["Zerquälte Ergebnisse einer Dichterseele"--literary critiques on psychiatry around 1900].
In the last decade of the 19th century dozens of "mad" people from the respectable bourgoisie went public with most stigmatizing details of their private lives. The authors told about healthy people branded as insane, and incarcerated in insane asylums. They took their cases to the "court of public opinion". These stories became the stuff of public scandals and also the basis of an organized "lunatics' rights" movement, which was a protest movement against the power and competency of psychiatric expertise. Inspired by this movement some authors and playwriters took up the criticism towards psychiatry and wrote novels and stage plays in which they told frightening and desparate stories of restrained people who had to suffer from arbitrary decisions of psychiatrists. The paper deals with three novels and stage plays written between 1908 and 1917 by Heinrich Mann, Frederik van Eeden, and Waldemar Müller-Eberhart. It analyses the gloomy picture of the asylum and the practice and attitudes of the asylum doctors painted by the three authors. I argue that the narratives had an impact on the public as well as the professional discourse on the problem of psychiatric arbitrariness, and that the authors not only conveyed citicism but also pointed out a concept of a humaine interaction between "normal" and "abnormal" people.
Schmiedebach
Heinz-Peter
HP
D005858:Germany; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006778:Hospitals, Psychiatric / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000266:history*; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*