Abstract
Nineteenth-century intellectuals often fell victim to a strange kind of physical and mental collapse which later generations would call a nervous breakdown. Twentieth-century historians have laboured to explain the psychological and sociocultural contexts of these crises.2 This chapter seeks, in a very modest way, to focus on a single, famous ‘case’ of a mental crisis and questions the utility of using psychiatric theories popular at any one time to explain such events. While the aetiology of mental disorders is a subject of undoubted importance for clinicians, there is little need to include particular biological, psychiatric or psychological theories in the historian’s toolkit. Does it matter to the intellectual historian whether Nietzsche suffered from the neuropsychological sequelae of syphilis or some other kind of mental disorder? I would suggest not, even though some medical historians — especially those whose allegiances and interests are more medical than historical — are likely to disagree.
The quoted phrase is from Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 122.
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Notes
On the prevalence of nervous breakdowns, see Janet Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)
and the essays in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds, Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds, Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 112, 110.
John Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 22.
See, for example, Mill’s admission to Thomas Carlyle that he was ‘indebted for all the most valuable of such insight as I have into the most important matters’ to his occasional fits of dejection, into one of which he seemed to be falling at the time of writing this letter. See F. E. Mineka, ed., Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 149.
See Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism, with Personal Recollections (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 42–4.
See also Janice Carlisle, John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 95.
See Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 282–4.
See Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 36.
A. W. Levi, ‘The “Mental Crisis” of John Stuart Mill’, Psychoanalytic Review, 32 (1945): 86–101, at 97.
On the pros and cons of psychohistory, see Fred Weinstein, ‘Psychohistory and the Crisis of the Social Sciences’, History and Theory 34 (1995): 299–319;
and H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 175.
See Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 147–202.
Quoted by L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940 (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 11–12.
Roger Smith, ‘The Background to Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy’, History of Science 11 (1973): 75–123, at 95.
He did not, however, use the term ‘neurasthenia’, which was to become popular in late nineteenth-century medical circles to explain cases such as Mill’s. On concepts of nervous disorder in British medicine and culture, see W. F. Bynum, ‘The Nervous Patient in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Psychiatric Origins of British Neurology’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the Histoty of Psychiatry, 3 vols (London: Tavistock, 1985), 1: p. 102.
See Jack Stillinger, ‘John Mill’s Education: Fact, Fiction, and Myth’, in Michael Laine, ed., A Cultivated Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 19–43, at pp. 29, 23 and 31 respectively.
William L. Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, American Historical Review 63 (1957–8): 283–304;
and Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 20.
The two biographies of Mill are Michael St John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954);
and Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The first complete biography of Immanuel Kant in a half-century was Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Hegel has had only one really full biography in English (Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]),
as has Wittgenstein (Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius [London: Cape, 1990]).
Friedrich Nietzsche is the obvious exception to this rule — for a recent biography that gives ample information on earlier ones, see Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, transl. Shelley Frisch (London: Granta, 2002).
Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 1.
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© 2007 Chandak Sengoopta
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Sengoopta, C. (2007). ‘One of the Best-Known Identity Crises in History’? John Stuart Mill’s Mental Crisis and its Meanings. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_15
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