Waltraud Ernst
Department of History
School of Arts and Humanities
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford, England

ist Kooperationspartnerin im Buchprojekt EUROPA 2

Transnational Psychiatries

Social and cultural histories of psychiatry in comparative perspective, c. 1800—2000

edited by
Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller

This collection will be of particular interest to scholars in the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and the sociology of health and illness. Because of its interdisciplinary approach and international vantage point, it will also appeal to colleagues in disciplines such as history of medicine widely conceived, medical anthropology, social geography, and social policy – in Britain, Continental Europe as well as in the United States and Australasia. Currently there is no such wide-ranging yet thematically and methodologically focused volume in the field.

The book focuses on psychiatry and mental health and illness in relation to 13 countries (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Pacific, India, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, England, Serbia, the United States of America, Japan). It provides an extensive assessment of the development of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy on four continents, covering themes that range from psychiatry’s colonial world to issues of knowledge transfer between competing European nation states; professional competition over new therapeutics; the impact of political events and warfare on psychiatric textbooks; the diversification of psychotherapeutic practices and re-emerging forms of patient care;  anti-psychiatry’s impact on scientific debates; and the forced and planned starvation of psychiatric patients under war time conditions. Each of these themes will be approached from an inherently comparative and transnational perspective, which means that no mere lip service is paid to a comparative methodology by simply collating a selection of chapters on diverse countries in one volume under the label ‘comparative’. The comparative element is an integral part of each single chapter, rather than leaving it up to the reader to compare particular issues highlighted in different chapters.