The soul of the nation : psychiatry, politics and society in the inter-war period

This paper documents the lecture of the recipient of the DGGN’s bi-annual dissertation prize for the doctoral thesis ‘Curing the Soul of the Nation: Psychiatry, Society, and Psycho-Politics in the German-speaking Countries, 1918–1939’ (Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence 2015). In a first section, I summarize the dissertations main thesis, its scope and perspective: the increasing presence of psychiatric experts in social and political debates of the inter-war period, whose claims to diagnose and shape society I describe as ‘psycho-politics’. The following section discusses the three interconnected case studies of the thesis: psycho-political diagnoses of the social and political situation at the end of WWI and the 1918/19 German revolution, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky’s project of ‘applied psychiatry’ as well as the networks that his manifesto for ‘medical imperialism’ helped to create both in Austria and abroad and finally, the culmination of various approaches to psychiatric prevention and reform in the international movement for mental hygiene, which emerged in the United States and reached the Germanspeaking countries in the mid-1920s. I conclude by restating the main findings of my research about the complex relationships between psychiatry, society and politics in the inter-war period