Book Reviews

Review: Closing the Asylum

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"While sharply critical of the way deinstitutionalisation has played out in practice, Barham has remained neither nostalgic for the asylum nor pessimistic about the prospects for more progressive services in the future."

Peter Barham, Closing the Asylum: The Mental Patient in Modern Society (London: Process Press, 2020) Steffan Blayney, University of Sheffield When the first edition of Peter Barham’s Closing the Asylum was published in 1992, it attempted to describe the historical underpinnings of a protracted upheaval in mental health provision which was still very much ongoing. While the dismantling of the Victorian asylum system had been the professed aim of successive British governments dating back at least to the 1959 Mental Health Act – and while the overall asylum population had been declining steadily since its peak in 1954 – still in the early 1990s deinstitutionalisation remained an unfinished project. By the time of the book’s second edition in 1997, with the majority of hospitals open a decade previously now closed, this seemed harder to argue, yet by this point characterisations of ‘care in the community’ as a failure were already becoming mainstream. This new edition, published

in 2020, arrives in the wake of the 2018 Independent Review of the Mental Health Act amidst ongoing debates about the extent of coercion and legal compulsion within the mental health system. Barham’s original text, reissued here with a new prologue and preface, situated twentieth-century debates over deinstitutionalisation within the longer history of how modern societies have dealt with the ‘problem of insanity’. This has always been a social question at least as much as it has been a medical one. In nineteenth-century Britain, and particularly after the New Poor Law of 1834, the public asylum emerged – alongside the workhouse and the prison – as a means to deal with surplus populations produced by industrialisation. Idealistically imagined by their founders as spaces of care and rehabilitation, the Victorian asylums quickly became little more than overcrowded repositories for incurables and undesirables. The segregation of the mad was given legitimacy by an emerging psychiatric profession whose own optimism about the possibility of cure quickly ceded…

Book Reviews

Review: On the Heels of Ignorance

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Owen Whooley, On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), ISBN: 9780226616384 Ahlam Rahal, McGill University, Montreal Positioning himself in psychiatric knowledge as a researcher, Owen Whooley starts On the Heels of Ignorance by describing memories from his childhood, which planted the seeds that grew into his writing about psychiatric ignorance. As the son of a man with a mental illness, young Whooley had daily experienced questions related to his father’s mental health problems. His attempts to understand his father’s depression and drug addiction had always been surrounded by ignorance, uncertainty, and inscrutability. As the author explains, both he and mental health professionals failed to grasp his father’s inner world or to define clearly the characteristics of his mental illness. This experience impacted Whooley’s thoughts and provided the impetus to study historical ignorance within psychiatric knowledge.  Unlike earlier scholars, who critically investigated the profession of psychiatry and the sociopolitical interests

that underlie health professions (e.g., Foucault, 1976; Fromm, 1955), Whooley investigates both challenges in psychiatric knowledge and power interests that proliferate within the psychiatric field. The biggest challenge, according to Whooley, is ignorance, which hampers our grasp of mental illness.  Ignorance, Whooley argues, is related to two self-reinforcing dimensions: ontology and epistemology. The ontological dimension refers to descriptions, causes, and the nature of “insanity”; whereas epistemology involves the assumptions, investigations, and inquiry approaches that grasp the essence of the mental illness. Whooley argues that the multiple definitions of the nature of the mental illness that psychiatry has offered throughout history have influenced the investigation of mental illness, and therefore, created incoherent psychiatric knowledge. Explaining these attempts to redefine and reinvent psychiatric identity, Whooley suggests that psychiatry has aimed to maintain its prestigious position, professional authority, and social control over the population and other health fields through the recreation of its discourse. Through writing this book, the author attempts to…

Book Reviews

Review: Psychedelic Prophets

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'“Psychedelic”... captured their idea that the consciousness altering experience of psychedelic drugs was no mental aberration but instead facilitated a widening of the doors of perception, an opening up of the self and the possibility of furthering human potential beyond the limits of everyday consciousness.'

Review: Paul Bisbee, Cynthia Carson, Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell, James Sexton, and James W. Spisak (eds.), Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2018) lxxix and 644 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7735-5506-8 Charlie Williams, Queen Mary University of London Humphrey Osmond is best known as the man who turned Aldous Huxley on to mescaline in 1953. Following a brief correspondence, Huxley invited Osmond, a psychiatrist based in Saskatchewan, Canada to come and stay with him and his wife in Los Angeles. In another letter, he suggested that Osmond might bring some mescaline. Huxley’s mescaline trip was described in detail in The Doors of Perception (1954), a book which would introduce countless psychic wanderers to the powerful subjective experience of mescaline and the ‘labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity’ discovered in the folds of Huxley’s grey flannel trousers. Their meeting in California was also the beginning of a close friendship, now captured in this

recent edited collection of their correspondence, Psychedelic Prophets. As a preface to the collection tells us, both men were prodigious letter writers. Huxley is estimated to have written 10,000 letters in his lifetime. Osmond, was both an ardent letter writer and a meticulous archivist, keeping copies of both sides of the transaction. Thus, the volume is said to represent a complete set of their correspondence (apart from one or more missing pages from a letter written by Osmond on April 30, 1956). Consisting of over 275 letters, Psychedelic Prophets begins formally, with a letter addressed to “Dear Mr Huxley” on March 31, 1953 and ends ten years later with tones of much deeper affection – “My Dear Aldous” – one month prior to Huxley’s death on November 22, 1963. Their discussions follow the arc of a close friendship and a rich intellectual connection, taking deep dives into questions of psychopharmacology, schizophrenia, parapsychology, mysticism, cybernetics, Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis, alongside never-ending intrigue about the effects…

Book Reviews

Review: A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism

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Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 316pp. $45.00. ISBN: 9780226597447by Tyson Leuchter, King's College London Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind announce their intentions in the title: David Hume, a “philosopher’s economist” and not “an economist’s philosopher.” Hume has long enjoyed a towering reputation in fields ranging from ethics to political theory to metaphysics to epistemology. While his economic thought, particularly on monetary matters, has been studied, until now there has been no full-length, English-language work on his economic doctrines as a whole (16).[1] Schabas and Wennerlind, both leading scholars in the history of economic thought, seek to redress this oversight in A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism. Their aim is to “restore the sense in which Hume’s life and writings form an integral whole centered on economics, broadly construed, as a unifying thread” (6). Rather than a philosophical giant with brilliant, but piecemeal insights into

economics, for Schabas and Wennerlind Hume is equally a thoroughgoing economist, whose doctrines were developed in tandem with his philosophical dispositions. In this interpretation, Hume’s thought on the specie-flow mechanism – the means by which international specie circulation might, in the long run, smooth out trade imbalances – must therefore be thought together with his empiricist epistemology. The result is an effective reconstruction of Hume’s cosmopolitan economic vision. The authors’ task is in some ways archaeological. The bulk of Hume’s economic thought resides in his Political Discourses (1752), later collected in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-77). But, Schabas and Wennerlind suggest, focusing solely on these works gives an incomplete picture of the expansiveness of Hume’s economic thought, as well as its connection to the rest of his philosophical oeuvre. Hume’s works must be mined deeply and assembled into a coherent form for his economic doctrine to fully come to light. Schabas and Wennerlind thus examine the Political…

Book Reviews

Review: Reproduction

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"when and where did ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’ begin and end, what did people mean when they talked in these terms, and how and why were their beliefs and actions like or unlike those that went before and came after?"

Reproduction: Antiquity to the present day, edited by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming and Lauren Kassell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) pp. 730. $125.00. Caroline Rusterholz, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Reproduction Antiquity to the present day is a massive, interdisciplinary and highly ambitious publication featuring 44 chapters, 40 exhibits – each consisting of a short essay focused on an image and artefact - and about 70 authors from different fields including history, demography, sociology, history of art, philosophy and theology, among others. Edited by Professor of History of Science and Medicine Nick Hopwood, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History Rebecca Flemming and Professor of History of Science and Medicine Lauren Kassel, all based at Cambridge University, this impressive collaboration reassesses the history of reproduction from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the twenty-first century from a Western perspective. The volume results from the work of Cambridge’s Generation to Reproduction Group, an interdisciplinary project led

by Cambridge historians of medicine and biology, funded by the Wellcome Trust, which started in 2004. This group of researchers have organised a wide range of seminars, reading groups and workshops, and one of these workshops provided the impetus for this ground-breaking volume. The collection is beautifully illustrated and highly accessible. The coherence of the volume lies in its sustained focus on a set of key questions: when and where did ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’ begin and end, what did people mean when they talked in these terms, and how and why were their beliefs and actions like or unlike those that went before and came after? (17) This volume traces the transition from generation to reproduction and focuses on the Mediterranean, Western Europe, North America and their empires. It dates this change in terminology to the mid-eighteenth century.  Generation, a ‘looser framework for discussing procreation and descent’ (4), appeared in written productions when authors drew on different ancient discourses in philosophy, medicine and agriculture…

Book Reviews

Review: Chimpanzee Culture Wars

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"...we should by all means be more human about nature, preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change, but... we should also try to be more chimp about culture"

Nicolas Langlitz, Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton: University Press, 2020; 352pp; Paperback: £22.00. ISBN: 9780691204284 Alfred Freeborn, Humboldt University The founding figures of science studies told us that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993), that we have never really been cultural agents independent from the natural world but have moved in a web of nature-culture hybrids. Nor indeed have we ever been human (Haraway, 2008), but exist on a continuum with our animal kin. How then are we to understand the exceptional destruction of biodiversity and climatic change that humans alone seem to be causing? This is one of the central questions Nicolas Langlitz poses in his journey alongside people who study chimps in order to understand why it ended up that we are interested in them. Chimpanzee Culture Wars asks what is at stake in understanding the limits of the “anthropo” in the Anthropocene and

uses the disciplinary matrices of primatology, anthropology, psychology and science studies to explore this question. So far, the book has only been reviewed by primatologists, one of whom is a central protagonist in the book: these reviews look at the book as a commentary on primatology (Nakamura, 2020; McGrew, 2021). This review, in contrast, will show the reviewer looking at Langlitz looking at primatologists looking at chimps. I met Langlitz at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while he was completing this book. We had met because of a shared interest in the work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). I was on a research trip to the States and he had kindly invited me to lunch at the Institute. Langlitz originally studied medicine in Berlin before shape-shifting into a medical anthropologist in California, writing a book about neuroscientists studying psychedelics (Langlitz, 2012) and becoming associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. After lunch he suggested…

Book Reviews

Review: ‘Aṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

HHS Contributor

"ʿAsfuriyyeh is a rich, original, deeply researched, and often moving work."

Chris Sandal-Wilson, University of East Anglia Joelle M. Abi-Rached, ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020) In 1982, after more than eight decades of operation, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders officially closed its doors. Seven years into the Lebanese civil war, as hospital employees – who had braved bullets and shells to continue providing counselling to the increasingly anxious population outside the hospital’s walls during the war – desperately sought to overturn the decision to close and to secure the salaries they were owed, the archives of the hospital were abandoned. It was through the initiative of Hilda Nassar, director (until 2013) of the Saab Medical Library at the American University of Beirut, and the work of the archivist Linda Sadaka that the archive of this remarkable institution was saved, as Joelle Abi-Rached tells us at the start of the equally remarkable history that

she has woven out of both this and an impressive number of other archives. ʿAsfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East traces the rise and fall of an institution which started out life as the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, became the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases in 1915, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders in 1950, and was in throes of a further transformation, this time into the Lebanon Psychiatric Institute in 1976, when war intervened. The hospital’s many names might be taken as indexing how the history of psychiatry unfolded in Lebanon across these decades, as the institution developed from a home for forsaken, impoverished, often chronic cases into the central node in a network of outpatient clinics which aimed to bring mental hygiene to the masses. But the hospital could never shake off another name, derived from its original location to the east of…

Book Reviews

Psychiatry’s Neoliberal Philosopher – Review: Thomas Szasz

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"Although Szasz was often dismissed out of hand by mainstream practitioners, his program shares more with the psychiatric status quo than may be apparent. As early as 1961, Szasz advocated a mental health policy that married conservatism with libertarianism and anti-communism, the main pillars of the Republican party that emerged under Ronald Reagan."

Review: C. V. Haldipur, James L. Knoll IV, and Eric v. d. Luft (eds.), Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv and 298 pp. ISBN: 9780198813491 Alexander Dunst, Paderborn University, Germany 70 years after the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness, the book’s enduring impact can seem puzzling. Built on a series of outrageous simplifications and argumentative slips, Szasz’s polemic generalized its denial of mental illness from an understanding of hysteria as “malingering“, never engaged with the intricacies of long-term care it sought to deny to patients, and upbraided the sick for cheating the healthy. Nevertheless, Szasz emerged as the pre-eminent critic of psychiatry in the United States. He at once relished this status and vehemently distanced himself from the left-wing practitioners and theorists, from Franco Basaglia to Michel Foucault, that he was often lumped with. Szasz’s distinction was to be the only conservative so-called anti-psychiatrist, and his writings were feted by right-wing intellectuals

and the counterculture alike. For patients and radical psychiatrists, The Myth of Mental Illness promised to remove the stigma of disease and seemed to offer freedom from paternalistic institutions. Despite its numerous shortcomings, then, Szasz's work proved useful to a wide range of readers and inspired an institutional practice of mental health that combined self-help, state neglect, and psychopharmacology under the aegis of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy fails to answer, or even seriously ask, how his flawed ideas could have such enormous consequences. The editors and authors are psychiatrists and analytic philosophers and have surprisingly little to say about the real-world contexts of their subject’s writing, either at the height of his career or in our present moment. Neither does the volume contain contributions by former patients, a particularly disappointing oversight because the social movements that formed against institutional psychiatry were an important locus of Szasz’s reception in the United States and abroad.…

Book Reviews

Review: Psychologies in Revolution

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'Luria eventually succeeds as an exemplary scholar within the tradition of his own social-historical approach, as he is not concerned with describing symptoms in isolation from a person’s whole personality, but to 'allow for the preservation of ‘the manifold richness of the subject’.'

Hannah Proctor, Psychologies in Revolution. Alexander Luria’s 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History. Palgrave, 2020; 259 pages, Hardcover £59.99, eBook £47.99; Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-35027-7, eBook ISBN 978-3-030-35028-4 by Lizaveta Zeldzina Psychologies in Revolution is dedicated to the work of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria: an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis in Russia, and ‘the father’ of Soviet neuropsychology, Luria was known internationally as a prolific writer and experimenter. He was an inspiration to a new generation of scientists in the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century, and managed to stay in touch with intellectual currents in the wider world. Together with Lev Vygotsky, Luria has become a figure of intense interest for many scholars of Soviet science, and especially for so-called 'revisionists'. Unlike existing studies, however, Psychologies in Revolution examines Luria in his social and historical circumstances, ‘contending that analysing Luria’s research in isolation from the historical circumstances it emerged from and influenced would be like analysing someone’s personality by examining

their brain on a glass table’ (p. 4). In this text, Proctor provides us with our first detailed history of Luria's ideas and his work. Psychologies in Revolution entails the discovery of a previously unknown Luria. The text is structured around his major scientific projects: studies of the criminal, the ‘primitive’ (Uzbek peasants with no formal education), the child, the aphasic (brain-injured Red Army soldiers) and the synaesthete. Eponymous chapters move the reader chronologically from the Revolution of 1917 to the late 1970s, opening out new dimensions for critical inquiry. Proctor shows how Luria, ‘developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating’ (p. 22). But she makes this claim by considering the inherent constraints on such an approach within Soviet Russia in the early and mid-twentieth century. As Proctor emphasizes, the contribution of her study is not to draw our…

Book Reviews

Review: Physics and Psychics

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"physical-psychical scientists... endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry."

Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; 403pp; Paperback £24,99; ISBN: 978-1-107-18854-9 Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira What is ‘science’ – and, as a corollary, ‘non-science’? What does it mean for something to be called ‘scientific’? And is ‘science’ an objective, singular entity, or is it conditioned by culture? These questions have provoked some of the most fascinating scholarly debates over the past two centuries, precisely the period during which ‘science’ (however defined) gradually became the standard of truth in most societies across the globe. These concerns – sometimes called ‘the demarcation problem’ – far exceed the immediate purview of philosophers and historians of science, having lasting consequences in fields such as education, medicine and public policy. Philosophers like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that to define ‘science’ is far more complicated than we might initially assume.[1] Over the past few years, their

(often contrasting) views have inspired a wave of ground-breaking historical works on the ‘fringe sciences,’ those disciplines and subjects – such as mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and parapsychology– rejected by ‘mainstream’ scientists for not conforming with their own ideological agenda. Physics and Psychics belongs to this revisionist tradition of scholarship in the history of science and technology. Richard Noakes has for years looked at the cooperation and contention between the physical sciences – fields like chemistry, physics and astronomy – and the occult in fin-de-siècle Britain. Physics and Psychics not only reunites his latest works on telegraphy, ether and psychics but also goes beyond, calling into question the popular, hasty definitions of ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ (or ‘pseudoscience’). It centres on the lives and activities of eminent British physical scientists who split their time between physical experiments and psychical investigation. Noakes calls these individuals ‘physical-psychical scientists’, an etic category that highlights their primary background as practitioners of the physical sciences while distinguishing them…