Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions

This book is a history of the federal mental institution Saint Elizabeths Hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC’s African American community. Founded in 1855 to treat insane military personnel and the District’s civilian residents, the institution became one of the nation’s preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so. The book charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late 1980s, when the hospital’s mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization and its transfer from the federal government to the District. The book makes two main arguments. First, ideas of racial difference figured prominently in how hospital officials understood the mission of the institution and subsequently designed and operated it, in how hospital officials understood mental disease and developed therapies to address it, and in how patients experienced their confinement. This history reveals the ways the American psychiatric profession engaged in an unarticulated project that conceptualized the white psyche as the norm. Second, this book argues that African Americans—both patients and nonpatients—were not powerless people acted on by large institutional forces. Black Washingtonians were active agents in their interactions with the hospital, from more overtly political and collective endeavors, such as calling for investigations of the mistreatment of black patients and advocating for the hospital’s integration, to the more individualized and quotidian attempts to manage their own or their loved one’s therapeutic experience.

Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound

Hollis Frampton's films have often been characterized as the afterimages of literary modernism. While the material and linguistic concerns of his early films as well as his time spent visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital attest to the impact that modernist poetics had on him, the grand finale of his career—the cycle of films that comprise Magellan—marked his most significant departure from these original influences. Considering Magellan in relation to Pound's Cantos illuminates the competing modernisms, both literary and cinematic, in Frampton's late work. In his depiction of two simultaneous voyages—one through the world and one through the history of film—Frampton counterintuitively suggests that a modernism uniquely conceived for film can only be realized after establishing a tradition to renovate: film can finally make it new only through becoming old.

Golden Age of Psychodrama at Saint Elizabeths Hospital (1939–2004)

The Psychodrama Program at Saint Elizabeths Hospital (SEH) was founded by J. L. Moreno, MD, and contributed to the profession for 65 years. A strong case can be made that, next to the Moreno Institute, the SEH psychodrama program was the most influential center for psychodrama in the United States and the world. This article describes those contributions, including training 16% of all certified psychodramatists; enhancing and advancing the body of knowledge base through more than 50 peer-reviewed published articles or book chapters; pioneering the use of psychodrama in law enforcement and criminal justice; and its trainees making significant contributions to the theory and practice of psychodrama including but not limited to founding psychodrama in Australia and New Zealand.