ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by stating more clearly what ‘morbid introspection’ meant, and what role it played in Victorian psychiatric theory, before going on to discuss some of its more important secondary associations, notably with imagination; with ‘dominant’, ‘imperative’, or obsessional ideas; with hypochondriasis and hysteria; and with ‘moral insanity’ and ‘moral imbecility’. It examines some of the implications which these ideas and associations were to have for the practice of psychiatry, especially for the ‘moral management’ of the insane, the ‘mental hygiene’ of childhood and adolescence, and the psychological interpretation and treatment of insanity. The chapter attempts to trace some of the principal lines of departure taken from the starting-point, around which so much of the theory and practice of later-Victorian ‘psychological medicine’ was organized. The association of morbid introspection and habitual self-absorption with hypochondriasis and hysteria is one of the oldest and most constant medico-psychological associations to have grown up around the themes since the Renaissance.
