The Average Person Goes Blundering on through Life: The Resistance to Introspection in Late Modern American Psychiatry

This paper explores perceptions of introspection during the interwar and early postwar years through patient letters to psychiatrists, state hospital publicity documents and films, and patient personal narratives and fiction. I explore the tensions between attitudes of resignation towards mental illnesses and the desire to intervene and cure them. I suggest that the idea of mental illness as an inescapable fate resonated strongly throughout this period, and was conflated with serenity and an idealization of quietude that stood as a reaction against the clamour and speed of modernity. I argue that this divide between life inside the asylum and the outside world can be expressed, in the late modern period, as a contrast between spaces of suspended time and introspection and industrial time and agitation. However, even if patients sometimes viewed the state hospital as a benign pause in this way, they also resisted the “forced confession” and wished to maintain the “right to reticence” in the face of perceived psychiatric intrusiveness and over-interpretation. I show that resistance to introspection, in the form of trite injunctions like “pull yourself together,” even sometimes informed psychiatrists’ attitudes and official leisure programs at the state hospital during the late modern period. I argue that this attitude of being strong in the face of adversity and resigning oneself to one’s fate was a major factor that coded psychiatry writ large as a form of self-indulgence and narcissism in this period, a deeply embedded critique that well pre-existed the “culture of narcissism” of the late twentieth century. This hesitation to appear egotistical or self-absorbed, shared by patients and caregivers alike, suggests both a strong faith in self-reliance, survivalism, and the subordination of the individual to the larger community, even from within therapeutic cultures, as well as grave doubts about the potentials of individualism.