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Contested Jurisdictions: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Psychology in the United States, 1940–2010

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Andrew Scull
Andrew Scull
Affiliation:
Andrew Scull, Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 401 Social Science Building, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093–0533, USA. Email: ascull@dssmail.ucsd.edu
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American psychiatry on the eve of Pearl Harbor was a small, stigmatised, and isolated specialty, for the most part confined as surely inside the high walls of its barrack-asylums as the patients over whom it exercised near-autocratic powers. The number of mentally ill patients incarcerated in state and county mental hospitals had grown sharply, from 150,000 at the turn of the century to 445,000 in 1940. The fiscal crisis of the states that accompanied the Great Depression had produced a steady deterioration of conditions in these institutions, a deterioration that would intensify as a result of the exigencies of total war. In the immediate aftermath of that prolonged conflict, conditions had degenerated to such a parlous state that a number of outside observers compared America's asylums to Nazi death camps.

Keywords

PsychiatryPsychoanalysisClinical PsychologyJurisdictional Disputes
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 401 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Alfred Maisel, ‘Bedlam 1946’, Life, 6 May 1946, 102–18; Albert Deutsch, The Shame of the States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948); Harold Orlans, ‘An American Death Camp’, Politics, 5, (1948), 162–7.

2 Joel Braslow, Mental Ills, Bodily Cures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Timothy Kneeland and Carol Warren, Pushbutton Psychiatry: A History of Electroshock in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Andrew Scull, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Edward Shorter and David Healy, Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Elliot Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

3 Lawrence J. Friedman, Menninger: The Family and the Clinic (New York: Knopf, 1990); Gerald Grob, ‘World War II and American Psychiatry’, Psychohistory Review 19 (1990), 41–69; Rebecca Plant, ‘William Menninger and American Psychoanalysis, 1946–48’, History of Psychiatry, 16 (2005), 181–202.

4 Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945).

5 James H. Capshew, ‘Psychology on the March: American Psychologists and World War II’ (unpublished PhD dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1986); Ingrid D. Farreras, ‘Before Boulder: Professionalizing Clinical Psychology, 1896–1949’ (unpublished PhD dissertation: University of New Hampshire, 2001).

6 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

7 Nathan Hale, Jr (1998), The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Ch. 12.

8 Quoted in Grob, op. cit. (note 3), 107–8.

9 David B. Baker and Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr., ‘The Affirmation of the Scientist–Practitioner: A Look Back at Boulder’, American Psychologist, 55 (2000), 241–7.

10 Hale, op. cit. (note 7), 252.

11 Andrew Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977); Paul Lerman, Deinstitutionalization and the Welfare State (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

12 On the unreliability of psychiatric diagnoses in the pre-DSM III era, see Aaron T. Beck, ‘The Reliability of Psychiatric Diagnoses: A Critique of Systematic Studies’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (1962), 210–16; Aaron T. Beck, C.H. Ward, M. Mendelson, J. Mock, and J.K. Erbaugh, ‘Reliability of Psychiatric Diagnoses: A Study of Consistency of Clinical Judgments and Ratings’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (1962), 351–7; R.E. Kendell, J.E. Cooper and A.G. Gourlay, ‘Diagnostic Criteria of American and British Psychiatrists’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 25 (1971), 123–30; J.R. Cooper, R. Rendell, B. Burland, J. Sharpe, J. Copeland, and R. Simon, Psychiatric Diagnoses in London and New York (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); R.E. Kendell, ‘The Stability of Psychiatric Diagnoses’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 124 (1974), 352–6; and – with scathing commentary and a wide array of references – Bruce J. Ennis and Thomas R. Litwack, ‘Psychiatry and the Presumption of Expertise: Flipping Coins in the Courtroom’, California Law Review, 62 (1974), 693–752.

13 Presidential Proclamation 6158, ‘The Decade of the Brain, 1990–1999’, Federal Register 55 (1990), 29553.