Jonathan Sadowsky

Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds), Psychiatry and Empire , Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. ix + 243, £45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4039-4711-6.

This is not the first edited volume to gather historical essays on psychiatry and colonialism. It does, however, contain some very good new research. It also provides some helpful confirmation of observations in previous work. These include, for example, the opinion that colonial psychiatric institutions were more often reluctant and desultory responses to social problems than they were instruments of grand schemes for social control. And, while colonial psychiatrists may have given expert imprimatur to racist theories of ‘the native mind’, they reflected racist ideologies more than they were instrumental in creating them; this theme is not new to this volume, though there are some really remarkable examples in a number of the chapters of how colonial culture compromised the vision of psychiatric theory. A number of the authors also echo previous work in disavowing the utility of applying Foucault by noting, for example, the lack of ‘great confinements’ in colonies, an observation co-editor Megan Vaughan made in her pioneering original work on the subject. There is some significant new ground broken in this volume. Shula Marks contributes a chapter on psychiatric nursing, a topic relatively neglected by historians of psychiatry, and not only in colonies. Marks’s chapter, titled ‘The microphysics of power’, actually illustrates how many of Foucault’s insights about the dynamics of knowledge and power may be relevant to colonial contexts, however much those contexts may differ from those in European metropoles—about which Foucault’s empirical foundation was always shaky, anyway. Richard Keller explores therapeutics in the Maghreb as a laboratory for French psychiatry, exploring the blurry line between therapy and control—themes developed further in his recent monograph. Shruti Kapila provides a nuanced exploration of the reception of Freud in India, showing how psychoanalytic ideas were selectively appropriated, not only as theories of the mind, but as reflections of varied orientations toward both religion and the Indian nation. And Hans Pols’s chapter on psychiatric constructions of the ‘native mind’ in the Dutch East Indies goes further than many previous treatments in exploring how colonised people responded to these ideologies. For readers looking for an overview of the field, Psychiatry and Empire supplants previous edited collections. Taken together, the varied essays provide a good gauge of the state of the field.

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