Schizophrenia is now held to be one of the major illnesses of mankind, but its recognition as a clinical syndrome is of relatively recent origin.
Indeed there is something very odd about the sudden arrival of the chronic schizophrenic on the stage of history at the end of the 19th century.
Why is this?
One hypothesis which has been canvassed recently is that schizophrenia was a novel condition, unknown before the end of the 18th century, which spread slowly across Europe and the United States in the 19th century, contributing in large measure to the vast increase in the population of asylums.
But a more historically-minded reading delivers a rather different interpretation of the coincidence between the identification of the chronic schizophrenic as a progressively deteriorating type and the transformation of the asylum into a custodial institution for the socially unproductive.
On this view, the formulation of schizophrenia as a chronic condition was deeply implicated in a field of social forces in which people who suffered from mental tribulation came to be represented as lacking any semblance of social value
To argue in this way is to espouse the kind of dynamic nominalism which Ian Hacking proposes as a way of understanding the dilemmas of the human sciences. ‘Categories of people,’ Hacking suggests, ‘come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.’ So, for example, the writings of Michel Foucault are to be understood as ‘in part stories about the connection between certain kinds of description coming into being or going out of existence, and certain kinds of people coming into being or going out of existence’.
On this reading, the category of schizophrenia, and the authoritative description of the schizophrenic, came into being at a time when different kinds of people became available for diagnosis as chronic types and scientific operators stood prepared to identify them as such.
What was offered was not an innocent observation afforded by the asylum for the chronic schizophrenic came more closely to resemble what others in any case already took him to be.
Indeed there is something very odd about the sudden arrival of the chronic schizophrenic on the stage of history at the end of the 19th century.
Why is this?
One hypothesis which has been canvassed recently is that schizophrenia was a novel condition, unknown before the end of the 18th century, which spread slowly across Europe and the United States in the 19th century, contributing in large measure to the vast increase in the population of asylums.
But a more historically-minded reading delivers a rather different interpretation of the coincidence between the identification of the chronic schizophrenic as a progressively deteriorating type and the transformation of the asylum into a custodial institution for the socially unproductive.
On this view, the formulation of schizophrenia as a chronic condition was deeply implicated in a field of social forces in which people who suffered from mental tribulation came to be represented as lacking any semblance of social value
To argue in this way is to espouse the kind of dynamic nominalism which Ian Hacking proposes as a way of understanding the dilemmas of the human sciences. ‘Categories of people,’ Hacking suggests, ‘come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between these processes.’ So, for example, the writings of Michel Foucault are to be understood as ‘in part stories about the connection between certain kinds of description coming into being or going out of existence, and certain kinds of people coming into being or going out of existence’.
On this reading, the category of schizophrenia, and the authoritative description of the schizophrenic, came into being at a time when different kinds of people became available for diagnosis as chronic types and scientific operators stood prepared to identify them as such.
What was offered was not an innocent observation afforded by the asylum for the chronic schizophrenic came more closely to resemble what others in any case already took him to be.
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