#edward shorter

[spectaculardistractions]

So it is possible that the rough musicking of wife-beaters indicates some "reform" of popular manners or amelioration of the lot of wives. But I cannot share the confidence of Edward Shorter, who, citing my own earlier article, argued that the evidence confirms "the early modernization of domestic relationships in England": As egalitarian relationships between husband and wife diffused, the community began to perceive as intolerable such vestiges of earlier patriarchal authority as the right to slam one's wife about; and so it moved to rebuke wife-beaters.

E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common

[proudestmoment1]

from Edward Shorter’s “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom”

While cases of hysteric paralysis in women rose and peaked in the 19th century, they drastically declined in the 20th century. Hysteric paralyses in men appear infrequently, but tend to be related to either occupational accidents, or war trauma. As a consequence, Edward Shorter argues that male hysteria stayed constant but rare throughout both the 19th and 20th centuries. Geroulanos’s The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe indicates another interpretation: male hysteria seemed to have risen or have been subsumed by (most likely both) war neuroses with the advent of the First World War.

James Halliday: “In civilian practice my observations made in the 1930s on insured persons showed that hysteria was most frequently seen in males engaged in dangerous occupations - notably workers at depths (such as underground miners), workers at heights (such as steeplejacks), and workers with explosives.”

(how are those for signifiers)

[coverspy]

A History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter (M, 20s, shirt and tie, glasses, stopped reading to look at front and back covers, 5 train)

[schizodissociativereading]

A combined group of researchers at Oxford and Newcastle made a promising beginning in the 1970s, distinguishing between Infantile Psychosis and Late-Onset Psychosis. In addition to the psychosis, the early-onset group demonstrated a whole range of autistic and catatonic symptoms, ranging from stereotypes and mutism (catatonic) to social isolation (autistic). The late-onset group, by contrast, showed mainly disordered thought, hallucinations, and perplexity, none of which characterize paediatric patients in the Iron Triangle. The early- vs late-onset distinction was, however, not taken up in the literature.

Shorter, E., & Wachtel, L. E. (2013). Childhood catatonia, autism and psychosis past and present: Is there an ‘iron triangle’? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand, 128(1), 21-33.

Read Online

[schizodissociativereading]

The French, who always had been uneasy about the schizophrenia diagnosis, were quick to identify a version of non-deteriorating psychosis in youth (‘heboïdophrenie’) that embraced autism and catatonia as well. Henri Ey and co-authors adumbrated this in 1967, ‘In fact one designates under the term “heboïdes” certain preschizophrenic patients, socially isolated [boudeurs], negativistic, impulsive, and plunged into a kind of morose autism’. The negativism would be suggestive of catatonia; the nonschizophrenic (‘preschizophrenic’) psychosis and autism are clear.

Shorter, E., & Wachtel, L. E. (2013). Childhood catatonia, autism and psychosis past and present: Is there an ‘iron triangle’? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand, 128(1), 21-33.

Read Online

[schizodissociativereading]

In these years, psychosis had drained out of the Iron Triangle because Kraepelin had decreed that ‘childhood schizophrenia’ was a distinctive illness, and psychotic children were considered to be in a different patient pool than the autistic and catatonic. This hiving off of childhood schizophrenia was harmful because it denied the existence of autism and catatonia in children who were not psychotic (not ‘schizophrenic’). It also suggested a horrifying prognosis for psychotic children: relentless progressive deterioration to vegetable status on the backwards of the asylums and institutes for mental retardation. No wonder the parents strenuously resisted the notion that their children with autism might also be psychotic.

Shorter, E., & Wachtel, L. E. (2013). Childhood catatonia, autism and psychosis past and present: Is there an ‘iron triangle’? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand, 128(1), 21-33.

Read Online

[schizodissociativereading]

The history of autism took a definitive turn in 1913 when, in the eighth edition of his textbook, Emil Kraepelin described what would later be considered typically autistic behaviour as evidence of early-onset dementia praecox. ‘We are dealing with children who have always shown a quiet, shy, withdrawn nature, engaged in no friendships and only lived for themselves’. Kraepelin assigned the tendency of dementia praecox patients to shutter themselves off from the outside world as ‘negativism’. ‘Bleuler’, he said, ‘has described this important diagnostic sign as autism’. Thereafter, autism would be considered definitively as part of dementia praecox, also called schizophrenia.

Shorter, E., & Wachtel, L. E. (2013). Childhood catatonia, autism and psychosis past and present: Is there an ‘iron triangle’? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand, 128(1), 21-33.

Read Online

[schizodissociativereading]

Autism, as stated, appears as a diagnosis in 1911. But for Bleuler, ‘autism’ had nothing to do with the later meaning of social isolation. He described it as a gap between the patient’s fantasy world and the unlovely reality the patient inhabited. ‘Thus the autistic world of thought remains inaccessible to reality, though perceived by the patient as completely real, while the patient’s subjective appreciation of the real world drops to around zero.’ Bleuler said that French psychopathologists had noted this gap between fantasy world and understanding of reality for years, although in his own system of schizophrenia he attached to this separation a certain importance.

Shorter, E., & Wachtel, L. E. (2013). Childhood catatonia, autism and psychosis past and present: Is there an ‘iron triangle’? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand, 128(1), 21-33.

Read Online