Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Ed. by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber (review)

At least since the publication of Carl Schorske’s classic work on fin-de-siècle Vienna, scholars have been drawn to the Habsburg capital as a cultural and political crucible as well as the birthplace of literary, artistic, and architectural modernism, modern nationalist movements, and Freudian psychoanalysis—to name but a handful of its legacies. Schorske argued that the setbacks Austrian liberalism endured in the late nineteenth century caused widespread political alienation and led to a withdrawal into the self among the younger generation of Vienna’s bourgeois cultural elite, triggering an explosion of modernist creativity. In the decades since, historians, art historians, scholars of Jewish studies, and others have critiqued and updated Schorske’s paradigm in multiple ways; yet the book’s stamp on the period endures, making it impossible to address the topic without engaging with Schorske to some degree. The book’s breadth and thoroughness help explain why it remains so present after nearly thirty–five years. Indeed, Schorske addressed a very wide diversity of figures who, although they led intersecting and often intertwined lives, are generally treated by different kinds of scholars. He knitted together the cultural and the political, and although his Freudian framework may now seem outdated, his foregrounding of the psychological dimensions of the intense Austrian encounter with modernity remains one of his more lasting contributions.

Journeys into Madness is the latest addition to the study of this cultural milieu. Based on the exhibition “Madness and Modernity: Medicine and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900,” which originated in London in 2009 and traveled to Vienna the following year, the volume consists of eleven essays each of which explores different intersections between the cultural and the psychological, modernism and madness, at the turn of the century. The organizing principle, which the editors present in a concise and lucid introduction, is the permeability of the boundaries between madness and sanity as well as the mobility of subjects traveling through the physical sites of madness—clinics, spas, asylums—and the interior spaces of psychopathology. Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber very effectively map this kind of mobility onto the framework of the Habsburgs’ multinational empire, putting encounters with madness at the center of modern Austrian culture and identity. Unfortunately, their promise to bring the empire into a field that too often focuses predominantly on its German-speaking hub remained mostly unfulfilled.

Among the volume’s many noteworthy contributions are Steven Beller’s reflections on Freud’s place in Austrian culture. Beller usefully historicizes several of the psychoanalyst’s insights and shows that they often followed rather than influenced literary treatments of the unconscious and its irrational drives. His chapter is also one of the few to deal with the position of Jews and the rise of political antisemitism in the period. Beller, whose earlier works critiqued Schorske’s inattention to the role of Jews qua Jews in Viennese culture, here also takes up the contentious question of how Freud’s Jewish background informed his articulation of psychoanalysis. Gavin Plumley’s essay brings to light a fascinating encounter between Freud and Gustav Mahler, offering insights into Gustav and Alma Mahler’s mental anguish and finding traces of the composer’s mental breakdown in the notes to his never-completed tenth symphony.

Several contributions shed light on the period’s thriving spa culture; Jill Seward and Nicola Imre both discuss the phenomenon of spa tourism and the overlapping space between medical treatment and the emerging consumer-leisure sphere of the late nineteenth century. Other chapters focus on the architecture of asylums and other psychiatric spaces and discourses on nerves, bodies, and psychosis in literature, visual culture, and even, in the essay by Sabine Wieber, around the body of Empress Elisabeth, a frequent sanitarium denizen. Leslie Topp provides an account of the original “Madness and Modernity” exhibition, emphasizing the...