Metaphors of mind and society. The origins of German psychiatry in the revolutionary era.

Abstract

Johann Christian Reil's long polemic, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode der Geisteszerrütungen (1803), is a call for the reform of the treatment of the insane. It also marks a transition from the Kantian approach to physiology of his earlier work to the Naturphilosophie that increasingly characterized his publications after this time. In this essay I first survey the historiographical debates of recent years concerning society and the emergence of psychiatry. I then examine the social-cultural context of the late Aufklärung in Prussia, out of which Reil's work emerged, before sketching the intellectual background of the Rhapsodieen, which lies in the development of German physiology since the 1750s. The heart of my work is a close analysis of Reil's theory of mental illness. Here I tease out his political and cultural imagery and note the ways in which his originally Enlightenment assumptions shifted toward the Romantic amid the anxieties of the revolutionary era.