How ‘Race’ Began, and the Emergence of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology

Abstract

The first part of this chapter explores the origins of ‘race thinking’ in European culture and literature; and then outlines how this led to racism as a dominant ideology in European culture with which to explain diversity of human physical appearance and cultural differences. It describes how race-based slavery (the white-on-black Atlantic slave trade and the plantation cultures of America and the West Indies) and subsequent race-based colonialism established racism as an important part of Western culture over the next 300 years. The second part of the chapter traces the emergence of (Western) clinical psychology and psychiatry (the main ‘psy’ disciplines), as they developed in tandem, through a study of madness in a positivist framework of the post-Enlightenment thinking of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapter discusses the confinement of the ‘mad’ and the construction of mental illnesses; how an earlier notion of a positive value of non-reason (of ‘mad’ people) changed to one where madness was seen as ‘illness’; and then how the ‘illness model’ was applied to explain the causes of a variety of human problems, leading finally to the biomedical psychiatry of today. It uses a table listing historic events against events in the development of the ‘psy’ disciplines to illustrate how racism permeated those disciplines.