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Women on the Confederate homefront, living in a war zone, suffered psychologically. Socialized to believe in doctrines of paternalism, many women were ill-equipped and unaccustomed to new wartime roles household head that the absence of men required of them. Many southern white women found the added demands of war unbearable and too demanding, leading some to succumb to mental illness that sometimes led to institutionalization in insane asylums, and suicidal ideation or behavior. The most vulnerable women on the homefront were young mothers and widows who bore the heaviest burdens when their husbands were gone leaving them to care for families under trying circumstances. Also contributing to the psychological ailments of Confederate women were worries about male relatives on the battle front, fear of invading armies, scarcity, financial duress, deaths of loved ones, and management of slave labor. The war also exacerbated conditions of women with postpartum disorders rendering them vulnerable to institutionalization or suicidal behavior. The chapter also compares women’s suicidal activity to mens’ and concludes that women more actively thought and talked about ending their lives than men, with relatively few ending their lives, whereas the suicidal behavior of men was more often lethal when compared to women.

Examines the psychological impact of the Civil War on Confederate soldiers who suffered debilitating psychological and emotional wounds that sometimes resulted in institutionalization in insane asylums, or in suicidal behavior. Historians have not focused on Civil War participants as victims of war trauma until recently. This chapter deepens our understanding of these experiences by asserting that external war-related pressures like witnessing death and mayhem combined with internal pressures like fear of masculine failure or being called a coward heavily taxed soldiers and their psyches. Factors that contributed to psychological distress among Confederate servicemen include: exposure to battle, fear of being called a coward, fear of failure, youthfulness, homesickness, and depression.Suicide offered southern white men a way to maintain mastery and control over their deaths in war zones where chaos and disorder prevailed. Attitudes toward Confederates who killed themselves during the war were more supportive and less stigmatizing than one might think. Many soldiers also ended up institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed as insane. Caregivers and family members rarely connected signs of mental distress with wartime experiences.

Chapter 4 examines medical and forensic approaches to self-murder. Some Mexican scientists believed the causes of self-murder to be biological and environmental. Others followed Emile Durkheim's arguments and placed its roots squarely in the urban environment. The environment was the modern city—, its rapid work paces, its changing technology, and the increasing alienation of the individual from family, community, and religion. Newspapers advertised a myriad of tonics and medicines to cure neurasthenia and other causes of excessive nervousness. Class and gender played significant parts in the interpretation and judgments of suicides, and these narratives were acted out in the media and in, judicial, and medical discourse. The documentary base of this chapter includes contemporary the journals ofmedical schools journals, insane asylumthe intake questionnaires of insane asylums, case files of patients incarcerated in the asylums, and forensic-medicine publications.

Eberbach’s founding in 1815 coincided with the lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the century. That movement in Germany took peculiar shape in the central role played from the start by the state. Unlike England and France, the primary initiative for the lunacy reforms in Germany came from above, by enlightened state bureaucrats under the tutelage of the German neoabsolutist states. If the (apocryphal) founding image of French psychiatry is the alienist Phillip Pinel famously striking the chains off the inmates of the Bicêtre during the French Revolution, its (real) German counterpart is that of the Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenburg charging J. G. Langermann (medical officer, later privy councillor and head of Prussian medical affairs) in 1803 with the responsibility of turning the Bayreuth madhouse into Germany’s first mental hospital. Other states and areas of Germany followed suit in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Eberbach was no exception to the German pattern, where new, enlightened ideas about insanity, concerns of state security with respect to the deviant poor, and the desire to keep abreast of the most progressive trends united to lead even the small and impoverished state of Nassau to embark on costly lunacy reforms. Further, in Nassau both the founding and functioning of the asylum were closely tied to state-building, that is, to the consolidation of state power, the political integration of the population, and the extensive administrative reforms that this entailed—in the penal system, medicine, local government, education, religion, and so forth. State reforms in the area of culture (religion and education) will be discussed in chapter 3. The following section focuses on the penal, medical, and (local) governmental reforms, which formed the broader institutional context of the asylum. The duchy of Nassau, which achieved its final form in 1816 (bounded by the Rhine, Main, Sieg, and Lahn rivers), was one of the new Mittelstaaten (medium sized states) to emerge out of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna.

Nathan Cohen, a Russian-Brazilian Jew, was declared insane and deported from the United States in 1914. After being twice refused landing in Brazil and Argentina, Cohen remained trapped on a ship in New York’s harbor with no country willing to accept him. Cohen’s well-publicized story reflected Americans’ fear of immigrants and immigrants’ difficulty navigating increasingly restrictive immigration policies. This episode also reveals how psychiatric evaluations were used at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify, detain, and deport supposedly “unfit” and “mentally defective” immigrants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mental hospital was by far the carceral institution most likely to hold both immigrants and citizens, and the rate of mental hospital incarceration then is equivalent to the rate in the more recent era of mass incarceration in jails and prisons.

In 1838, an indigent tailor arrived at the Eberbach asylum terrified, dazed, and repeatedly crossing himself. At home before his committal, Martin M. had become violent and been bound and beaten. He had experienced, as he later explained, “an irresistable urge to spit in people’s faces and hit them.” Now, during his eleven-month incarceration, he incessantly begged for “mercy” from the asylum physicians. Rituals of authority and submission were built-in features of doctor-patient relations in an institution where doctors wielded almost absolute power and where acts of submission were a necessity for any patient who wanted to leave the place. Curiously, Martin M. understood this fact in a language foreign to the medical designs of the asylum—a language (“mercy”) of the prisoner or penitent, of criminal justice or the church, not that of the patient. Martin M., it seems, felt he needed either divine salvation or judicial clemency, not medical treatment. The treatment of Martin M. in an insane asylum was an innovation of the nineteenth century. Just twenty-five years earlier, such a man would have been left at home to face the punishments of family and community or placed in one of the multifunctional work-, poor-, and madhouses that housed the castoffs of society—beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, orphans, the insane, and the infirm. In contrast to these detention institutions, the new asylums of the nineteenth century contained only the mentally ill, with the aim of medically treating and rehabilitating them through methods that affected the mind. The birth of a new medical specialty and a new set of experts—the alienists, later known as psychiatrists—thus accompanied the founding of modern insane asylums in a movement that spread throughout Europe and North America beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a result of these changes, masses of deviant and mentally ill people in the nineteenth century came to be incarcerated and subjected to new kinds of medical and psychological treatment (although their numbers remained limited in the first part of the century). We know that most of these people came from the lower classes; certainly such people made up the overwhelming majority of patients in public asylums.

This chapter analyses the messy impact of historical forces such as ableism, patriarchy, and institutionalization on Ott’s life. The justifying logic imbedded in her diagnosis and prescriptive institutionalization (re)wrote her life story—her past, her future, and how she would be remembered. The ableism undergirding Ott’s insanity diagnosis permeated legal, familial, and activist contexts both outside and inside the walls of medicine in the late nineteenth-century United States. The chapter then argues for biography as a powerful methodology to forefront lived experiences while simultaneously embedding those lived experiences in large-scale social and historical structures.

This chapter argues that the terror of Moby-Dick dramatizes the logical paradoxes of a meta-dialectical method. It introduces a study of the influence of Melville’s close friend, George Adler, a proponent of Hegelian metaphysics and a chronic paranoiac, upon Moby-Dick. And it shows how the multiple terrors of Moby-Dick do not arise from one or the other philosophical commitment, but rather from a Hegel-inspired application of dialectical method to the problem of dialectical method itself. The chapter analyzes how moments of precarious balance, in Moby-Dick, are paired with an existential and epistemological terror. The chapter concludes with a reading of how Melville models this dialectical terror upon the physical properties of light.

Almost unknown before the 1970s, multiple personality disorder (M.P.D.) has become an epidemic in the last twenty years. One estimate puts the incidence of new cases between 1985 and 1995 at forty thousand. The patients are overwhelmingly “white, female, and North American.” The New Yorker tells of one such case: Elizabeth Carlson, a suburban housewife, who began psychiatric treatment in 1989 for depression. Within a year she had discovered more than two dozen personalities inhabiting her mind and had recovered horrifying memories of childhood sexual molestation at the hands of a satanic ritual cult. The psychiatrist, Diane Humenansky, had supplied her patient with a M.P.D. illness script— books, videotapes, and leading questions— which Carlson faithfully internalized and made her own. It was a dangerous script. Before long, Carlson’s condition was deteriorating: she no longer left her bedroom and her marriage was falling apart; she became suicidal, and felt she was going crazy. M.P.D. is not a disease entity. Not the tools of the psychiatrist, but those of the historian, social psychologist, and sociologist are best suited to explain its epidemiology and symptomatology. The illness script Humenansky and other psychiatrists made believable to their patients drew from a number of political, social, and cultural currents: the child-protection movement of the 1970s, the later recovered-memory movement, and the involvement of an unlikely alliance of feminists and Christian fundamentalists. M.P.D. became a psychiatric growth industry, which promoted the illness from new institutional bases: a professional organization (I.S.S.M.P.&D.: International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation), annual conferences, specialized units within hospitals, and publications. Finally, the media spread the word through magazine, talk show, and news coverage (one program featuring a “star [M.P.D.] patient who switched personalities [on cue] for the camera”). On the other hand, it is not accurate to make M.P.D. alone responsible for mental disorder in these women and the medicalization of otherwise purely social problems. Like Carlson, most of these women had long been troubled in mind and “already spent [on average] seven years in the mental—health system” before undergoing M.P.D. therapy.