Hysterical Men
Subtitle: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry)
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: July 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9780801440946
Subjects: European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); History of ideas, intellectual history; Psychiatry; Social, group or collective psychology; Psychology; Hysteria; Germany; Social Psychology; Europe - Germany; History; Mental Illness; Psychic trauma; Social aspects; War neuroses
First sentence: GERMAN PSYCHIATRY in the late nineteenth century was a profession plagued by institutional, intellectual, and political insecurities, a profession that was the world's most advanced, but which struggled for status at home, a profession that purported to transcend ideology, but which participated in the divisive class politics of the German Empire, a profession that could do little to treat its own patients, but which sought to cure the entire nation.
Description: "Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn male hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political subjects." "Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual scepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations."--Jacket.