The Madness of Free Indirect Style

This chapter considers the emergence of moral therapy in early psychiatry in order to argue that the Romantic-era innovation of free indirect style shares an affinity with eighteenth-century psychiatric diagnosis and case records. While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management, as well as in the political literature of the 1790s and in Romantic-era realist prose fiction. Free indirect style has a monitory function that abetted the psychiatric practice of moral management in the late eighteenth century: as a strategy for mediating the voice of a speaker in a text, free indirect style allowed early psychiatrists, who believed madness was transmitted orally, to regulate their patients’ conditions by moderating their speech. Free indirect style continues to bear the traces of the madhouse in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. Free indirect style also thus inaugurates the association of the novel with the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, free indirect style allows the writer to intimate forms of pathology that the reader is invited to, in effect, diagnose.

Ethics as Medicine: Moral Therapy, Expertise, and Practical Reasoning in al-Ghazālī’s Ethics

The idea that ethics might be fruitfully understood in analogy with, or indeed as a form of, medicine has enjoyed a long and distinguished history. A staple of ancient philosophical thinking, it also achieved wide expression in the Islamic world. This essay explores the role of the medical analogy in the work of the eleventh-century Muslim intellectual Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. Al-Ghazālī’s use of this analogy offers a unique vantage point for approaching several key features of his ethics of virtue, as notably expressed in the Revival of the Religious Sciences. These include his understanding of the nature of virtue and moral education; the fundamental structure of value; and most importantly, the place of human reasoning in the ethical life. This analogy also illuminates the rhetorical context of the Revival, taken as a book that aims to foster skills of practical reasoning and train its readers to become their own physicians.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CHARACTER FOR THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION THROUGH MORAL THERAPY: A STUDY OF THE NAZAM AZKIYA’ MANUSCRIPT

Purpose of the study: This research focused on the development of character for the millennial generation through moral therapy as can be found in the manuscript Nazam Azkiya’. Additionally, various teachings and guidance of the Wali were discussed in fostering the morals contained in the manuscript. This article also described the moral therapy and the form of teachings and guidance for peace seekers by exploring the values contained in these teachings and guidance. Methodology: The method used in this research is detailed verification, using ex post facto and survey approaches employed to investigate the phenomena such that values ​​can be analyzed extensively. Main Findings: The results of the data analysis show that the condition of moral values and character of the millennial generation are in the high category, so are the social, environmental, and religious conditions. Therefore, the character building of the Millennial generation by employing a system of moral therapy based on the teachings of the Wali in the Nazam Azkiya manuscript is by first, instilling religious norms from an early age. Second, teaching the importance of courtesy. Third, instilling family values since childhood. Fourth, sharpening their will and drive. Fifth, familiarising them in socializing. Applications of the study: The findings of this research could be used as a form of study and particularly towards the development of knowledge on tasawuf manuscripts and moral education. Furthermore, this article is expected to be used as a reference for scholars in applying knowledge in social life and enrich insights that are useful for the development of science. The expected outcome of this moral therapy is a change in the millennial’s attitude and character towards a better and more responsible individual. Novelty/Originality of the current study: This therapeutic system is the development of character for the Millennial generation, mainly in instilling intelligence, virtue and moral character, beneficial to others, can use gadgets and technology appropriately and according to their functions. Additionally, the Millennial generation should always be accompanied by religious teachings that can shape them into individuals with good disposition and morality.

Now She Is Choked

This chapter examines the chaotic lives of women committed to the asylum, and reveals how the principles of moral therapy were often undermined by the violence experienced by these patients, especially enslaved women. Domestic violence and poverty often precipitated problematic behavior and crimes like infanticide, yet asylum administrators increasingly chose to focus on female reproductive and sexual organs instead of the trauma that destabilized so many women. The asylum also promoted a racialized vision of healthy womanhood and motherhood that ignored the trauma of abuse, fostered dependency in white women, and disproportionately characterized black women as promiscuous imbeciles. This somatic emphasis on pregnancy, parturition, and puerperal fever as productive of insanity was at odds with the environmentalism of asylum medicine, but complemented the paternalism of asylum superintendents.

Conclusion

The conclusion opens with discussion of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather,” a satire of moral treatment. Poe was a distant cousin of Superintendent John M. Galt, and he might have based his fictional institution on the Eastern Lunatic Asylum, particularly his depiction of the attendants as African apes. This story provides an opportunity to review the ideals and shortcomings of moral therapy, and to connect the history of psychiatry to analysis of race. It is asserted that racial antipathy undermined humane asylum care and stalled implementation of successful outpatient care models. Instead, moral medicine gave way to moral hygiene and eugenics as asylum and prison moved closer together. The conclusion ends with a brief discussion of psychiatrist Franz Fanon, who drew upon his professional experiences to outline a different asylum nightmare than that envisioned by Poe.

2. Asylums and the origins of psychiatry

‘Asylums and the origins of psychiatry’ outlines the historical care of the mentally ill. If the mentally deranged could not be cared for within the family, they were sent to private madhouses for the rich and workhouses for the poor. The asylum movement began in earnest in the 1820s, aiming to provide moral therapy in a calm, spacious, rural environment. However, conditions deteriorated with overcrowding. The 19th century saw increasing research into mental health, especially in German-speaking Europe, with three of psychiatry’s most influential figures being Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Freud. Meanwhile, asylums had become even more overcrowded and neglected. Not until the 1920s did specific effective treatments become available.

“Vain dalliance with misery”: Moral Therapy in William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”

The following paper will examine how (male) speakers in William Wordsworth’s “The Baker’s Cart” and “Incipient Madness,” which eventually became reworked into “The Ruined Cottage,” narrate the histories of traumatised women. It will be argued that by distorting the women’s accounts of suffering into a didactic lesson for themselves, the poems’ speakers embody the tension present in the chief psychiatric treatment of the Romantic period, moral therapy, which strove to humanise and give voice to afflicted subjects, at the same time trying to contain and eventually correct their “otherness.”