The theory of symptom complexes, mind and madness

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio V Daker

Kahlbaum’s seminal approach to symptom complexes, as opposed to disease entities, is still relevant. Many psychopathologists have approached mental symptom complexes without prejudging them as necessary physical deficits or diseases, favouring a broader dimensional and anthropological view of mental disorders. Discussions of symptom complexes gained prominence in psychiatry in the early twentieth century – through Hoche – and in the period leading up to World War II – through Carl Schneider. Their works, alongside those of Kraepelin, Bumke, Kehrer, Jaspers and others, are reviewed in relation to the theme of symptom complexes, the mind, and mental disorders. A particular feature of symptom complexes is their relationship to aspects of the normal mind and how this affects clinical manifestations. It is further suggested that symptom complexes might offer a useful bridge between the psychic and the biological in theories of the mind.

Author(s):  
Sarah Pinto

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. This chapter introduces Mrs. A., Satya Nand, and the outlines of the case, which began with a discussion of bringing “Hindu Socialism” to Indian peasants and turned into an exploration of love, sexuality, ambition, and life after marriage. The case appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in twentieth-century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. This introduction also introduces Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya, central mythic figures who entered Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s science. It asks what it means to begin a conversation about ethics from elsewhere than the usual sources in European myth and philosophy, and wonders at how we might consider this narrative in and beyond its place and time, Punjab on the eve of Partition, considering what it demands of us as readers of and alongside Mrs. A., an anonymous yet intimate voice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

After World War II, transformations in the newspaper industry, in mainstream gender values, and in the nature of popular discourse again reshaped Americans’ experience with advice. The rise in the 1950s of a new generation of advice columns, led by Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, also marked the decline of local, participatory columns like the Detroit News’ “Experience” and the Chicago Defender’s “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise.” Yet early twentieth-century advice columns set key precedents of collective communication that continue to shape the digital communities that serve as our primary modes of personal interaction today.


Author(s):  
Daishiro Nomiya

High modernity claims that the modernity project gave rise to institutional organs of modern nation states, culminating in an emergence of ultra-military states with wartime economy in the early twentieth century. It also argues that the same developmental pattern continued to dominate in the post-World War II period. This chapter examines this high-modernity thesis, employing Japan and Hiroshima as cases to be analyzed. Against the high-modernity thesis, many believe that Japan had a historical disjuncture in 1945, being ultramilitary before the end of World War II and a peaceful nation after. Examinations show that, while the modernity project controlled a large-scale historical process in Japan, it met vehement resistance, and became stranded in Hiroshima.


Author(s):  
Daniel Stedman Jones

This chapter illustrates how Friedrich Hayek began to develop an intellectual and organizational strategy to protect and maintain “the free society” as World War II drew to an end. His strategy looked to the influence of the early twentieth-century American progressives and British Fabian socialists and argued that defenders of liberty would have to develop a similar organizational and intellectual strategy. The result of Hayek's efforts was that a sympathetic group of intellectuals from Paris, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Manchester, the LSE, and Chicago came together under his leadership to form a kind of neoliberal international. The group called itself the Mont Pelerin Society after the venue of its first meeting, which was held in Vevey, Switzerland.


Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.


Author(s):  
Hillary Maxson

In the aftermath of World War II, many Japanese women felt impelled to exorcise “martial motherhood,” a stoic, tearless, child-sacrificing gender ideal constructed by the state throughout the early twentieth century. At the Mothers’ Congress of 1955, mothers from across the country gathered to reclaim motherhood from the state and began to redefine motherhood for themselves in the postwar era. This chapter argues that the Mothers’ Congress represented a moment of transition from the wartime concept of “motherhood in the interest of the state” to the postwar idea of motherhood in the interest of mothers. Furthermore, the influential power of the organizers of Japan’s Mothers’ Congress was fundamental in the creation of the 1955 World Congress of Mothers. This was the first instance in which Japanese women became international feminist leaders, and they did so through the language of matricentric feminism.


Author(s):  
Barbara Cohen-Stratyner

Gertrude Hoffman (Hoffmann) was an early twentieth-century Broadway dance director and performer, and the first woman to receive a dance direction—or choreographic—credit on Broadway. From her first credited choreography for Punch, Judy & Co (1903), through to her retirement in the early 1940s, she was known for her clever and innovative staging of women’s precision choruses for both the Broadway and the international stage. As a solo performer, however, she is remembered as an impersonator of other vaudeville and theater performers and concert dancers, developing a vaudeville feature act called The Borrowed Art of Gertrude Hoffman. Hoffman developed and performed in the first U.S. productions of the Ballets Russes repertoire (1911–15), was the first woman admitted to the Theatrical Managers’ Protective Association, and, after buying herself out of her previously signed contracts, set up her own producing organization. In the 1920s and 1930s, she created and staged dance specialties for precision dance teams, known as The Gertrude Hoffman Girls, comprised of twelve to twenty-four performers. Her troupes appeared in the Shuberts’ annual Broadway revues and musicals, as well as in ‘‘picture palaces’’ and large cinemas in America and Western Europe. She retired when World War II closed access to the European entertainment industry.


1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Wacker

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni

The epilogue explores the fate of Italian transnational migrant marketplaces after World War II. It connects today’s popularity of Fernet con Coca, considered Argentina’s national drink, to the historical movements of Italians and trade goods in the early-twentieth century. The Epilogue argues that due to Italy’s postwar “economic miracle,” the socio-economic mobility of second- and third-generation Italians and changes in the status of Italian food worldwide, migrant marketplaces came to exist increasingly in the imaginary and in commodified form, rather than in the actual, embodied movements of Italians and foods from Italy. However, imagined migrant marketplaces continue to play a critical role in the performance of ethnicity for descendants of Italians and in the consumption of Italianità for non-migrants in the U.S. and Argentina.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document