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Letters to the Editor Source Type: research
Research on the history of psychiatry: Dissertation Abstracts, 2011 (continued)
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Research on the history of psychiatry Source Type: research
'Visions of the Dying', by James H Hyslop (1907): With an introduction by
Deathbed visions have been of interest to psychical researchers and others since the nineteenth century. This Classic Text presents a reprint of an article on ‘Visions of the Dying’ published in 1907 in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research by philosopher and psychical researcher James H. Hyslop (1854–1920). The article was Hyslop’s attempt to define the topic as one belonging to the agenda of psychical research and to request additional cases for further study. An introduction to this Classic Text sets it in the context of previous writings on the subject, of Hyslop’s psy...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Alvarado, C. S. Tags: Classic Text No. 98 Source Type: research
Insanity, philanthropy and emigration: dealing with insane children in late-nineteenth-century north-west England
The historiography of asylums and insanity is dense, and some topics have received much scholarly attention but others, such as insanity among children, have been largely neglected. Children by no means formed the majority of asylum populations, but they still suffered from mental impairment and were admitted to these institutions in significant numbers. Identifying the various experiences of insane children is the central goal of this research, but the asylum will not be the sole emphasis. The focus is to place child mental deficiency within a broader context of extramural care. By examining workhouses, the role of family...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Taylor, S. J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and its impact on the theory of psychopathology
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) wrote in 1929: ‘For what it [the philosophy of symbolic forms] is seeking is not so much common factors in being as common factors in meaning. Hence we must strive to bring the teachings of pathology, which cannot be ignored, into the more universal context of the philosophy of culture’ (Cassirer, 1955: 275). This statement summarizes his approach in shifting the focus on psychopathological theory from the brain and its localizations to the living interaction between the self and his/her social environment. The present article looks at the impact of symbol theory...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Andersch, N., Cutting, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
'I am reading the history of religion': a contribution to the knowledge of Freud's building of a theory
Could Reinach’s Cultes, mythes et religions (1908) have served as a model for the theory of religion that Freud was later to put forward in Totem and Taboo (1913)? This hypothesis has been tested by examining Freud’s marginalia in his personal copy of Cultes, mythes et religions. In this way it is possible to reconstitute the line of thinking that led Freud to declare, in late summer 1911, that he had found an answer to the question of the origins of tragic guilt and religious sentiment. (Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Cotti, P. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Shifting boundaries between the normal and the pathological: the case of mild intellectual disability
When disorders fade into normality, how can the threshold between normality and disorder be determined? In considering mild intellectual disability, I argue that economic factors partly determine thresholds. We tend to assume that the relationship between disorder, need and services is such that: first, a cut-off point between the disordered and the normal is determined; second, a needy population is identified; and third, resources are found (or at least should be found) to meet this need. However, the changing definitions of intellectual disability can best be understood if we think of this happening in reverse. That is,...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Cooper, R. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Japanese psychoanalysis and Buddhism: the making of a relationship
This article explores the making of a relationship between Japanese psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in the life and work of Kosawa Heisaku. Kosawa did not work out the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Buddhism in abstract, theoretical terms; rather, he understood them as two different articulations of the same practical approach to living well. He saw this approach in action in the lives of Freud and Shinran, the latter a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist reformer. For Kosawa, both individuals exemplified the ‘true religious state of mind’, at the achievement of which Kosawa understood psychoanalytic psycho...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Harding, C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
John Locke on madness: redressing the intellectualist bias
Locke is famous for defining madness as an intellectual disorder in the realm of ideas. Numerous commentators take this to be his main and only contribution to the history of psychiatry. However, a detailed exegetical review of all the relevant textual evidence suggests that this intellectualist interpretation of Locke’s account of madness is both misleading and incomplete. Affective states of various sorts play an important role in that account and are in fact primordial in the determination of human conduct generally. Locke’s legacy in this domain must therefore be revised and the intellectualist bias that do...
Source: History of Psychiatry - May 19, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Charland, L. C. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
The powers of suggestion: Albert Moll and the debate on hypnosis
The Berlin physician Albert Moll (1862–1939) was an advocate of hypnotic suggestion therapy and a prolific contributor to the medical, legal and public discussions on hypnotism from the 1880s to the 1920s. While his work in other areas, such as sexology, medical ethics and parapsychology, has recently attracted scholarly attention, this paper for the first time comprehensively examines Moll’s numerous publications on hypnotism and places them in their contemporary context. It covers controversies over the therapeutic application of hypnosis, the reception of...
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Maehle, A.-H. Tags: Articles Source Type: research
Soren Kierkegaard's disease (received 17 December 2013)
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Tags: Letters to the Editor Source Type: research
Book Review: Martin Halliwell, Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970
(Source: History of Psychiatry)
Source: History of Psychiatry - March 4, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Dunst, A. Tags: Book Reviews Source Type: research
