Psycho-Politics between the World Wars – PDF

Psycho-Politics between the World Wars: Psychiatry and Society in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – eBook PDF

Psycho-Politics between the World Wars, (PDF) is about the psycho-political visions and programmes in early-twentieth-century Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. In the middle of the political and social unrest that followed the First World War, psychiatrists tried to use their clinical insights to understand, identify, and treat society at large. The ebook uses a variety of unpublished and published sources to retrace major debates, protagonists, and networks included in the redrawing of the boundaries of psychiatry’s sphere of authority. The ebook is based on three interrelated case studies: the project of medical expansionism under the label of ‘applied psychiatry’ in inter-war Vienna; the overt pathologization of the 1918/19 revolution led by right-wing German psychiatrists; and the attempt to join and implement different approaches to psychiatric prophylaxis in the movement for mental hygiene. By studying these histories, the ebook also sheds light on the emergence of ideas that still form the field to the present day and shows the close connection between utopian promises and the worst abuses of psychiatry.

Review

“In this amazingly fresh history of interwar psychiatry in the German-speaking countries, David Freis explores how the era’s most renowned psychiatrists (Emil Kraepelin, Erwin Stransky, and Auguste Forel among others) shifted their diagnostic language from the clinic to society at large. … Readable, dynamic, and deeply researched, David Freis’s ebook is a valuable reminder of the human cost of false associations between nationalism and mental health theory, then as now.” — Elizabeth Ann Danto, Hunter College of City University of New York, USA

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