Early Modern Affinities? Esotericism and the Human Sciences in Turn of the Twentieth Century France

Friday, January 7, 2011: 9:50 AM
Room 103 (Hynes Convention Center)
Elizabeth Angeline Nelson , Indiana University
Catholic melancholics versus Protestant maniacs? This paper examines the role of denominational difference in turn-of-the-twentieth-century psychiatry and psychology, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. At this time, doctors theorized that theological variation was linked to differing psychologies and psychopathologies. The Protestant Reformation became a site of psycho-historical speculation and research for late-modern thinkers interested in the early-modern emergence of Protestant subjectivity. In seeking to explain such phenomena as religious enthusiasm, conversion, and examination of conscience, doctors and other commentators created historical models, folding psychological analysis into narratives about the appearance of modern selfhood.
As the theologian Paul Tillich put it, the Reformation inaugurated a “Protestant Era”—or so it seemed to turn-of-the-twentieth-century practitioners of the human sciences.  Their own researches were certainly impacted by the splintering of Christianity that began in the Reformation. This paper highlights the impact of the resulting religious cultures on the sciences: the fertility of the United States’ variegated religious landscape for psychological researchers; the relationship between Catholicism and French physicians' approaches to mental illness; and possible reasons for the origin of what are still current understandings of psychosis in largely Protestant, German-speaking countries.
This cultural history of medicine will demonstrate how “irrational” forces such as religious conviction and religious cultures played central roles in the development of the psychological sciences. Additionally, in "reading the Reformation" in turn-of-the-twentieth-century medicine, this paper attempts to construct a knotted image of the modern age as intimately bound up with its past.