Psychiatry and Its Discontents

371 Pages·2019·72.783 MB·English

by  Andrew Scull

Psychiatry and Its Discontents

Psychiatry and
Its Discontents
Andrew Scull
university of california press
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2019 by Andrew Scull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scull, Andrew, 1947– author.
Title: Psychiatry and its discontents / Andrew Scull.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: lccn 2018055944 (print) | lccn 2018058799 (ebook) |
isbn 9780520973572 (Ebook) | isbn 9780520305496
(cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Psychiatry.
Classification: lcc rc454 (ebook) | lcc rc454 .s3567 2019 (print) |
ddc 616.89—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055944
Manufactured in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For those who have suffered and even now suffer from
serious mental troubles:
I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists.
Anna Akhmatova, Requiem and Poem without a Hero,
translated by D. M. Thomas
And for my friends Amy Forrest and Stephen Cox
with gratitude for kindness I cannot adequately repay

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction: The Travails of Psychiatry 1
part i the asylum and its discontents
2. The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship: Madness and
Civilization Revisited 27
3. The Asylum, the Hospital, and the Clinic 38
4. A Culture of Complaint: Psychiatry and Its Critics 54
5. Promises of Miracles: Religion as Science, and
Science as Religion 73
part ii whither twentieth-century
psychiatry?
6. Burying Freud 81
7. Psychobiology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis:
The Intersecting Careers of Adolf Meyer,
Phyllis Greenacre, and Curt Richter 95
8. Mangling Memories 134
9. Creating a New Psychiatry: On the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Rise of Academic Psychiatry 142
part iii transformations and interpretations
10. Shrinks: Doctor Pangloss 169
11. The Hunting of the Snark: The Search for a History
of Neuropsychiatry 178
12. Contending Professions: Sciences of the Brain and
Mind in the United States, 1900–2013 185
part iv neuroscience and the biological turn
13. Trauma 217
14. Empathy: Reading Other People’s Minds 230
15. Mind, Brain, Law, and Culture 246
16. Left Brain, Right Brain, One Brain, Two Brains 261
17. Delusions of Progress: Psychiatry’s
Diagnostic Manual 270
Notes 299
Index 347
Illustrations
1. Adolf Meyer 100
2. Curt Richter as a boy and young man 104
3. Curt Richter as a young scientist, and Phyllis Greenacre while
in medical school 106
4. Curt Richter and Phyllis Greenacre conducting an
experimental study 112
5. The staff of the Phipps Clinic in the mid-1920s 114
6. The sites of focal infection 118
7. Phyllis Greenacre lecturing during her New York years 127
8. Curt Richter at his microscope 128
9. Conventional lobotomy knives, a pair of orbitoclasts,
and the heads of two orbitoclasts 135
10. Henry Maudsley 251
11. Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma 253
ix