Book Announcement: Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry
[Book announcement] With the mad. A social history of
psychiatry in the 20th century
New Book: On Psychiatry in Europe in the 20th century by
Benoît Majerus
The blurbs read:
*The challenge of this book is to tell the story of
psychiatry in the 20th century not through psychiatric handbooks or nosological
controversies, but through the daily life of one asylum. This approach enables
to discover actors that are still largely excluded from the traditional
narrative on psychiatry be it patients but also nurses, social workers… This
historiographical gaze gives new readings of classical themes in the field such
as the spatial settings of enclosure or the link between knowledge and power.
It also questions the chronology by revisiting the so-called chemical
revolution in the 1950s or the deinstitutionalisation from the 1960s on.*
*Patients’ records are a fascinating material to get
access to psychiatric practice. The organisation of work, the forms of
knowledge, the medical gaze, the experience of mental illness by the patient or
the physician are all topics that are too often described and analysed through
medical reports or through the published literature in psychiatric journals.
Considering these questions from below offers an
intriguing insight in the tensions between discourse and practice, between
representation of a field and its actual functioning.*
*This book is part of a larger narrative that goes beyond
a historiography of psychiatry still too often entangled in a dichotomous
narrative:
medical
progress or disciplinarisation. Combining micro-history
and sciences studies, it hopes to participate in the historicisation of a topic
difficult to grapple, but particularly rich for a history of the 20th century
through the margins.*
To read the two first chapters, click
.
Benoît Majerus is Associate Professor for European
History at the University of Luxembourg