Psychiatry, Madness, and Society

Catalog description

Examines social, cultural, intellectual and institutional aspects of the history of madness in Europe since 1789. The course will begin with the age of the so-called ?Great Confinement,? then move on to consider the institutional and therapeutic reforms of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era; the rise of theories of degeneration, hysteria and neurasthenia in the second half of the 19th century; psychoanalysis and sexology; war neurosis and military psychiatry; psychiatry under the Nazis. It will conclude by looking at the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and the new biological psychiatry of the 1980s and 1990s.