Overview

In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular diagnosis for America's problems was that society was becoming a madhouse. In this intellectual and cultural history, Michael E. Staub examines a time when many believed insanity was a sane reaction to obscene social conditions, psychiatrists were agents of repression, asylums were gulags for society's undesirables, and mental illness was a concept with no medical basis. Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills-from dysfunctional marriage and family dynamics to the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism-were at the root of mental illness. Staub chronicles the surge in influence of socially attuned psychodynamic theories along with the rise of radical therapy and psychiatric survivors' movements. He shows how the theories of antipsychiatry held unprecedented sway over an enormous range of medical, social, and political debates until a bruising backlash against these theories-part of the reaction to the perceived excesses and self-absorptions of the 1960s-effectively distorted them into caricatures. Throughout, Staub reveals that at stake in these debates of psychiatry and politics was nothing less than how to think about the institution of the family, the nature of the self, and the prospects for, and limits of, social change. The first study to describe how social diagnostic thinking emerged, Madness Is Civilization casts new light on the politics of the postwar era.

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Reviews

Madness Is Civilization makes a valuable contribution to the American intellectual history of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. For older readers, Staub provides a well-researched and insightful recreation of the debates that dominated a bygone period. For younger ones, he is a thoughtful guide to the general intellectual energy that the study of sanity and madness once provided. For both cohorts, he shows how much has been lost because of the absence of a genuinely social view of mental illness in current discourse about normality and abnormality. . . . Staub's highly readable synthesis of a wide range of material is the single best source for a thoughtful discussion of the 'anti-psychiatry' movement that at the same time is so chronologically close yet so intellectually distant from our current era. --Allan V. Horwitz Social History of Medicine

A valuable contribution to the American intellectual history of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. For older readers, Staub provides a well-researched and insightful recreation of the debates that dominated a bygone period. For younger ones, he is a thoughtful guide to the general intellectual energy that the study of sanity and madness once provided. For both cohorts, he shows how much has been lost because of the absence of a genuinely social view of mental illness in current discourse about normality and abnormality. Staub's highly readable synthesis of a wide range of material is the single best source for a thoughtful discussion of the 'anti-psychiatry' movement that at the same time is so chronologically close yet so intellectually distant from our current era. (Allan V. Horwitz, Social History of Medicine)

Author Information

Michael E. Staub is professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, and the author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America.

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