Henry Maudsley Research Articles

Hidden histories of science and medicine: spirit mediumship and the ‘psychology without a soul’

Mental health professionals working with the dying and bereaved may occasionally feel that a belief in the mind’s persistence after death can function as an important coping device for some of their patients. To facilitate an unbiased reading of the empirical articles in this thematic issue, this essay therefore uses the history of a particularly contested area of ‘survival research’, spirit mediumship, to highlight widely forgotten but pivotal historical contexts and complexities which have failed to inform and balance standard academic receptions of empirical approaches to the mind’s hypothetic survival of death. After sketching diametrically opposed attitudes to mediumship by the founders of modern psychology, William James and Wilhelm Wundt, and psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s defences of research with mediums against the dismissive stance exemplified by Emil Kraepelin and Henry Maudsley, I conclude that standard interpretations of any open-minded scientific interest in mediumship and survival research as wishful thinking are asymmetrical and psychologically simplistic.

Explaining religion by human faculties: the naturalism of Henry Maudsley

ABSTRACT In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Great Britain, a group of scientists decided to challenge the intellectual authority of theologians and clergymen. Because of the recently discovered law of conservation of energy, they considered any so-called ‘divine’ intervention on Nature as scientifically impossible and thus as being pure storytelling. In this context of a global tension between some scientists and some theologians for cultural and intellectual leadership, a famous psychiatrist of his time, Henry Maudsley, decided to provide his readers with a psychological approach of religion. His main objective was to inquire on the human intellectual or passional tendencies leading to the creation and diffusion of different types of religion. By doing this, he showed how religion is deeply rooted in human nature, but not in one of the greatest aspects of our nature.

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin

Reviewed by: Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology by Linda M. Austin Anne Stiles (bio) Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin; pp. x + 260. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.00. Linda Austin’s Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology aims to show how various art forms—from landscape painting, memoirs, novels, and photography to classical ballet—addressed psychological debates about human automatism from approximately 1870 to 1911. During this time period, scientists such as T. H. Huxley, Alexander Bain, William James, William Benjamin Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Théodule Ribot, and others contested the degree to which human neurophysiology was analogous to mechanical mechanism. Mechanistic conceptions of brain function such as theories of reflex action or studies of the autonomic nervous system proved controversial because they undermined a mentalist understanding of human psychology that stressed the autonomy of the human mind, will, or soul. As Austin acknowledges, Victorian debates about human automatism have been ably explored by historians and literary scholars alike, including Anson Rabinbach, Rick Rylance, Nicholas Dames, Deanna Kreisel, Jill Matus, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Austin’s principal intervention is to broaden these debates to a wider range of art forms and genres than previous critics. Her book thus requires readers to maintain working knowledge of several fields at once, from early photography to popular journalism to classical dance. This makes Automatism and Creative Acts a challenging read at times, but one that rewards determined readers. Austin shows the ways in which literary authors, painters, photographers, librettists, and choreographers weighed in on the debate surrounding human automatism with varying degrees of success and conviction. Part 1, titled “Automato-phobia,” demonstrates how early-nineteenth-century memoirist John Stuart Mill and travel writers Richard Jefferies and John Davidson favored mentalist interpretations of brain function that privileged the [End Page 121] independent mind, soul, or will above a mechanistic view of human neurophysiology. Part 2, “Technologies of the Automatic: Process and Movement,” explores the ways in which landscape photographers, spiritualists, novelists, and choreographers understood their works as simultaneously intentional and automatic, mental and mechanistic. While most of the book focuses on British texts and contexts, the final chapter turns to continental ballet to understand how “the preeminent nineteenth-century art of human movement” served as a battleground for debates surrounding human automatism (169). Austin’s monograph gets progressively better as it goes on. The first two thirds of the book make for challenging reading, especially the highly technical chapter on landscape photography (though perhaps a historian of photography could better appreciate Austin’s discussion of this medium). By contrast, chapters 4 and 5 gather momentum by describing how late-Victorian artists and scientists gradually abandoned mentalist theories of brain function to embrace automatism in its various forms. Because the fin-de-siècle works described in later chapters more closely approach modern understandings of brain function, they are more likely to resonate with twenty-first-century readers. Of greatest relevance for literary scholars is chapter 4 on professional writing, with its brilliant discussion of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Austin likens the novel’s antihero, journalist Jasper Milvain, to an automaton whose speed and efficiency allow him to thrive in the cutthroat late-Victorian literary marketplace. By contrast, novelist Edward Reardon is a throwback to an earlier era of literary realism and moral sincerity whose human rate of production dooms him to failure. The two- and three-decker novels he laboriously produces are old-fashioned, as are his mentalist views of literary composition and his adherence to the Romantic ideal of the literary genius. Milvain thus serves as an avatar of the new psychology, while Reardon represents older modes of thinking that privileged the mind or soul over mechanistic understandings of brain function. Gissing reveals clear sympathy with Reardon’s mentalism and his obsolescent literary values, and the novel ultimately condemns both “the climate of forced, frenetic activity” that made late-Victorian publishing inimical to sincere and ambitious writers like Reardon, and the erosion of mentalist values that accompanied this change (133). At the same time, Gissing’s...

The Female Mind in the Periodical Press: Henry Maudsley's "Sex in Mind and in Education"

By the mid-1800s, the concept of the female mind as inferior and prone to nervous disease was well established in literature for a medical audience. However, in the second half of the century, discussion of women's madness in non-specialist periodicals both popularised and diversified views on the nature of the female brain. This essay investigates how the alienist Henry Maudsley inadvertently opened these clinical ideas to dispute by publishing his article "Sex in Mind and in Education" in the Fortnightly Review. Maudsley's controversial paper sparked a debate in the popular press that allowed ideas of the female mind to be refuted, expanded, and transformed by those outside the psycho-medical profession.

The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender, by Michael Tondre

Reviewed by: The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre Christie Harner (bio) The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender, by Michael Tondre; pp. ix + 230. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018, $45.00. What would it mean, Michael Tondre asks, to read nineteenth-century literary realism not for its poised assertions of teleological plot but, rather, for the narrative structures that are “couched in the conditional or subjunctive mood” (4)? Tondre’s book The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender focuses our attention on a mid-Victorian [End Page 678] generation of intellectuals, both novelists and scientists, who peered through the looking glass, defied the insistence on causality, and introduced alternative trajectories, potential outcomes, and enticing indeterminacies. Moving adroitly across the fields and discourses of thermodynamics, physio-psychology, evolutionary science, statistics, and literary form, Tondre argues persuasively for fluid “network relations” between disciplines rather than directional structures of influence (12). As he suggests, what emerges from a capacious reading of these seemingly divergent spheres is a developing articulation of what was variably termed chance, probability, or frequency. In taking up the discursive work of these terms, The Physics of Possibility joins a cadre of scholarly studies that explores the nineteenth-century fascination with what cannot readily be seen: currents of light and energy, minute or distant material bodies, theories of relativity, and mathematical relationships. Scholars such as Sarah Alexander, Barri J. Gold, Anna Henchman, Andrea Henderson, Christopher Herbert, and Alice Jenkins have argued powerfully for a renewed interest in Victorian studies in speculative mathematics and energy physics. While Tondre is right to point to an “enabling absence in scholarship” that sidesteps Victorian specificities in favor of an epistemic leap from the Enlightenment to Albert Einstein, and to urge further scholarship in the field, he does not always acknowledge overtly enough the already lively dialogues within the interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies (172). The “enabling absence” that he identifies exists less in the work of his immediate scholarly colleagues and more in that of so-called new materialist philosophers whose claims have developed outside of period boundaries. What makes Tondre’s work unique in this burgeoning field, and so pleasurably exciting to read, however, is his deft capacity to traverse an enormous body of scientific, social scientific, and cultural material. The four chapters each focus on a different type of “probabilistic calculus” or an alternative model of chance and variability—but also, in doing so, move across webs of texts and thinkers that have rarely been brought together (13). The first chapter links the mathematics of chance to the astronomer’s error curve, Augustus De Morgan’s work on probability, and Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857–61), among other texts, before contemplating elliptical structure and occluded possibilities in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). In its analysis of sensation, writ large, chapter 2 interweaves equations based in the delayed reaction times of astronomers with a series of physio-psychological writings on sense stimuli and duration by Alexander Bain and Henry Maudsley, among others. The move to Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1864–66) then asks readers to perceive fiction as weighing in on competing definitions of postponement, those drawn from probability and physio-psychology but also from Walter Pater, nineteenth-century “temporal regimentation,” and theorizations of literary sensation (82). While some readers may find the networking of widely disparate sources confusing, perhaps especially in the second chapter’s discussion of multitemporal logics, Tondre’s capacity to synthesize a wealth of material is impressive and inspiring—an exemplar for interdisciplinary thinking and for what he identifies as the patterns of “formal and conceptual connection” among fields (169). The second half of the book underscores Tondre’s expansive knowledge of his subject as it shifts from mathematical models of probability, broadly defined, to what he calls the “dominant Victorian sciences of evolutionism and thermodynamics” (14). Chapter 3 gives a lengthy account of the challenge that nonreproduction posed to [End Page 679] evolutionary theory, alongside an apt reminder of Charles Darwin’s work on chance variation, before turning to an analysis of the two altruistic, but non-reproductive...

The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre

Reviewed by: The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre Devin M. Garofalo TONDRE, MICHAEL. The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 240 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $45.00 e-book. Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility traces the relationship between novels and statistical thinking in the Victorian period. It does so to explore how they together configured the real not as a question of what is but rather, and more tantalizingly, what might have been. Taking as its point of departure Henry James’s likening of novels to “loose baggy monsters,” The Physics of Possibility offers “a revised history of the novel” wherein “what was once deemed bad form”—narrative disruptions and digressions, occlusions and abandonments—is in fact “a meaningful legacy of fiction,” rife with “expansive ethical and political aims” that do not abide organicist models of narrative form (1). Tondre revivifies this legacy and its aims by reading for “ensemble effects,” or “moments that break the diegetic frame of a plot” in order to tarry with the conditional, the possible, the might have been (11). These moments mark critical “deviations from the coherence of a fictional world,” conjuring instead “a composite of different possible plots imagined at a given fictional moment or location” (11). To read for ensemble effects is in some sense to read for ghosts—for the strange alter-novels that flicker into view in moments of narrative irresolution and indirection, when narrative “nonhappenings” take forceful if not also fleeting shape (26). As Tondre notes, “ensemble” connotes simultaneity and thus a thinking of the present as a landscape of presents in dynamic formation (26). By the end of the nineteenth century, the word also connotes “statistical ensembles,” or “versions of a physical system, each expressing a possible state of affairs at a given moment” (11). This shift coincides with a broader cultural reconfiguration underway during the Victorian period: namely, the reconceptualization of chance as neither strictly subjective nor objective—as “something more than an illusion” and yet “less than a plain fact” (7). Such irresolutions were the focal point of what Tondre calls the “physics of possibility”: “a conceptual legacy” (19) wherein various thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Henry Maudsley, and James Clerk Maxwell, among others—attempted to statistically “approximate the condition[s]” of the real and the alternatives with which it teems. Reimagining norms not as fateful determinates but potentially realizable fictions, Victorian scientists “cultivated” with their novelist contemporaries a set of “common techniques of representation” (2). Together, they tell a story about statistical data that departs from familiar narratives of biopolitical control. Along the way, these disciplinary crossovers also reveal how novels do science. As Tondre puts it, “latent scientific irresolutions…had singular importance in literature and as literature” (25). If Victorian scientists were unable to [End Page 617] put the unresolved relationship between the real and the possible to rest, novelists took over from there, turning to fiction for what it does best: thinking beyond and outside the “propositional logic of science” to “pose ideas without prescribing truth claims, invite multiple perspectives on what had seemed self-evident, and question what went without saying” (25). Tondre thus attends to the ways “fictional aesthetics are adept at reimagining” (rather than “simply reifying”) “historical realities” (2). This, Tondre argues, is the “lost promise and ameliorative potential” of the Victorian novel (60): it never produces “a single composite claim of truth” (73), preserving instead the ethical potentiality of “stand[ing] outside” or in multivalent relation to “the present” (66). Crucial to the ethics of Tondre’s argument is his engagement with queer theory. The Physics of Possibility tracks alternatives to the organicist telos of the Bildungsroman, exploring how Victorian novels deviate from this norm to noninstrumentalist ends. Reminding his readers that “Victorians conceived of character as a field of possibilities from classical norms of formation,” Tondre tracks “a tradition of realism couched in the conditional or subjunctive mood,” which tends toward failed formation and its “altered futures” (4). Eve Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading—as well as Elizabeth Freeman’s and Heather Love’s respective refusals...

Yorkshire’s influence on the understanding and treatment of mental diseases in Victorian Britain: The golden triad of York, Wakefield, and Leeds

ABSTRACTIn the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more humane approach to the care of the insane in Britain was catalyzed in part by the illness of King George III. The Reform Movement envisaged “moral” treatment in asylums in pleasant rural environments, but these aspirations were overwhelmed by industrialization, urbanization, and the scale of the need, such that most asylums became gigantic institutions for chronic insanity. Three institutions in Yorkshire remained beacons of enlightenment in the general gloom of Victorian alienism: the Retreat in York founded and developed by the Quaker Tuke family; the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield led by Sir James Crichton-Browne, which initiated research into brain and mental diseases; and the Leeds Medical School and Wakefield axis associated with Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, which pioneered teaching of mental diseases and, later, the first Chair of Psychiatry. Three other Yorkshiremen who greatly influenced nineteenth-century “neuropsychiatry” in Britain and abroad were Thomas Laycock in York and Edinburgh, and Henry Maudsley and John Hughlings Jackson in London.

Carrying On Like a Madman

Melissa J. Ganz, “Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (pp. 363–397) This essay reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) alongside medico-legal debates about the nature and scope of insanity, arguing that the novel seeks to shore up the idea of individual responsibility in Victorian society. The cognitive test of insanity that emerged from the M’Naghten case of 1843 deemed a person legally irresponsible for his acts if, due to a defect of reason resulting from mental disease, he was unable to perceive the nature and quality of his acts or to know that they were wrong. Alienists such as James Cowles Prichard and Henry Maudsley, however, argued that this test failed to acknowledge the existence of affective and volitional disorders such as moral and impulsive insanity. In their treatises, they urged judges to adopt a more permissive standard—an “irresistible impulse” test—that deemed accused criminals “mad” if they could not control their actions, even if they knew what they were doing was wrong. While the novel appears to be sympathetic to the position articulated by Prichard and Maudsley, I argue, it ultimately shows the dangers of broadening the definition of insanity. To recognize the idea of irresistible impulse as the basis of an insanity defense, Stevenson suggests, is to confound the distinctions between freedom and compulsion, deviance and disease. Contesting the use of emotional insanity to acquit educated professionals like Jekyll, Stevenson holds the doctor guilty of murder.

Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination by Suzanne Keen (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination by Suzanne Keen Anne Stiles Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination. Suzanne Keen. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 236. $64.95 (cloth). In Thomas Hardy’s Brains, Suzanne Keen makes a persuasive case for reading Thomas Hardy’s poetry and prose alongside the psychology and neurology of his time. While literary scholars have often applied twentieth-century psychological approaches to Hardy’s works, especially the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, these are sources that Hardy probably never encountered in his lifetime (due to his limited knowledge of German, among other reasons). By contrast, Hardy was well-versed in the psychological theories of Henry Maudsley, Théodule Ribot, Henry Head, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, William James, and G. H. Lewes (5, 18). Hardy was an adept “student of psychology” and “reader of neurology” throughout his career, Keen argues, particularly during the 1880s, as he was preparing to write his neurologically-themed verse drama, The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908)(6). His psychological expertise came not just from extensive reading but also from conversations with leading scientists such as James Crichton Browne, the co-founder of the journal Brain (1878-present). Although Hardy’s interest in evolutionary science, particularly Darwin’s work, has been well documented by critics, he also possessed “up-to-date knowledge of the psychology of his day,” a fact that has been less widely acknowledged (20). Thomas Hardy’s Brains aims to rectify this oversight and inspire other scholars to follow suit. Utilizing Hardy’s unpublished literary notebooks, Keen is able to pinpoint which authors Hardy read and when. She also demonstrates how specific psychological ideas find expression in his fiction. Her work is thus particularly valuable as a source study, although this book has broader appeal for Hardy scholars and students of Victorian psychology. [End Page 405] In terms of methodology, Keen’s book combines two related strands of contemporary literary criticism: historical study of the intersections between Victorian literature and science (practiced by Nicholas Dames, Alan Richardson, Jill Matus, and Vanessa Ryan, among others) and cognitive literary theory, exemplified by writers such as Alan Palmer, Patrick Colm Hogan, and Lisa Zunshine. It is difficult to say which approach predominates in her work. Whereas chapter 1 is a historically-based source study of Hardy’s psychological readings, chapter 2 draws on cognitive literary theory, particularly Alan Palmer’s work on intermental thinking, to illuminate Hardy’s narrative technique. Chapter 5, meanwhile, draws on a broad range of cognitive literary theory—including Keen’s own previous work, Empathy and the Novel (2007)—to discuss the expression of empathy in Hardy’s works. Even the chapters with a theoretical bias are rich in historical detail, showing that Keen can successfully combine historical and cognitive theoretical approaches. These two schools of thought all too rarely cohere in practice, for all of their apparent similarities. Keen is also adept at analyzing literary form, particularly in the sections on verse, wherein her expertise as a published poet stands her in good stead. The sections on Hardy’s novels likewise skillfully explain interactions between psychological content and literary form. In chapter 2, for instance, Keen discusses Hardy’s reliance on “thought report” (Palmer’s term) over other types of narration, such as free indirect discourse. Hardy’s unusual narrative style allowed him to “report conditions of mind of which the character remains unaware,” thus emphasizing his characters’ fateful ignorance of key information (64). This emphasis gels with Hardy’s pessimistic view of human destiny; his characters “proceed unaware of the rigged system that has made them feeling beings in a universe of action they cannot control” (52). While this chapter predominantly takes a cognitive approach to Hardy’s work, Keen also shows that Hardy’s contemporaries noticed his interest in psychology. Andrew Lang, for instance, criticized Hardy for using “language like that of Herbert Spencer” to describe the thoughts and feelings of common people, while sexologist Havelock Ellis lauded Hardy’s portrayal of instinct as a motive force (57, 83). While Keen successfully balances historical and cognitive approaches...

The enigmatic figure of Dr Henry Maudsley (1835-1918).

In spite of his contribution to psychiatry in 19th century Britain, Henry Maudsley remains a mysterious figure, a man mostly known for his donation to the London County Council for the building of the Maudsley Hospital and for The Maudsley Annual Lecture created in honour of his benevolence. Besides Sir Aubrey Lewis' article in 1951 and Michael Collie's attempt in 1988 to construct a biographical study on Maudsley, there does not seem to be any current endeavour to tell the story of his life, whereas Trevor Turner's contribution to the 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives a somewhat scathing but unattributed account of Maudsley's personality. This essay attempts to explore his contributions to the Medico-Psychological Association (MPA), the current Royal College of Psychiatrists, his editorship of the Journal of Mental Health (currently named the British Journal of Psychiatry), his literary contributions and his vision for a psychiatric hospital. This essay is an attempt to demystify his figure and to explore some of the rumours and criticisms surrounding his name and the reasons why so little has been written about him. It is also a venture to unravel his complex personality and his intricate philosophy.

Return to the Past in García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

El amor en los tiempos del colera assembles many of the themes and techniques that characterize Garcia Marquez's earlier work. Paramount among the techniques are hyperbole, retrospection, humor, and sarcasm. Thematically, memory, age, illegitimacy, the passage of time, poverty, politics, and civil wars provide its spiritus vivicans. In El amor, the reevaluation of memory in light of the rapid changes ushered in by modernity takes center stage. The reassessment of the value of memory in the novel parallels efforts from early modernity to subvert the importance of remembering. This essay argues that while Garcia Marquez joins the chorus celebrating the weakening of memory as a basic lifeorientation, he avoids the excesses of those like Jean Baudrillard that promote a near total break with the past. His position in El amor approximates that of Soren Kierkegaard who calls for a self-perfecting in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting in order to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence (Either/Or 1: 234). To that end, the essay provides a historical review of the importance of remembering and forgetting before examining the novel under three rubrics, to wit, remembering, forgetting, and the twin arts of remembering and forgetting. HISTORICAL REVIEW In Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, David Gross establishes that pre-modern view of remembering was generally positive. The Greeks, Romans and the medieval world all considered memory as sine qua non for piety, creativity, ethics, character, spirituality, happiness, and wholeness. However, this positive outlook began to be questioned especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the foundations of traditional society began to shake in the wake of modernity. The rapid changes occasioned by industrialization, including mobility and urbanization, came with a new set of values. New institutions sprang up to replace traditional ones. The individual could no longer be relied upon to preserve values, customs and traditions handed down from forebears since she was not glued to one place. In light of this new reality, intellectuals began to question the value of memory, which began to lose its appeal and became a liability. In time, it was viewed as an outside determination, coercive and restrictive of one's thoughts and actions. Forgetting became the new paradigm and was praised by psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers alike. In the view of many thinkers, including Pierre Janet, Herman Ebbinghaus, Frederick Nietzsche, Henry Maudsley, William James, Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Lavelle, the advantages of ridding ourselves of the old lumber of the were enormous. For one thing, we are able to loosen up, improvise, or even start afresh. These qualities of freedom, improvisation, and innovation would enable us to cope successfully with the demands of modernity (Gross 31). In addition to being unreliable and escapist, many thinkers perceived memory as an impediment and even a monstrosity (33). Forgetting, on the other hand, was liberating, regenerative and purifying. According to Anthony Giddens, forgetting opened the door to potentially new ways of being and acting (78). SETTING THE STAGE In El amor, the process of mnemonic reevaluation begins by setting the story in post-independent Colombia over a period of about fifty years, beginning from 1880 to about 1930. Nation building was the order of the day as European culture and technology found its way into Colombia. Modernity was on a slow but certain march and the foundations of traditional society had begun to wobble. It is against this backdrop that Garcia Marquez weaves a love triangle spanning over fifty years and whose development allows a reassessment of the value of memory in light of emerging realities. Garcia Marquez's journey to the past is not guided by the allure of romanticism or the magic of tradition. …

FITLY DISORDERED: Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. By JILL MATUS * War Trauma and English Modernism: T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. By CARL KROCKEL

In a wide-ranging essay entitled ‘Insanity: What Is It?’ which opens the 1895 edition of his influential book The Pathology of the Mind, the prominent Victorian psychiatrist Henry Maudsley describes the insane man as ‘alienated from his normal self and from his kind’, and ‘so self-regarding a self as to be incapable of right regard to the notself’. Psychic disorder is presented as a disjunction not only from societal norms but from a presumed authentic self. While it is difficult to generalise the precepts of so capacious and contentious a discourse as pre-Freudian Victorian mental science, Maudsley's formulation strikes two of its common notes, expressing an awareness of, and anxiety about, multiple, alienated, and even opposing selves, while aligning mental dysfunction not only with antisocial behaviour but with disregard of one's responsibilities to others. Even so, Maudsley does not neatly cordon off the insane mind from the sane one. He later observes that the effect of mental ‘disease’, in its ‘dominating delusion’ and ‘corresponding hallucinations’ is ‘very much what the so-called mesmeric or hypnotic operator does for his subject when he puts him into a hypnotic trance’. The mesmerised subject ‘is as effectually severed from full mental contact with things as if he had been educated through life to exercise that tract [of thought] and no other, or as if he were a madman dominated by its morbid growth and function’. Maudsley implies that altered states such as trance have the capacity, at least temporarily, fundamentally to modify the mental abilities and preoccupations of an ordinarily rational individual, producing not only behaviour but cognition indistinguishable from that of a madman.

Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice

This article argues that Aleister Crowley’s desire to understand his own occultism in naturalized and psychologized terms was in tension with his view of himself as the leader and founder of a new religion. Crowley’s attitudes towards spiritualist phenomena are here examined together with his views on yoga and magic, showing how Crowley saw himself as leading a life of continuous and consistent spiritual development. Even as Crowley worked to naturalize and psychologize traditional interpretations of occult practices in a modern framework, absorbing the influence of authors such as William James and Henry Maudsley, nevertheless he did not go all the way to a complete naturalization and psychologization of magic.

Katharina Rowold, The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women's Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865–1914, Routledge Research in Gender and History, No. 7 (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. x + 311, £70.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-415-20587-0.

While one still finds the antifeminist pronouncements of Henry Maudsley and other late nineteenth-century medical men and scientists quoted as exemplary of attitudes towards the possibility of women being capable of, and benefiting from, higher education, one seldom finds these adequately contextualised as part of a much larger, and more contested, debate on women's minds and bodies; not to mention the fact that in spite of the diatribes as to their mental and physical unsuitedness to advanced studies and the deleterious effects of these on female health, women were nonetheless increasingly entering higher education during the later decades of the nineteenth century in Britain. Katharina Rowold has already performed the valuable service of producing an edited volume, Gender and Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), documenting these debates in the UK. In The Educated Woman she sets the British story within a wider European context, invoking, in comparison, the situations in Germany and in Spain, which provide particularly useful examples of differing traditions affecting how these debates were framed and how they played out in practice. Both these nations saw women admitted to university education a good deal later than they were in the UK (not until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century). This did not occur very substantially earlier in Germany than in Spain, in spite of the existence of an organised women's movement from the late nineteenth century in the former, and no such degree of collective organisation in the latter, although there was the emergence of a ‘woman question’, and individual voices arguing for some degree of female emancipation. However, as Rowold points out, when women were admitted to tertiary education in both countries, this was universally applicable across the institutions of higher education, whereas in the UK, although the University of London and the various emerging provincial universities, as well as those in Scotland and Wales, were open to women from the late nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge remained hold-outs for much longer in the grant of actual degrees. The differing systems for the provision of higher education – in the UK, a decentralised mixture of public and private, compared to, for example, the monolithic state system of Prussia – thus had a significant impact on their permeability for female students. Rowold's study focuses primarily upon the debates which proliferated about ‘women's minds and bodies, their natural aptitudes and limitations, and how these related to women's place in society’ (p.1), and their progress from unarticulated assumptions about women's capacities, to much more elaborated positions both for and against. In particular, she demonstrates that science, medicine, religion, and theories of gendered citizenship were neither neutral, nor inevitably associated with pro or anti views, but were subject to a constant process of renegotiation. Although a good deal of the agitation for improved female education in Spain was driven by the rationalist, secularist, modernising Krausist movement, Gimeno de Flaquer, for example, was a devout Catholic who argued on the basis of the equality of the sexes before God, while repudiating ‘the vulgar tradition’ of the inherited sin of Eve (p. 172). These debates were, perhaps inevitably, framed around the vexed problem of the relationship between women's individualistic mental development, and their role as mothers of the nation, increasingly inflected by Darwinism and developing notions of eugenics. It is clear from Rowold's nuanced account, however, that Darwinism was contested, problematised, and reworked in the interests of supporting female education, with reiterated arguments that apparent female intellectual inferiority was due to environmental and societal causes rather than an innate result of evolutionary processes. Lamarckian notions of the inheritance of acquired characteristics continued to exercise considerable influence. In England, by the early twentieth century, there was an intricate interweaving of feminist and eugenic ideas about the informed and free choice of partners by women, the value of education in motherhood, and the importance of intelligent women bearing offspring for the nation. In Germany, however, female higher education was seen as having a role primarily to provide career opportunities of social utility for unmarried women. The Educated Woman is a valuable and thoroughly researched study that illuminates the interaction of numerous different strands – the scientific, the medical, the religious, the political – within specific national contexts and particular historical moments on this important topic.

Psychiatry in Britain, c. 1900

At this period, British psychiatrists practised in a climate of opinion that was deeply pessimistic, influenced by the views of Henry Maudsley and by the accumulation in asylums of incurable patients. The inflexible Lunacy Act of 1890 tended to encourage chronicity. The terminology both of mental illness and of the doctors who dealt with it was uncertain. Management of these disorders was intimately involved with the operation of the Poor Law. Neurology, on the other hand, carried high prestige and advanced clinically; many patients with neurotic disorders came under the care of neurologists. Postgraduate education and training in psychiatry was practically non-existent, as was academic psychiatry, in contrast notably to Germany, though there was a small professional organization.

Women in psychiatry

Borrowing books was a privilege introduced for women by several academic institutions and libraries in England in the 19th century. Cambridge University accepted women on equal terms with men in 1948. Various objectors before that feared that higher education would have untoward effects on women's bodies and minds. The eminent 19th-century psychiatrist Henry Maudsley was convinced it would make them infertile (Robinson, 2009). Yet women played an important role in the founding of many Islamic educational institutions from the first millennium, and Christian religious orders fostered education for girls and women in Europe before the modern era.

James Crichton Browne and controlled evaluation of drug treatment for mental illness

James Crichton Browne and controlled evaluation of drug treatment for mental illness

Strindberg as Vivisector: Physiology, Pathology, and Anti-Mimesis inThe FatherandMiss Julie

This essay explores how Swedish dramatist August Strindberg employed the idea of vivisection – dissection of live animals and, in rare cases, humans – as a trope within The Father and Miss Julie. Throughout his early career, Strindberg played the role of vivisector in order to associate himself with ongoing experimentation in modern medical science as practised by such pioneering scientists as Théodule Ribot, Claude Bernard, and Henry Maudsley. In his effort to vivisect his characters, Strindberg sought to pierce through external surfaces into uncharted physiological and metaphysical terrains that would reveal individual pathologies. The act of opening up his dramatic subjects though theatrical strategies allowed him to engage a wider field of medical discourses for understanding the somatic body. Thus, through his dramatic vivisections, Strindberg moved beyond the observational and objective strategies of naturalism to create instead what he famously termed the art of “greater naturalism,” a dramatic technique that strove to see beyond the everyday. In countering his naturalist colleagues in the theatre, such as Émile Zola and André Antoine, Strindberg effectively used vivisection to question observational technique and, in so doing, to destabilize the very foundation of theatrical representation: mimesis.

First special hospital for mental disease in London: BJN 100 years ago

An important and historical step in the treatment and nursing of mental disorders was reported in the BJN100 years ago. Up to this time there was no special hospital in London for the treatment of patients with mental health problems. Sufferers from such conditions were sent out to the country to be cared for in ‘county asylums’, which tended to be long-stay facilities rather than acute psychiatric hospitals. Many acute cases were left until their condition got worse and they were certified insane! Therefore, when Dr Henry Maudsley announced he had made an offer of £30 000 towards establishing a hospital for mental diseases within the city it was greeted not only with enthusiasm from the London County Council but by the medical and nursing professions as an important and significant step.

SELF AGAINST CHILDHOOD: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ALICE MEYNELL TO A PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGY OF MEMORY

THE IDEA OF THE SELFin its various constructions–political, economic, psychological–has always been shadowed by an English tradition of skepticism about the persistence of a conscious and stable identity. Voiced most disconcertingly by David Hume in his section, “Of personal identity” fromA Treatise of Human Nature(1739–40; I.iv.vi), this attitude was significantly advanced during the second half of the nineteenth century by a group of physiological psychologists who argued for the corporeal basis of mental functions, including memory. Henry Maudsley and George Henry Lewes, among others, challenged the metaphysical notion of a mind and drew instead from controversial and often suppressed theories of neuroscience to describe the physiological operation of memory. These theories, which located impressions and sensations in the brain or spinal chord, produced a form of identity that could endure alterations of consciousness. They offered, in addition, a new understanding of an adult's physical connection to the personal past.