Madness and the Problems of Psychological History in the Sixteenth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16608958 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H C Erik Midelfort (corresponding author), H C Erik Midelfort H C Erik Midelfort |
| Year | 1981 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 5-12 |
| Publication date | 1981-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sixteenth Century Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0361-0160 • E-ISSN: 2326-0726 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3003698 |
| PMID | 11633161 |
| OpenAlex | W2467891658 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO William Langer gave historians their next assignment, the recovery of the psychological world and the mental dynamics that had shaped the character and culture of the past.' It must be said that historians have not effectively responded to this challenge. Some few have tried to recover this psychological dimension, with the best results coming in the efforts to describe the mentality of a whole culture rather than in the apparently more treacherous task of dealing with individuals.2 There is justice in this broad, cultural approach, of course, for it may be said that individuals and small groups cannot be understood apart from the cultural assumptions and expectations of their age. One unfortunate consequence has been, however, that we have often been so concerned with the general mentalit6 that individuals and small groups have fallen out. This has meant in turn that when scholars have turned their energies to individuals in the past, they have felt compelled to ignore the cultural context and have tried instead to apply the psychological structures and assumptions of our own day to isolate and recover personalities of the past. Erik Erikson's famous book on Luther was a classic of this sort, arranging Luther's putative youth to fit a neo-Freudian understanding of identity crisis.3 Stimulating as such attempts can be, it seems to me that they tend to tell us more about our age than about strangers in a strange culture. When one scholar claims, for example, that Bruegel's famous portrayal of Dulle Griet is really a study of schizophrenia, the reader
Psychoanalysis · History · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1996 - 2020 (25) |
| Highly cited | No |