Introduction

Leading currents of scholarship over the last couple of decades have made it tempting to identify the history of psychiatry with the history of the asylum. The reasons for the rise of the asylum are manifold, and they have been fiercely debated. Lunatic asylums were for those who had temporarily gone out of their minds, according to the Lockean concept of insanity as the misassociation of ideas. The asylum was there to restore reason to such victims. Henry Maudsley had come to believe that the classic vast public asylum, centred on the system of compulsory confinement, was good neither for patients nor for psychiatry. In many different ways the movement of psychiatry during the nineteenth century was away from the irrational man in the asylum and rather in the direction of the study of the aberrations and pathology of the mind in general, within the normal relations of society.