Medicalizing the mind: The invention of American psychotherapy, 1800-1920. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

A contemporary observer of the American medical and cultural landscape during the final decade of the nineteenth century would be hard-pressed to locate the buds of what would ultimately blossom into modern psychotherapy. That so-called functional nervous disorders were on the rise seemed beyond dispute. But only a tiny minority within the American medical community gave credence to the possibility that mental healing--either by itself or in conjunction with one of many available somatic therapies--offered much hope. Medical recognition of mental suffering in no way implied a concomitant commitment to mental therapeutics. Within less than a decade this situation had changed dramatically, and by 1910 psychotherapy had become the subject of a heated professional and public debate. Medicalizing the Mind: The Invention of American Psychotherapy, 1800-1920 traces the causal paths linking culture, profession, and knowledge in the formation of psychotherapy in the United States. It contends that the invention of American psychotherapy was not simply an internal medical affair but rather the product of a myriad of interlocking social and cultural matrices endemic to late Victorian America. Where this interpretation departs from others that have acknowledged the cultural dimensions of American psychotherapeutic discourse is in its capacity to locate discrete nodal points at which medicine and culture actually intersect. The work is composed of six separate chapters, each of which examines a distinct element in the formation of American psychotherapy. The first provides a comprehensive discussion of American psychiatry up to and shortly beyond the Civil War. The second analyzes the capacity of railroad accidents to inspire an awareness of post-traumatic psychological disorders. The third examines the cultural and medical significance of neurasthenia. The fourth focuses on what William James termed the "mind-cure" movement and explores its impact on American religion, medicine, and culture. The fifth addresses the philosophical and epistemological roots of what came to be called "scientific psychotherapy." And the final chapter provides a case study of the first popular psychotherapy movement in America, the Boston-based Emmanuel Movement of 1906-1910.