American Mental Epidemics

BORIS SIDIS (1867–1923), a psychologist whose views ultimately diverged significantly from those of Freud, was one of the founders of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the author of numerous books exploring the medical and political effects of patterns of individual human behavior. Born not far from Kiev, in Ukraine, a child of Moses and Mary (Marmor) Sidis, he was tutored at home until the age of seventeen under the supervision of his father, who made his living as a merchant. Soon after he moved to Kishinev to continue his studies at a government school, he was arrested—allegedly for teaching peasants how to read—on the basis of the so-called “May Laws” approved by the Czar in May 1882 against the Jews. After a long period of solitary confinement, he was permitted to return home under the continuing surveillance of the police, before making his way out of Russia to New York, where he arrived in 1887. There he managed to support himself through factory work and by offering private lessons, while pursuing studies on his own in the city’s public libraries. In 1892 he was accepted to Harvard as a special student; by the following year, he was enrolled as a candidate for the AB degree, which he received in 1894, the same year that he married Sarah Mandelbaum, who went on to become an MD and with whom he had two children. Sidis received his AM degree a year later, and was awarded the PhD degree in 1897.

During these years at Harvard, Sidis captured the attention of two of the preeminent psychologists of the era, William James and Hugo Munsterberg, and he completed his first book, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society, which began as his dissertation and was published by D. Appleton and Company in New York in 1898. In addition to conducting research, Sidis had been working as an associate psychologist and psychopathologist at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, an appointment he had been given by Governor Theodore Roosevelt in 1896; he continued in that position until 1901, then was named director of the Psychopathic Hospital and Psychopathological Laboratory of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. He subsequently returned to Harvard, maintaining a private practice in Brookline while he worked toward his MD degree, which he received in 1908; he then went on to establish a private sanitarium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he remained until his death in 1923 at the age of fifty-six.

Sidis’s long list of publications includes Multiple Personality: An Experimental Investigation into Human Individuality (1904); The Psychology of Laughter (1913); The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914); and Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure (1922). The excerpt presented here is taken from the concluding chapter of The Psychology of Suggestion. Although William James did not share all of Sidis’s ideas, in the introduction that he provided for this book he pointed out that the author had taken up the “very important matter of ‘crowd psychology’ . . . almost for the first time in English”; and “there is,” James emphasized, “probably no more practically important topic to the student of public affairs.”

—SD

Turning now to American social life, so radically different from that of the middle ages, we still find the same phenomena manifesting themselves. The social spirit runs riot in mobs, crazes, manias, pests, plagues, and epidemics.

American religious epidemics hallowed by the name of “revivalism” are notorious. A Jonathan, a McGready, a Sankey, or a Moody is stricken by the plague, falls into a delirium, and begins to rave on religion. The contagion spreads, and thousands upon thousands pray wildly in churches and chapels, rave furiously, and fall into convulsions in camp meetings. A revival epidemic has come, rages violently for some time, and then disappears as suddenly as it came. To take a few instances of the many cases of revivals:

In 1800 a wave of religious mania passed over the country and reached its acme in the famous Kentucky revivals. The first camp meeting was...