Project Details
Projekt
in#sane The contemporary history of an eroding difference
Applicant
Professor Dr. Benoit Majerus
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419057548
The aim of the project is to challenge the hitherto dominant top-down, national-historical viewpoint by changing perspectives and telling the story of deinstitutionalisation through everyday history. The project wants to answer the question of deinstitutionalisation "from below" by looking at the trajectories of women and men. In addition, the erosion of the guiding difference between normal and crazy in the everyday life of those affected is to be reflected. Have the walls of the institution shifted into everyday life outside the asylum or can an erosion of traditional boundaries really be traced in practical terms? For this reason, both the prehistory and posthistory of these "patients" are included in the narrative. The working hypothesis is that there was no deinstitutionalisation, but rather a fanning out of institutional responses. The approach based on everyday history should also make audible the experiences of actors of this deinstitutionalisation who have hardly been heard so far. Three problem areas are to be examined in micro-historical terms.- Trajectories: The central core of the project is no longer to start from the place, as has been the case in the history of psychiatry, but from people who were in a psychiatric room at a certain moment. - Psychiatries: Since the end of the 1950s there has been a fanning out of what a psychiatric room is, which is no longer defined solely by asylum. - Networks of social help: Historiography on/about the 18th and 19th centuries has often intertwined the history of psychiatry with the history of the welfare state/social assistance. For the 20th century, however, the two fields have until now followed largely separate historiographical paths. However, if one follows the biographies of patients, it turns out that they very often switch back and forth between offers of more socially defined institutions and more medical-therapeutic institutions. The crossing of these axes is intended to break up the over-simplified narrative of deinstitutionalisation, to show the heterogeneity of life experiences of people who spend part of their lives in psychiatric configurations and thus contribute to the general research question of the softening of in#sane. The double shift, away from a top-down, national-historical narrative to a micro-historical approach and a non-German-language case study, brings new questions to the fore and contributes to a sharper understanding of the German-speaking world in a comparative perspective.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Belgium, Luxembourg
Partner Organisation
Fonds National de la Recherche
Cooperation Partners
Dr. Renaud Bardez; David Guilardian
