I'm currently enjoying
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - the real-life English country house murder story by Kate Summerscale - and to my delight I've discovered that it contains some wonderful insights into Victorian attitudes to mental illness.
We learn, for example, that the Victorians believed madness was generally passed down from the mother, and that the most likely recipient was the daughter. Summerscale writes: "Another theory - psychological rather than physiological - was that brooding on one's hereditary taint of madness could itself bring it on."
What particularly surprised me the other day was a passage in the book suggesting that one of the characters, a doctor, could face reprisals for his suggestion that a young girl in the story was likely to be mad simply because her mother had suffered from mental illness. "In the 1850s" Summerscale explains, "several medical men were found to have consigned sane women to asylums - the ease of getting a doctor to testify a women's madness had become a national scandal. A parliamentary select committee investigated the phenomenon in 1858, and the
Women in White [murder mystery novel] was dramatising it in 1860. The public was familiar now, with the figure of the physician who falsely declared a woman insane."
Remember this is some decades before
Fraud (oops, see
here) Freud started applying the diagnosis of conversion disorder or hysteria to so many women, many of whom probably had organic illnesses. So the timeline seems odd somehow. How did a society that apparently recognised the scandal of falsely diagnosing women with mental illness, give way to Freud and all his shenanigans? Or am I being unfair to Freud? If anyone can explain, I'd love to hear from you via comments...
Link to official website of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
译文:
十九世纪五十年代，妇女患有精神疾病，即使是误诊，也是一大丑闻——那Freud是如何避开惩罚的呢？
我正在阅读一篇有Kate Summerscale所写的《Whicher先生的嫌疑》——这是真实发生在英国乡村家庭的一个谋杀故事——而让我高兴的是我发现故事里饱含了维多利亚时代对精神疾病的态度的一些奇妙的观点。
我们发现，比如说，维多利亚人相信精神错乱大多是从母亲那里传下来的，而且女儿传到此病的几率更大。Summerscale写到：“另一个理论——心理上而非生理上对精神错乱遗传因素耿耿于怀本身也会促发精神疾病。”
另有一天，一本书上的一篇文章令我大吃一惊。文章中的一个人物，一名医生，因提出了故事中的一个年轻姑娘几近疯狂仅仅只因为她的母亲换上了精神疾病这一观点而面临报复。“在十九世纪五十年代”Summerscale解释道：“人们发现一些医生将正常的妇女移至精神病院——减少医生验证一个妇女的精神错乱，并直接移交精神病院已成为一个国家的丑闻。1858年，一个国会选举委员会对此现象做了调查，1860年，《白色女人》（谋杀悬疑小说）一书将其改变成剧本。由于医生错判妇女精神错乱的情况屡见不鲜，现在大众对这种现象也不以为奇。”
记得是在Freud开始为转变一些妇女的精神错乱或歇斯底里而实施了诊断后的数十年，这些妇女几乎都患有器官疾病。这样的及时似乎很是奇怪。一个社会是如何看似承认了误诊妇女患精神疾病这一丑闻，向Freud和他说有的恶作剧妥协？或是我不公平地对待了Freud？如果有人能够解释，我乐意通过评论听听你的意见……
链接到《Whicher先生的嫌疑》的官方网站
