As historians have turned to global and transnational history, their attention has been drawn to the movement of subjects, objects, and ideas across boundaries. Especially concerned with the processes and dynamics underlying historical developments, they have often embraced the metaphors of mapping and travel to make sense of the traffic in people and things. Spaces that once appeared to be defined by boundaries and barriers have now come to be seen as far more permeable and dynamic. Gemma Blackshaw's and Sabine Wieber's edited volume fits firmly into this historiographical framework.
Following lines of argument similar to those outlined by Cornelia Brink in Grenzen der Anstalt. Psychiatrie und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1860–1980 (2010), Blackshaw and Wieber understand the turn-of-the-century asylum to be less a fortress than a site of continuous interaction between insiders and outsiders, a world in which patients, knowledge, and treatments enjoyed lives that were never contained within the walls of psychiatric facilities. As Thomas Müller and Frank Kuhn point out in their chapter, asylums at the turn of the twentieth century could not—nor did they fully intend to—keep the realities of the outside world from entering. At the same time, these institutions played important roles within the wider communities in which they were embedded.
This volume's focus on madness in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is an especially intriguing choice for a number of reasons. For one thing, contemporary developments in Imperial Germany have tended to overshadow those of its neighbor to the south. To be sure, the work of figures such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud has garnered serious attention by historians, but even in these instances, the emphasis has been mostly on Vienna. The deliberate intention here, however, is to decenter the history of madness in the Habsburg empire, moving it away from psychoanalysis and toward recognizing the diversity of everyday encounters outside the metropolis.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979), Carl Schorske's influential interdisciplinary study of Viennese modernism, nonetheless remains the inspiration for this volume, whose essays explore topics that extend beyond the social history of mental illness to include intellectual history, art history, and the study of architecture and design. On the one hand, there are multiple essays on health spas (Luftorte) and asylums that demonstrate how the design of, and regimen inside, such facilities were deliberately informed by the intention of making these spaces comfortable and homey. As all these chapters show, however, what might be termed a kind of therapeutic domesticity appears to have been chronically undercut by the inherently confining nature of asylums, leading many former residents to resent at least some aspects of their experiences. Other essays, on the other hand, explore topics involving the arts and high culture, with chapters on an exhibition on “Madness and Modernity” at the Wellcome Collection in London in 2009–2010; on Gustav Mahler's engagement with Sigmund Freud; on Empress Sisi's attempts to manage her weight and public image; on representations of the madhouse in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities; and on the works of Gustav Klimt and Peter Altenberg.
The presence in the volume of both social historical research and a cultural studies approach to the history of madness—two lines of research often viewed by social historians of medicine as working at cross purposes—testifies to the editors’ intent to undermine the conventional distinction between “high” and “low” forms of expression. As Luke Heighton argues in his contribution on the art of the mad, instead of both lumping and marginalizing these forms under one category (e.g., relegating them to the status of “outsider art”), one should “read the art of the insane alongside art made by more mainstream artists without questioning the status of either as art, or feeling the need to establish a hierarchy between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ artists and their aesthetic practice” (157).
As laudable as this sentiment is, Journeys into Madness is not altogether successful in showing how those most interested in the cultural study of modernism and those more concerned with uncovering the social history of madness might constructively engage one another's research. To be sure, in acknowledging the porosity of the boundaries separating institutionalized forms of mental illness from the wider world, both lines of argument reach a similar conclusion: that the experiences of those deemed mad and the institutions historically designed to contain them were far more mainstream and more conventionally normal than many scholars have appreciated. This does not carry scholarly analysis very far, however, and the essays here appear to engage only sporadically in direct conversation with one another.
Moreover, the fact that the editors and most authors focus on so-called “functional illnesses”—forms of nervousness, neurasthenia, and neurosis lacking a clear-cut somatic lesion—reinforces a bias toward semantic interpretation. The experiences of those individuals suffering from severe forms of chronic psychosis, intellectual disability, or degenerative neurological problems, for instance, do not lend themselves nearly so easily to the kinds of interpretations laid out here. The authors arguably lost an opportunity to take advantage of the historical specificity of their subject matter by largely neglecting to draw on the parallels between, on the one hand, turn-of-the-century encounters with a set of illnesses defined by their relative instability and, on the other, the social realities of an empire riddled by destabilizing conflicts.
