Psychiatry Beyond the Asylum: The Origins of German Military Psychiatry Before World War I

Abstract

This study examines the co-operation between psychiatry and the army in Germany between 1870 and 1914, leading to the establishment of military psychiatry as an independent discipline. Arguing that military psychiatry played a key role in the history of modern clinical psychiatry, the paper points out how the first generation of military psychiatrists developed innovative diagnostic technologies, such as the intelligence test, and established crucial institutional alliances between psychiatric clinics, military authorities, and local and national administrations. The early history of military psychiatry marks the transition of psychiatry from a medical sub-discipline to a more generally applicable "social technology" assessing the borderline between normality and abnormality in multiple social contexts.

Trauma and the state with Sigmund Freud as witness

“…By the 1920s, their specialized knowledge allowed psychiatrists to decide which soldiers could reintegrate into society which were behaviorally incorrigible, or mentally ill (Lengwiler, 2003). And much like their colleagues in France, Britain, and Germany, the Viennese psychiatrists under Wagner-Jauregg's leadership generally held to a doctrine of medical moral righteousness merged with patriotism (Thomas, 2009).…”

Central European Psychiatry: World War I and the Interwar Period

“…While military psychiatry is mostly associated with the wartime treatment of mentally wounded soldiers, psychiatrists had already established a foothold in the military in peacetime. Following the wars of German unification in the 1860s and early 1870s, the military made increasing use of psychiatric expertise in the medical examination of recruits and in court martials, and psychiatrists eagerly seized the possibility to advance the professionalization of their specialty and to tap an inexhaustible source of cases for their studies (Lengwiler, 2000(Lengwiler, , 2003Ulrich, 2020, p. 34). Degeneration theory provided psychiatrists with a range of bodily and behavioral signs that could be used to diagnose recruits and defendants as biologically "inferior."…”