“A General Revolt in the Name of the Soul”: The Mind-Cure and Psychotherapeutic Movements in America

Abstract

The incipient therapeutic movements of the late-Victorian and Progressive eras in the US are salient to understanding the ways in which the desire to heal and be healed has at once a subtle and far-reaching influence on how crisis is understood and social transformation is carried out. Historians of late have amply documented how lay, faith, and medical healers of these eras negotiated new forms of selfhood amidst a rapidly changing political and socioeconomic order. Yet the historical portrait remains incomplete insofar as critical examination has not been paid to the “crisis resolution” specific to this reformation: the optimistic healing narrative that the sociomedical discourse on nervous diseases engendered. Such an investigation into this veritable birth of the therapeutic helps disclose how a dominant set of psychosomatic interpretations and healing modalities could cohere alongside both the evolving structure of monopoly capitalism and the designated roles people assumed within it.