Primitive madness: Re-writing the history of mental illness and race

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 245-257

  Fearnley, Andrew M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; MENTAL DISEASE; PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY; PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL; RACE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY;

CONTINENTAL POPULATION GROUPS; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MENTAL DISORDERS; MODELS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; PREJUDICE; PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY;

EID: 52249109616     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: 14684373     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrm029     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Gerald N. Grob, The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts, 1830-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 3.
2. See also his "Psychiatry's Holy Grail: The Search for the Mechanisms of Mental Diseases," Bull. Hist. Med., 1998, 72:2, 189-219.
3. Grob, "Psychiatry's Holy Grail," 197.
4. Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 126.
5. Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 4.
6. Ellen Dwyer, "Psychiatry and Race during World War II," J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 2006, 61:2, 117-43. A number of others scholars have begun to grapple with the substantive and conceptual issues this lacuna presents.
7. See for example, Dennis Doyle, "The Universal Mind Assumption: Harlem and the Development of a New Racial Formation in American Psychiatry, 1938-1968" (Ph.D. diss., Stony Brook University, 2006);
8. Andrew M. Fearnley, "Ideas of Race and Insanity in the Modern U.S." (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2008);
9. Jonathan Metzl, "'The Protest Psychosis': Race, Stigma, and Schizophrenia," MIT Center for the Study of Diversity Conference, April 2006;
10. Kirby Randolph, "Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane: A History of African Americans with Mental Disabilities, 1844-1885" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003).
11. Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 2.
12. James B. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 8.
13. Evelynn Hammonds and Banu Subramaniam, "A Conversation on Feminist Science Studies," Signs, Spring 2003, 28, 923-44.
14. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo, 13.
15. Ibid., 8.
16. Michel Foucault, "What Is An Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 119.
17. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo, 239 (emphasis in original).
18. Ibid., 67.
19. Joan Scott shows how the qualities of individuality were much vaunted in late nineteenth-century Western culture, and in particular the way race and gender were inscribed on them. See her Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 10-12.
20. Celia Brickman, "Primitivity, Race, and Religion in Psychoanalysis," J. Rel., January 2002, 82, 53-74.
21. The writings of Boston psychiatrist Edward Southard prove this point particularly well. See E. E. Southard, The Major Divisions of Mental Hygiene, Public, Social, Individual (Boston: Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene publication n.18, 1916).
22. The Kingdom of Evil: Psychiatric Social Work Presented in One Hundred Case Histories, Together with a Classification of Social Divisions of Evil (New York: MacMillan, 1922) is a posthumously-published collection of case notes by Southard, notable for the sparsity of references to racial groups and the complete lack of mention of "white," "Caucasian," or "American" patients.
23. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo, 211.
24. Ibid., 211.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. A superb account of the decline of American psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), see esp. ch. 17-20.
27. Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 52.
28. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 161.
29. William Allen White, writing in his influential Lectures in Psychiatry (The Major Psychoses) (1928; New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1931), expressed a similar opinion with his insistence that "the savage is constantly attributing to all natural phenomena causative agencies that are essentially human in kind." Years later, A.A. Brill, Freud's American translator and eager promoter, would show the tenacity of the analogy with his comparison of "savages," "children," and "neurotics" in his Lectures on Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946), see esp. 92-7, and 168-9. Indeed, Freud was far from alone among psychiatry's foundational figures in invoking the idea of the 'savage' as an analogy for the neurotic as those familiar with Emil Kraepelin's writings well know.
30. See Kraepelin's Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia (Edinburgh: E.S. Livingstone, trans. R. Mary Barclay, 1921), 261.
31. Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 196.
32. Claudia Tate, "Freud and His 'Negro': Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans," J. Psychoanal. Cult. Soc., Spring 1996, 1, 54.
33. Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 176.
34. For the contention that Southern states' decisions to provide care for the black insane was done entirely at the whim of social and political considerations, see Steven Noll, "Southern Strategies for Handling the Black Feeble-Minded: From Social Control to Profound Indifference," J. Policy Hist., 1991, 3:2, 130-51;
35. and his, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
36. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989),
37. and her Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).