“Perfectly Contented to Sit and Look Out the Window All Day”: The Automaton and the Self in American Psychiatry, 1920s–1970s

This paper explores perceptions of the emotional states of patients with mental illnesses, amongst psychiatrists, family members and patients themselves, using examples from the modern and late modern periods in the United States, 1920s-1970s. I suggest that the image of the psychiatric patient as automaton, benumbed and oblivious as a result of psychiatric treatment, an image so chilling and troubling to patients’ rights movements and anti-psychiatry thinkers during the 1960s, was not so terrifying from the standpoint of early and mid century observers. In fact, an apathetic patient was more likely to be considered a soul “at peace”, a coveted emotional state given the vagaries of mental illness, as well the vast changes and intense pace of modernity outside the asylum walls. It is as if doctors and families grafted the lingering nineteenth century insane asylum ideal as placid retreat and refuge onto their patients’ beings. By the 1950s and increasingly by the1960s, however, the tranquil patient came to be viewed as a tragic violation of individual authenticity, by patients most centrally, but even by family members and some doctors. I suggest that this shift is the legacy of re-evaluations of science and fears of scientism in the wake of World War Two. The state of emotionlessness was then ascribed with a more grave political significance, one that rendered the self too frail, vulnerable to external manipulations and totalitarianism. Inflected by the counterculture, new ideas of what it means to be human also emphasized the necessity of experiencing the full range of human emotion. To illustrate this shift, I draw on patient/family/doctor correspondence from the Racine State Hospital in Wisconsin, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., the Rochester State Hospital in Minnesota, as well as the papers of individual psychiatrists and medical advertising in this period.