The straitjacket, the bed, and the pill

Material Cultures of Psychiatry

“…Cultural studies in recent years has been dealing in greater depth with questions relating to the material production and composition of psychiatric space, taking up a thread of analysis that was laid out by psychiatrists like Jean Étienne Esquirol (1772-1840), Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868), and Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) (Ankele 2018;Majerus 2017; Hess/Majerus 2011; Hicks/Beaudry 2010). As Monika Ankele (2018a) points out, psychiatric science always had to take into account the effects of the materiality and spatial quality of the psychiatric institution, since treatment never takes place under laboratory conditions.…”

“…In the last decades, historiography engaged more systematically with the opportunities and challenges of this turn. While the materiality of the walls remains central, other aspects are also taken into account such as paper technologies (Hess 2018; Borck/Schäfer 2015) or medical and control devices such as pills (Majerus 2017), keys (Wernli 2019), the sickbed (Ankele 2019), the bathtub (Ankele 2020), and the electroconvulsive therapy machine (Boschma 2019). Another topic being researched is the question of the impact of material culture on the development of scientific knowledge in the field of the "mind sciences" (Guenther/Hess 2016) or in the formation of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis (Müller 2019).…”

“…In the context of systemic therapy, special attention is paid to the use of the chair in the therapeutic setting, especially when it comes to therapy with outpatients. For inpatients it has to be mentioned that the object of the bed plays a long and important role in the history of psychiatry (Ankele 2018;Majerus 2017). In psychiatry, the chair is used and arranged in various forms of systemic constellation work.…”

Lives in Storage: Clothes and Other Personal Effects As a Way of Recovering Patients' Histories in a Psychiatric Hospital

“…We are only too familiar with straitjackets and binding belts as objects that have helped to shape our ideas of asylums, symbolically asserting their own implicit logic throughout the history (and pre-history) of psychiatry (Majerus 2017). The initiatives in Lyon and New York show how we, whether as historians, cultural mediators, or museum curators, can shift the attention of material interest onto less connoted objects, which might well in the end be of more significance to the individuals who passed through different psychiatric institutions in the 20th century.…”