Neurosis and Modernity

The Age of Nervousness in Sweden
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-90-04-16075-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 394 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 883 g

Reihe: History of Science and Medicine Library

In late nineteenth-century Sweden, paths to modernity created socio-cultural conditions conducive to the dissemination of the language of nerves. This book shows how neurosis became an extremely contagious diagnosis, and how our modern language of discontent, stress and malaise has a history that goes back to the birth of modern neuroses in the 1880s. Hysteria, neurasthenia, psychoneurosis and other neuroses spread from middle-class women to all segments of the Swedish population, and by the mid-1950s nobody was safe from the medico-cultural virus of neurosis. While offering the first historical analysis of the ways in which neuroses became a national malady in Sweden, this book illustrates and analyses general aspects of social and cultural history during the Age of Nervousness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pietikainen, Petteri

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Age of Nervousness

PART I. MEDICALISED MODERNITY
1. On the Swedish Path to Modernity
2. How Swedes Became Nervous
3. Weak Nerves, Degeneration and Racial Hygiene: Health Ideology in the Age of Nervousness
4. Masters of Psychomedical Reality: Neurosis and the Medical Profession

PART II. FROM THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS TO THE ERA OF PSYCHOCULTURE
5. Feminity, Sexuality and Childhood: Sources of the Nervous Self
6. Remedies for Nervousness
7. The Culture of Complexes

PART III. DOCTORS, PATIENTS AND THE STATE
8. On the Shattered Nerves of Dr Lennmalm’s Private Patients
9. Nervousness with Tears: Patients at the ‘Nerve Clinic’
10. How to Turn Neurotics into Productive Citizens

Conclusion: Neurosis as a Contagious Diagnosis

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Petteri Pietikainen, Ph.D. (1999) in History, University of Helsinki, has published extensively on modern medical and intellectual history, including C. G. Jung and the Psychology of the Symbolic Forms (1999) and Alchemists of Human Nature.