Introduction: Reflections on Psychiatry and Its Histories

Abstract

Abstract Among the most rapidly growing, controversy-ridden, and attention-attracting areas of history over the past generation has been the history of psychiatry. During the last three decades, debates have raged concerning the rise and fall of the asylum; the history of compulsory institutional confinement and deinstitutionalization; the origins, scientific validity, and therapeutic efficacy of Freudian theory; the merits of biological as opposed to psychodynamic models of the mind; the history of the insanity plea in the courts; the past uses of extreme physicalistic treatments for mental disability, such as frontal lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy; and, most recently, the role played by psychiatry in the alleged processes of social and sexual control applied to women, workers, ethnic minorities, and gay people. The past thirty years have brought an outpouring of original scholarship—often passionate, partisan, and polemical—in all of these areas with no sign at present of slackening.