[Psychiatry and psychiatric care. On the relationship of science and society around 1900]

Abstract

Psychiatrists undertaking historical research, poets praising advances in the natural sciences, sociologists speaking the language of medicine and biology: these are only some examples of how various approaches started to flow together around 1900. This convergence was attributable on the one hand to a fear of social disintegration and the consequences of modernization, and on the other hand to a widespread belief in scientific progress. The nineteenth century concept of individual integrity and a right to cultural education was now replaced by collective approaches emphasizing the role of society as a whole (the "masses") and heredity. During the next few decades eugenic approaches to the treatment of "asocial elements" and minorities predominated. Rather than deriving, as claimed, from scientific principles, these approaches were often based on cultural argumentation. The trend was more toward a culturalization of the scientific and medical discourse than toward a biologization of thinking with regard to society. A good many areas in this connection have hardly been researched yet. Interdisciplinary studies would be required to elucidate the relationships between medically defined "health" and socially defined "normality", the intertwinement of disciplines, and the implementation of scientific concepts into social and political models.