Full Description
"PPPP . . . To compress 200 years of psychiatric theory and practice into a compelling and coherent narrative is a fine achievement . . . . What strikes the reader [most] are Shorter's storytelling skills, his ability to conjure up the personalities of the psychiatrists who shaped the discipline and the conditions under which they and their patients lived."--Ray Monk The Mail on Sunday magazine, U.K.
"An opinionated, anecdote-rich history. . . . While psychiatrists may quibble, and Freudians and other psychoanalysts will surely squawk, those without a vested interest will be thoroughly entertained and certainly enlightened."--Kirkus Reviews.
"Shorter tells his story with immense panache, narrative clarity, and genuinely deep erudition."--Roy Porter Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
In A History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter shows us the harsh, farcical, and inspiring realities of society's changing attitudes toward and attempts to deal with its mentally ill and the efforts of generations of scientists and physicians to ease their suffering. He paints vivid portraits of psychiatry's leading historical figures and pulls no punches in assessing their roles in advancing or sidetracking our understanding of the origins of mental illness.
Shorter also identifies the scientific and cultural factors that shaped the development of psychiatry. He reveals the forces behind the unparalleled sophistication of psychiatry in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the emergence of the United States as the world capital of psychoanalysis.
This engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and fiercely partisan account is compelling reading for anyone with a personal, intellectual, or professional interest in psychiatry.
Contents
Preface
1 The Birth of Psychiatry vii
A World without Psychiatry 1
Traditional Asylums 4
Heralding the Therapeutic Asylum 8
Organizing the Therapeutic Asylum 18
Nervous Illness and Nonpsychiatrists 22
Toward a Biological Psychiatry 26
Romantic Psychiatry 29
2 The Asylum Era 33
National Traditions 34
The Pressure of Numbers 46
Why the Increase? 48
Redistribution of Illness 49
Rising Rate of Psychiatric Illness 53
Dead End 65
3 The First Biological Psychiatry 69
Enter Ideas 69
A German Century 71
French Disasters 81
Anglo-Saxon Laggards 87
Degeneration 93
The End of the First Biological Psychiatry 99
An American Postscript 109
4 Nerves 113
Nerves Better than Madness 114
The Flight of Madness into the Spa 119
Tired Nerves and the Rest Cure 129
Neurology Discovers Psychotherapy 136
5 The Psychoanalytic Hiatus 145
Freud and His Circle 146
The Battle Begins 154
American Origins 160
The Arrival of the Europeans 166
Triumph 170
Psychoanalysis and the American Jews 181
6 Alternatives 190
Fever Cure and Neurosyphilis 192
Early Drugs 196
Prolonged Sleep 200
Shock and Coma 207
Electroshock 218
The Lobotomy Adventure 225
Social and Community Psychiatry 229
7 The Second Biological Psychiatry 239
The Genetic Strand 240
The First Drug That Worked 246
The Cornucopia 255
Neuroscience 262
Antipsychiatry 272
Return to "the Community" 277
The Battle over ECT 281
8 From Freud to Prozac 288
Maintaining Market Share 289
A Nation Hungers for Psychotherapy 293
Science versus Fashion in Diagnosis 295
The Decline of Psychoanalysis 305
Cosmetic Psychopharmacology 314
Why Psychiatry? 325
Notes 329
Index 421
