ABSTRACT
The Modern age generally refers to the period of time from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. It covers an enormous number of dramatic changes in the human landscape. These include the industrial revolution, high levels of colonization and then postcolonization, the emergence of universal education, mass urbanization, the Romantic movement, modern medical science, an explosion in various technologies that directly impacted how people live, two world wars, a revolution of human rights, and the list goes on. By the end of the Modern age, in the early part of the twentieth century, the professional fields of psychology and psychiatry were set but far from settled. Psychiatry was split between, on the one hand, its empirical, medical model (concerned with diagnostic categorization and the neurological underpinnings of mental illness) and on the other hand, its revolutionary new subfield of psychoanalysis, based on an intuitive, dynamic model, concerned with the unconscious developmental mind and the inherent conflicts within the psyche. This split would continue well into the twentieth century when the rise of psychotropic medication and academic, psychology-based psychotherapy would lead to the victory of the medical model in the psychiatric world. Conversely, psychology had emerged as an academic field but was also splitting apart between those who sought to understand the normal workings of the human mind and those who dared to tread in the field of psychiatry, exploring the definitions, roots, and treatments of mental illness.
