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Seeing the Insane in Textbooks of Abnormal Psychology: The Uses of Art in Histories of Mental Illness
Author(s) -
SCHOENEMAN THOMAS J.,
BROOKS SHAN,
GIBSON CARLA,
ROUTBORT JULIA,
JACOBS DIETER
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5914.1994.tb00249.x
Subject(s) - psychology , insanity , ideology , mentally ill , history of psychology , mental illness , ignorance , psychoanalysis , epistemology , psychotherapist , politics , law , psychiatry , philosophy , mental health , political science
Abstract Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors’professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for reproductions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in three (20%) or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a “Whiggish” account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distorted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depict the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their literal and metaphorical shackles by men who are “ahead of their time” in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphasized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of stereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western history. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of “history for the sake of the past” as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases.