Sander L. Gilman

Jews and mental illness: medical metaphors, anti-semitism, and the Jewish response.

The idea that Jews were prone to a specific set of illnesses is as old as the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century the view that the Jew was especially prone to developing mental illnesses became an accepted part of medical discourse. Jewish doctors, too, believed this and had to evolve a means of dealing with their own potential madness.

Darwin sees the insane.

Charles Darwins work on human and animal expression introduced this age-old problem into psychological study. Darwins interest in the expression of the mentally ill led him to correspond with J. Crichton Browne, a young psychiatrist, who supplied him with detailed materials concerning the insane as well as photographs of them.

Lam Qua and the development of a westernized medical iconography in China

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Representing health and illness: thoughts for the twenty-first century.

In their critical paper on images in the health sciences, Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein pointed out the limits of visualisation and representation in the existing literature in the public representation of health and illness. They focus on the complex and multilayered field of medical representations as the site where levels of epistemic, philosophical and political presuppositions provide insight into the interpreters historical position. From a close focus on medical (or even public health) representations as a reflection of a partial worldview, to the historical embeddedness that they suggest is the key to understanding the limitations of all visual hermeneutics in the sphere of health and illness:

Reviews : Sándor Ferenczi (translated by Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, edited by Judith Dupont). The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. 227.

trauma which had antedated the ’origins of psychoanalysis’ as Freud understood them. This was especially true of the paper on a ’Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child’ which Ferenczi read to Freud in September of 1932 and which precipitated a break between Freud and the individual whom he had selected to be the next president of the International Association. The prolonged suppression of the clinical diaries which Ferenczi had written in the early 1930s (and the more extensive correspondence with Freud) has lead to a longstanding fascination with them. Published first in French in 1985, the diaries proved to be a major impetus to the on-going debate about the function of trauma in the origins of mental illness. The letters between Ferenczi and Freud have yet to be published. Indeed, this question, to no little degree because of the recent publications of Jeffrey Masson, and the fascination of the feminist critics of psychoanalysis with this question, has been one of the central foci of debate both within and outside of psychoanalytic circles for the past decade. The question is quite simple: were the Freud and Breuer of 1895 right all along? Is the origin of ’hysteria’ or at least some of the major neurosis and some of the psychosis to be found in the ’reality’ of sexual abuse of children. After 1928 Ferenczi came to believe that

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most exciting and extraordinary manner. It is much more than a narrowly focused study of the theories of madness and art (such as the Cologne dissertation by M. Meurer). MacGregor starts at a rather different point. Beginning with the question of the representation of the insane in the ’high’ art of Europe from the eighteenth century (and thus paralleling my own study Seeing the Insane), MacGregor illustrates the close relationship between models of representing the insane and the understanding of the artistic creation by the insane. Central to his argument are the famed images of the insane by William Hogarth and Wilhelm Kaulbach, both of which include the representation of artistic work (in the broadest sense) by the inmates of the asylum. He then moves elegantly to the ’discovery’ of ’the art of the insane’ and the attribution of

Reviews : John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp.390.

The critical literature concerning colonial literature in German has fostered the misconception that the presuppositions governing this literature are identical to those which determined other colonial literature. 1 While it is true that the general definition of colonial literature is also applicable to the literature inspired by the German colonial empire, the context and development of this literature is unique. Colonial literature deals with extra-European settlements in such a way as to present the indigenous population as part of the exotic background. This dehumanizing factor is demanded by the need to create the central myth of the colonies, the &dquo;white man’s burden&dquo;. In this myth the indigenous population was given value only through the introduction of European domination. ’Value’ was understood in basic economic terms. The ’native’ does not produce, he is therefore without ’value’; the European will teach him the merit of work and thus give him ’value’. Certainly German colonial literature developed within this general model. However, the late date of the German colonial empire (it was only in the mid-1880s that Bismarck saw the need for colonial expansion) and the particular tradition of late nineteenth-century German letters set the evolution of German colonial literature apart from that of other colonial