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Conventions of Madness: Bürgerlichkeit and the Asylum in the Vormärz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Ann Goldberg
Ann Goldberg
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Extract

Soon after his wife's incarceration in the Eberbach asylum in 1827, Herr S., a rector and soon to become Gymnasium professor in Weilburg, wrote to Philipp H. Lindpaintner, the asylum's director. The letter was about the pressing problem of his wife's illness, but, strangely, Herr S. spent a great deal of time chatting about himself — about his new position as professor; his recent salary raise; his new apartment “near the castle garden, where the Hofmarschal used to live”; his library; his Naturalien-Kabinett (natural history collection), which will be put on display at the Rathaus “for the use of schools and the enjoyment of the friends of nature and art.” Finally, Herr S. turned to the issue at hand: his wife's mental illness.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 173 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2000

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References

1. Undated letter (ca. September 1827), Hessian State Archive, Wiesbaden (HStAW), 430/1, no. 883. Throughout the article, 1 refer to Anna's husband as “Herr S.” and to her father as “Herr Stein.” Subsequent footnotes of Eberbach's patient files (in HStAW, section 430/1) are cited only by their case-file number. All sources on Anna S.'s case are in her case-file, no. 883.

2. Porter, Roy, Mind-Forg'd Manacles (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 81–89.Google Scholar

3. Lepenies, Wolf, Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 83–84.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 75 ff. On German melancholy, see also Hans-Jürgen, Schings, Melancholie und Aufklärung (Stuttgart, 1977)Google Scholar. A different and updated Sonderweg argument about German madness can be found in Klaus, Dörner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar, which compares German, French, and British psychiatry and asylums in the nineteenth century.

5. Two of the most influential texts in the Sonderweg debate are Hans-Ulrich, Wehler, The German Empire (Providence, RI, 1985)Google Scholar; Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provided a critical analysis and revision of the Sonderweg thesis I have outlined (in necessarily very simplified terms) above.

6. The term “bourgeoisie” refers to those middle-class groups whose social positions lay outside the old corporatist order: entrepreneurs, bankers, state bureaucrats, clergymen, and those in education and the free professions. On the problem of defining the German bourgeoisie, see Jürgen, Kocka, “The European Pattern and the German Case” in Bourgeois Society, ed. idem, (Oxford, 1993), 3–39.Google Scholar

7. The percentage for Eberbach is based on the 463 surviving patient files (out of a total of 758). Asylum statistics used class schemas that do not conform to late twentieth-century categories, and thus can only be used as rough estimates. Percentages for other asylums are taken from Blasius, Dirk, Der verwaltete Wahnsinn (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 33Google Scholar; Sylvelyn, Hähner-Rombach, “Patientinnen der königlichen Pflegeanstalt Zwiefalten” (MA thesis, University of Stuttgart, 1994), 33–35Google Scholar; Ruer, Wilhelm, Irrenstatistik der Provinz Westphalen (Berlin, 1837), 11.Google Scholar

8. On Nassau poor law, see Blum, Peter, Staatliche Armenfürsorge im Herzogtum Nassau, 1806–1866 (Wiesbaden, 1987).Google Scholar

9. Kaufmann, Doris, “‘Irre und Wahnsinnige’: Zum Problem der sozialen Ausgrenzung von Geisteskranken in der ländlichen Gesellschaft des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Verbrechen, Strafen und soziale Kontrolle, ed. Richard van, Dülmen (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 178–214Google Scholar, discusses this and related issues at length. See also Goldberg, Ann, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

10. Many families mentioned in their correspondences with Lindpaintner the financial hardships of paying the asylum costs and, accordingly, either reduced the levels of upkeep over time or removed their family members from the asylum.

11. This is a rough estimate, based on the marital status of the patients at their first incarceration. 80 of the 201 male, lower-class patients were married; among middle-class patients, it was 13 out of 62.

12. On the gendered nature of liberal theory the literature is by now large. For Germany, see Hull, Isabel, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, 1996), 199 ff.Google Scholar

13. Michel Foucault and the antipsychiatrists of the 1960s (e.g., R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz) are the original theoretical influences on this historiography. It is best illustrated in the work of Scull, Andrew, Museums of Madness (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; idem, , The Most Solitary of Afflictions (New Haven, 1993).Google Scholar

14. On social disciplining, see Ester, Mathias, “‘Ruhe- Ordnung- Fleiss’: Disziplin, Arbeit und Verhaltenstherapie in der Irrenanstalt des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 71 (1989): 349–76Google Scholar. The issue of bourgeois self-disciplining has been most fully developed in the literature on women and hysteria. On this literature, see Micale, Mark, Approaching Hysteria (Princeton, 1995).Google Scholar

15. Kaufmann, Doris, Aufklärung, bürgerliche Selbsteifahrung und die “Erfindung” der Psychiatrie in Deutschland, 1770–1850 (Göttingen, 1995).Google Scholar

16. For a more general (non-class-specific) treatment of the asylum's use of spatial arrangements and social activities, see Cheryce, Kramer's study of Baden's Illenau asylum: “A Fool's Paradise: The Psychiatry of Gemüth in a Biedermeier Asylum” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998).Google Scholar

17. There has been an almost complete disconnect between the history of German psychiatry and the social-cultural history of the German bourgeoisie. With few exceptions, psychiatry has been treated either in the framework of the history of ideas or professions, or in terms of the social control model.

18. On Eberbach's origins, administration, and treatment measures, see Goldberg, Sex, chap. 1.

19. Reluctance to incarcerate a family member, even when that person no longer contributed to the economic well-being or social status of the family, is exemplified by the case of Elisa D., the wife of a Frankfurt pastor, whose behavior was deemed so outrageous that she was kept shut up at home. But she was not incarcerated until nine years after the initial medical report (no. 514).

20. On the role of families in incarcerations and other asylum matters, see also Mary-Ellen, Kelm, “Women, Families and the Provincial Hospital for the Insane, British Columbia, 1905–1915,” Journal of Family History 19, no. 2 (1994): 177–93Google Scholar; Tomes, Nancy, A Generous Confidence (Cambridge, 1984), chap. 3Google Scholar; Mackenzie, Charlotte, Psychiatry for the Rich (New York, 1992), 21–24, 97 ff.Google Scholar For a concise summary of the historiography on well-to-do families and asylum incarcerations, see Wright, David, “Family Strategies and the Institutional Confinement of ‘Idiot’ Children in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 2 (1998): 197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization (New York, 1965)Google Scholar is the original influence here. although his periodization and focus differ somewhat from the aforementioned version of events. Most recently, see Blasius, Dirk, “Einfache Seelenstörung” (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 80 ff.Google Scholar

22. A good example of the use of home care for disciplinary purposes is that of the wife of the director of Frankfurt's school for the deaf, whose husband placed her in the country home of a pastor in 1832 after her release from Eberbach (no. 106). No. 433 provides a good example of a father's use of the asylum to discipline his son.

23. Tomes, , Generous, 127Google Scholar, correctly surmised that the bourgeois family — its privatization and emphasis on “emotional relationships” and the “social and moral education ot children” — reduced tolerance for mental illness in the home. On the German bourgeois family and childrearing. see Jürgen, Schlumbohm, Kinderstuben (Munich, 1983), 302 ff.Google Scholar

24. Undated (ca. September 1827) letter of Herr S. to Lindpaintner. no. 883.

25. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 15 October 1828; Herr Stein to Lindpaintner, 22 November 1828.

26. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 30 November 1827.

27. Ibid., 24 December 1828.

28. Ibid., 15 October, 1828.

29. For example, Lindpaintner to Herr S., 11 December 1827. Discussed further below.

30. Kaufmann, , Aufklärung, 111 ff.Google Scholar

31. This early-nineteenth-century attitude toward the asylum radically contrasts with a later era of the “warehousing” of patients in huge asylums and the psychiatric pessimism of degeneration theories. Blasius, , Einfache, 61 ff.Google Scholar On the optimism of early psychiatry, see, most recently, idem, , “Rheinische Psychiatrie im 19.Jahrhundert,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 62 (1998): 308–19.Google Scholar

32. No. 433, Sophie S. to Lindpaintner, 4 February 1827.

33. “Alienist” was a contemporary term used for what later would be called “psychiatrist.” Because of the preprofessional nature of psychiatry in the first half of the century (see below), alienists, unlike their later counterparts, included people like Lindpaintner who worked in the field of “mental medicine” without formal training.

34. Mental medicine at German universities was, with few exceptions, taught (if at all) not by specialists, but by physicians and philosophers and incorporated into courses ranging from anthropology to forensic medicine. The first specialized psychiatric journal, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, was founded in 1844; the first professional organizations of psychiatrists in the 1860s.

35. Frevert, Ute, “Frauen und Ärzte im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert — zur Sozialgeschichte eines Gewaltverhältnisses,” in Frauen in der Geschichte, ed. Kuhn, (Düsseldorf, 1982) 2: 177–210.Google Scholar

36. No. 135, letter of 1 June 1832.

37. Lindpaintner's training at university (Aschaffenburg, Augsburg, and Heidelberg) included courses in the natural sciences, law, taxation, police science, and political economy.

38. Johanna Volk to Caroline Volk. undated letter; Caroline Volk to Anna S., 1 December 1828.

39. Because she was already suffering from a belief in “demonic and magical influences.” Lindpaintner to Caroline Volk. 2 December 1828.

40. Only to the husband did Lindpaintner feel free to reveal his true thoughts on the subject. In two letters to Herr S. (8 December 1829; 28 December 1829), Lindpaintner made clear the extent of his opposition to Anna's release to “Wiesbaden” and its relation to the issue of “quackery.”

41. 1 December 1828.

42. Unlike France, where alienists thought of religion and science as antithetical, in Germany most alienists subscribed to religious rationalism, a philosophy that complemented and supported their scientific endeavors and liberal outlook. Goldberg, Sex, chap. 2.

43. Lindpaintner to Herr Stein, 31 October 1828; Windt to Herr S., 13 February 1828.

44. Goldstein, , Console and Classify (Cambridge, 1987), 101 and chap. 6.Google Scholar

45. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 3 December 1828; Lindpaintner to Herr S., 6 December 1828; Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 15 December 1828.

46. He wondered if she could find someone who was willing to take in a peasant-inmate scheduled for release from Eberbach. Caroline Volk to Lindpaintner, 13 February 1828.

47. Nos. 135, 163, 67, 212, 47.

48. For example, no. 62, a minister whose physician brother was on “du” terms with Lindpaintner.

49. No. 130, undated letter.

50. Vogel, Samuel Gottlieb, Kurze Anleitung zum gründlichen Studium der Arzneywissenschaft (1791). 1–2Google Scholar. Cited in Broman, Thomas, “Rethinking Professionalization: Theory, Practice, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century German Medicine,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (1995): 844.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Broman, “Rethinking”; idem, , The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750–1820 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. Broman would probably disagree with my term “premodern.”

52. Broman, , “Rethinking,” 870.Google Scholar

53. No. 433, letter of 1 March 1837.

54. Lindpaintner to Herr S., 20 September 1827.

55. Lindpaintner was physically present at Eberbach when these letters were exchanged. I can only conclude, therefore, that he was either ill at the time or chose to communicate through letters as a therapeutic measure. See the discussion of letter writing below.

56. No. 24, Eberbach, 20 June 1824.

57. For some time, her husband explained to Lindpaintner, Anna had placed “special trust” in the “abilities” of a local medical official known for his chivalry with the ladies of the town. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 30 August 1827.

58. Herr Stein to Lindpaintner, 5 January 1828; Frau Stein to Lindpaintner, 22 January 1828. Herr Stein to Lindpaintner. 3 October and 16 October 1828.

59. Husband to Lindpaintner, 4 January 1829.

60. Lindpaintner to Herr Stein, 28 November 1828.

61. Religious obsessions, for example, could indicate a subspecies of monomania (religious monomania); deviant sexual activity a subspecies of mania (nymphomania or erotomania). On the history of depth psychology, see Henri, Ellenberger's magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

62. Obermedicinalrath Dr. Huthsteiner, 24 September 1828.

63. Asylum log, 21 July, 1827.

64. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 11 February 1828.

65. For example, Lindpaintner noted with approval to Herr S. how “admirably” Anna now acts in company, and how her behavior “is modest” rather than “prägend.” Letter of 11 December 1827.

66. Porter, Roy also makes this point in “Madness and the Family Before Freud: The View of the Mad-Doctor,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 2 (1998): 159–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67. Asylum log, 25 1827; 1 September 1827; 15 December 1827.

68. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 15 October 1828.

69. See also the prescriptions for diversions of bourgeois patients in Jacobi, Maximilian, “Irrenanstalten,” in Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der medicinischen Wissenschaften 19 (1839): 150–52Google Scholar; Roller, C. F. W., Die Irrenanstalt nach allen ihren Bezielwngen (Karlsruhe, 1831), 198–211.Google Scholar

70. This term is not to be confused with its later reference to gambling.

71. Lindpaintner to Nassau government, HStAW, 211/394. See especially the reports tor the years 1827, 1829–30, 1833, 1842, 1844. Places of cultivated sociability, the early-nineteenth-century Casino should not be confused with its later association with gambling.

72. Lindpaintner to Nassau government, January 1828, HStAW, 211/394.

73. Habermas, Jürgen, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1991). 31 ffGoogle Scholar. On voluntary associations, see Nipperdey, Thomas, “Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie, ed. idem, (Göttingen, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Casinos in particular, see also Gall, Lothar, Bürgertum in Deutschland (Berlin, 1989), 196.Google Scholar

74. This is Irving Goffman's term for institutions of total control: insane asylum, prison, army. Asylums (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

75. Hull, , Sexuality, 209–10.Google Scholar

76. Mettele, Gisela, “Der private Raum als öffentlicher Ort: Geselligkeit im bürgerlichen Haus,” in Bürgerkultur, ed. Hein, Dieter et al. (Munich, 1996), 155–69.Google Scholar

77. Report of 1 January, 1843, HStAW. 211/394.

78. See, for example, no. 106, Ludwig K. to Lindpaintner, 25 January 1832.

79. Herr Stein to Lindpaintner, 11 June 1833. The asylum log on Anna also noted her fondness for the visits, which “had the most beneficial influence on her mood.” See entries of 17 November and 15 December 1827.

80. Steinhausen, Georg. Geschichte des deutschen Briefes (Frankturt am Main, 1968), 39 ffGoogle Scholar. German baroque literature also radically circumscribed the personal and individual in favor of “general rules and suprapersonal forms.” Albrecht, Schöne, Das Zeitalter des Barock (Munich, 1988), vii.Google Scholar

81. Wegmann, Nikolas, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart, 1988), 73 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.; Schmidt, Siegfried J., Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 94–95Google Scholar. See also the analysis of the German discussion of (bourgeois) Kultur versus (aristocratic, French) Zivilisation in Elias, Norbert, The History of Manners (New York, 1978), 3–50.Google Scholar

82. Some writers extolled its benefits; others claimed that letter writing tended to reinforce the deranged ideas of patients and thus should be allowed only under strict medical supervision. See Roller, , Irrenanstalt, 177–78.Google Scholar

83. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 19 January 1828. What Herr S. was looking for in his wife's letter (which is not preserved) can be surmised from a direction he gave Lindpaintner later that year: “Observe if the patient [Anna] speaks favorably of me [and with] sincere concern and recognition [of me]. or the opposite. The latter would be a bad omen!” (Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 24 December 1828.)

84. No. 433, Sophia Strobel to Lindpaintner, 5 December 1830.

85. One moving (if overwrought) letter that remained unsent was written by a 51-year-old Steuer-Controleur, Anton L., to his wife and children. It complained of “suffering so much that I have only death as consolation,” and begged his family to get him released from the asylum and placed instead on an “isolated farm” so that he could spare them financial ruin and himself the prison of an asylum (no. 135, June 1833). Anna S. failed to receive the letters of Caroline Volk that contained discussions of her “quack” salve.

86. Herr S. to Lindpaintner, 30 November 1827.

87. Lindpaintner to Herr S., 20 September 1827. “The truth” Lindpaintner sought to hide from Anna was probably the fact that the husband knew of the asylum's suspicions that she was pregnant. As it happens, she was not pregnant.

88. No. 883. Herr Stein to Lindpaintner, 5 January 1828.

89. Ibid., 22 September, 1827.

90. Ibid., 22 November, 1828.

91. For example, McAleer, Kevin, Dueling (Princeton, 1994)Google Scholar, Reddy, William, The Invisible Code (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar, Nye, Robert, Masculinity (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

92. By way of explanation of her absence from them, for example, Anna S. wrote from the asylum to her children that she was suffering a “physical illness” (undated letter, ca. September 1827).

93. No. 433, letters of father to son, 19 September 1822; 21 August 1822; brother to Karl R., 5 September 1822.

94. No. 1183, letter of brother-in-law, 22 February 1836.

95. See, for example, Lindpaintner's advice to Anna's father after her second release (letter of 31 October 1828.

96. No. 433, letter to Lindpaintner, 23 February 1831.

97. See, for example, Hein, Dieter and Schulz, Andreas, eds., Bürgerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1996)Google Scholar; Herrmann, Ulrich, ed., “Die Bildung des Bürgers” (Weinheim, 1982)Google Scholar. On the recent historiography of the German bourgeoisie, see Sperber, Jonathan, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 2 (1997): 271–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

98. Schulz, Andreas, “Der Künstler im Bürger: Dilettanten im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bürgerkultur, 34–52.Google Scholar

99. This style of expertise was specific to the asylum's bourgeois patients. A very different set of relations and circumstances applied to lower-class patients and their families. This latter topic is the subject of Goldberg, Sex.