new book & review of interest to Pynchon readers

[pynchonoid]

Paul Lerner. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the
Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003. xi + 326pp.
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8014-4094-7.

Reviewed by Brian E. Crim, Department of Defense.
Published by H-German (January, 2004

....Lerner begins Hysterical Men by discussing the
status of psychiatry in Wilhelmine Germany and the
defeat of the traumatic neurosis theory by the male
hysteria diagnosis. Most psychiatrists supported the
male hysteria diagnosis because they suspected many
men suffering from symptoms of trauma were milking
Germany's accident insurance laws. Chapter 2 reveals
that German psychiatrists initially welcomed war as a
healthy alternative to the perceived decadence of
peacetime industrialized Germany. Lerner then
delineates the debate between psychiatrists over the
cause of the war neurosis crisis. Psychiatrists like
Hans Oppenheim failed to convince his colleagues that
the crisis was legitimate and that patients required
long-term care. Instead, German psychiatrists
attributed mental collapse to weakness and sloth and
treated the symptoms without investigating the
illness. Lerner describes in detail some of the
disturbing treatments employed by psychiatrists in the
field hospitals and special clinics devoted to the war
neurosis crisis. The last three chapters are the most
interesting for Germanists because Lerner places
psychiatry within the context of the political,
social, and economic tensions confronting both wartime
and post war Germany. Most German psychiatrists
adapted what may be called "rationalized psychiatry."
Under this system, patients' mental health was
considered less important than their economic
productivity. Lerner includes an interesting chapter
on how psychoanalysis responded to the war neurosis
phenomenon and the external pressures to return
patients to the field or war industries. It seems
psychoanalysis was more influential within the medical
profession than Freud suspected. Lerner relates how
the mostly conservative and patriotic psychiatric
profession politicized war hysteria in the November
Revolution by declaring revolution and Social
Democracy the work of mentally ill degenerates. Lerner
concludes his study by analyzing the formation and
debate of "individual and collective memories of war
and trauma in Weimar society, psychiatry, and culture"
(p. 11).

The key to understanding the psychiatric profession in
Germany during the time period studied by Lerner is
its embrace of rationalization. The organization of
psychiatric facilities and treatment emphasized
"therapeutic speed and efficiency." If hysterical
patients could not return from the front, wartime
planners used them for the war economy. Lerner
discovered, "[m]edical power created a system to serve
economic needs" (p.126). Lerner wisely avoids
determining the validity of the hysteria diagnosis
versus trauma by treating these psychiatric concepts
as historical actors. Lerner also avoids drawing
direct connections between the behavior of the medical
profession during the First World War and the Third
Reich. However, Lerner is on safe ground when
speculating that "an approach to mental health that
prioritized the needs of the nation over the welfare
of the individual patient [...] may have contributed
to the mentalities that made possible the path from
'mass well-being' to 'mass annihilation'" (p. 247)....

...read it all:
<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=298941076518460>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html