HIPS 29103/HIST 24907:

A Social History of Psychiatry in the United States, 1750-1947

 

Instructor: Rachel Ponce

 

Description

This course is intended to be an introduction to the history of psychiatry with an emphasis on understanding the social impacts of changes in diagnosis and treatment of the mentally ill.  We will focus on critical (usually controversial) developments in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment in the United States from the end of the colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century.  Topics include the rise of the asylum, insanity under the law, criminality, sexuality, neurasthenia, hysteria, psychoanalysis, shell-shock, craniometry, intelligence testing, and psychosurgery.  We will look at a mixture of primary and secondary sources to explore how psychiatric knowledge was produced and to assess the extent to which popular stereotypes about gender, race, class, and nativity became embedded in psychiatric thinking.

 

Course Requirements

Class Participation: 30%

Short Paper and Presentation: 30%

Final Paper: 40%

 

It is essential that you keep up with the readings.  I will try to keep each week manageable, but knowledge of the texts will be essential to having good discussions. You are expected to have the reading prepared before class each week.  Regular attendance and participation is required.

 

You will also be expected to check the Chalk site before class every week and be prepared to respond to your fellow classmateÕs posts for each weekÕs presentation (description below).

 

The readings are contained in a course packet that will be available for purchase from the Fishbein Center during the first week of the quarter.  Any supplemental readings will be made available through e-reserve or the chalk website.

 

There is one required text in addition to the course packet:

 

Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, (New York: Norton, 1989).

Short Paper and Presentation

 

There are 3 components to this assignment.

 

1. Make a short post  (200-300 words) on the Chalk site by 10pm the Friday before the class for which the reading is assigned.  For example, if the reading you signed up for is to be discussed in class on Monday, October 20th, your post needs to be up on the Chalk site on Friday October 18th.  Your post should not be a summary of the text!  Rather, I want you to make an argument or an insightful observation about the text.  What do you see as the textÕs strengths or weaknesses and why?  What questions would you like to see us ask of the text in class discussion?

 

2.  Be prepared to discuss your post in class.  You will be asked to give a very brief prŽcis of the argument you posted on the chalk site in class the following Monday.  You presentation should be short (no more than 5 minutes!).  Then be prepared to defend your observations to your classmates.  I will expect everyone to have read your post before class and weÕll spend about 15 minutes in class responding to your post and your presentation.  

 

3.  Based on the class discussion, revise and expand your original chalk post.  The final product should be a short essay of about 1000 words. Turn this paper in to me at the beginning of the class following your presentation.  Again, if your presentation is on the Monday, October 20th, your paper is due to me on Monday, October 27th.  Points will be deducted from late papers. 

 

 

Final Project – Research Paper

 

Your final project will be a 12-15 page paper (Times New Roman, 12 pt., 1Ó margins) that will require you to do independent research.  You have a choice of research project between the following two options:

 

1.  Write a historical essay.  Find and analyze primary sources on the topic of your choice.  You will be expected to have at least 5 different primary sources for your essay, and you will need to make an argument (that is, your essay cannot just be a summary or description of your sources).  Ask a question of these sources, and let your argument be an attempt to answer that question based on the evidence the sources provide.

 

2.  Write a historiographical essay.  Find and analyze secondary sources on the topic of your choice.  You will be expected to use at least 5 different secondary sources for your essay.  Your essay needs to analyze and evaluate the claims made in the secondary sources, not just describe them.  You should also make an argument about how the secondary sources youÕve chosen relate to your main topic and how effective you think they are at answering

 

You must tell me what topic you are researching and have identified at least 2 sources for your topic by Week 7.  If you have not done so by Friday November 14th, I will drop the grade on your final project by ½ a grade (ie. from an A to A-, a B+ to a B, and so on).

Schedule of Readings

 

9/29  Week 1

Class Introduction

            No readings.

 

 

10/6  Week 2

The Origins of the Asylum: Curability and Social Order

 

Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, (Sheffield, 1806), 174-207.

Dorothea Dix, Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts (Boston, 1843).

Edward Jarvis, Insanity and Idiocy in Massachusetts: Report of the Commission on Lunacy, 1855 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971), 9-18, 46-78.

David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, (Boston: Little Brown, 1990), 130-154.

 

 

10/13  Week 3

Insanity in the Courtroom: The Insanity Defense, Wills, and Involuntary Commitment

 

George Tyler Bigelow and George Bemis, Report of the Trial of Abner Rogers, Jr. Indicted for the Murder of Charles Lincoln, Jr., (Boston: 1844), 30-33, 109-126, 149-166

E. P. W. Packard, Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. PackardÕs Trial, and Self-Defence from the Charge of InsanityÉ (Hartford, 1866), 1-41

Susana Blumenthal, ÒThe Deviance of the Will: Policing the Bounds of Testamentary Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America,Ó Harvard Law Review 119 (2006), 960-1034.

 

 

10/20  Week 4

Controversies, Abuses, and Contradictions

 

Isaac H. Hunt, Astounding Disclosures!: Three Years in a Mad-House. (1852), 3-43, 55-58

Clifford W. Beers, A Mind that Found Itself, (New York 1908), 111-180.

Pliny Earle, The Curability of Insanity (Philadelphia, 1876) 7-30, 52-63.

Bonnie Ellen Blustein, "A Hollow Square of Psychological Science,: American Neurologists and Psychiatrists in Conflict,Ó Madhouses, Mad Doctors, and Madmen: A Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era (Philadelphia: U of Penn P 1981), 241-270.

 

           

 

10/27 Week 5                         **MEETS IN REGENSTEIN  SPECIAL COLLECTIONS**

Psychological Treatments: Moral Therapy, Hypnotism, and the ÔTalking CureÕ

 

Amariah Brigham, ÒThe Moral Treatment of Insanity,Ó American Journal of Insanity 4:1 (1847), 1-15.

Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, (New York: Norton, 1989).

Jerome Schneck, ÒJean Martin-Charcot and the History of Experimental Hypnosis,Ó Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 16 (1961), 297-305.

Phillip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 140-158.

 

 

11/3 Week 6

The Evolution of a Disease: Hysteria as a Female Malady

 

Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ÒThe Case of Emmy von N.,Ó Studies in Hysteria (New York, 1936), 32-75.

Isaac Baker Brown, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria In Females, (London, 1866), 3-31.

S. Weir Mitchell, Fat and Blood: An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Types of Neurasthenia and Hysteria (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1884), 33-79.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 41-59, 348-349.

 

 

11/7 Week 7  

The Evolution of a Disease: Neurasthenia and Shell Shock

 

Eugene OÕNeill Shell Shock (1918). http://www.eoneill.com/texts/shell/contents.htm

Colonel Sir John Collie, ÒThe Management of War Neuroses and Allied Disorders in the Army,Ó Mental Hygiene 2:1 (January, 1918), 1-18.

George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Its Consequences (New York, 1881), 1-17, 96-133.

Caroline Cox, ÒInvisible Wounds: The American Legion, Shell-Shocked Veterans, and American Society, 1919-1924,Ó Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 280-305.

 

 

 

11/17  Week 8

Sexuality and Criminology: The Medicalization of Deviance

 

Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 45-57, 72-76, 167-182.

Bernard Glueck, ÒPsychiatric Aims in the Field of Criminology,Ó Mental Hygiene 2:4 (October, 1918) 546-556.

Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis (NewYork: Arcade Publishing, 1998), 186-200.

A. J. Bloch, ÒSexual Perversion in the Female,Ó New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 22:1 (July 1894) 1-7.

George Chauncy, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 131-150.

 

 

11/24  Week 9

 

Creating the Normal: Measuring Aptitude and Intelligence

 

Robert M. Yerkes, ÒThe Relation of Psychology to Military Activities,Ó Mental Hygiene 1 (July, 1917), 371-376.

Edward A. Spitzka, ÒA Study of the Brains of Six Eminent Scientists and Scholars Belonging to the American Anthropometric Society,Ó Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 21:4 (1907), 175-178, 208-234.

Henry Herbert Goddard, The Criminal Imbecile: An Analysis of Three Remarkable Murder Cases (New York: 1915) v-vi, 1-41, 100-108.

John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality In the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, Princeton UP, 2007), 159-194.

 

 

12/1  Week 10

Somatic Treatments: Organotherapy, Lobotomy, and ECT

 

Walter Freeman and James Watts, ÒPrefrontal Lobotomy in the Treatment of Mental Disorders,Ó Southern Medical Journal 30:1 (January1937), 23-31.

Hannah M. Moser, ÒA Ten-Year Follow-Up of Lobotomy Patients,Ó Hospital and Community Psychiatry 20 (1969), 381.

A. Miller, ÒThe Lobotomy Patient—A Decade Later: A Follow-up Study of a Research Project Started in 1948,Ó Canadian Medical Association Journal 96 (1967), 1095-1103.

Newdigate M. Owensby, ÒHomosexuality and Lesbianism Treated with Metrazol,Ó Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 92:1 (July 1940), 65-66.

Bayard Holmes, ÒThe Physical Findings in Dementia Praecox and the Call for Massive Research,Ó The Alienist and Neurologist 41:2 (April 1920), 69-76.

Lothar B. Kalinowsky and Paul H. Hoch, Shock Treatments and Other Somatic Procedures in Psychiatry (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1946), 1-6, 109-136, 228-243.