Article ID: CBB368791802

‘Psychosis of civilization’: a colonial-situated diagnosis (2021)

unapi

In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis ‘psychosis of civilization’ appeared in some psychiatrists’ writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming ‘like’ Europeans – a goal to which they seem to aspire – but too far from their ‘ancestral habits’ to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

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Authors & Contributors
Zorzanelli, Rafaela Teixeira
Keller, Richard Charles
Appelquist, Malin
Ji-Hye Shin
Campbell, Morag Allan
Scarfone, Marianna
Concepts
Psychiatry
Clinical psychology
Mental disorders and diseases
Diagnosis
Case studies
Colonialism
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
North Africa
Germany
France
Brazil
Libya
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