A quarter century of the history of psychiatry (original) (raw)

1999, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

This article reviews the development of the historiography of Anglo-American psychiatry over the past quarter century, while passing attention to work on the history of psychiatry in Europe. The relationship between earlier and later work is stressed, and recent trends in the field assessed. ᭧ 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1. This is a curious phenomenon that doubtless deserves further examination in its own right, but the present article is scarcely the place to undertake such a task. 2. This constraint is more than purely geographical, of course, given the distinctive theoretical approaches to the subject that have emerged in particular national contexts: the influence of critical theory and the so-called Frankfurt School, for example, on the work of Klaus Dörner and his followers in Germany (see especially Dörner's Madmen and the Bourgeoisie (1981); and of Foucault and the Foucaultians in France, for example, Robert Castel, The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarnation in France (1988). 3. The original edition appeared in 1961. A heavily abridged English translation-which is all most anglophones are acquainted with-appeared in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (Trans.). For a series of recent essays on Foucault, by both partisans and critics, see A. Still & I. Velody (Eds.), Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's Histoire de la folie (1992).

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