You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Healing the Mind, by the academic psychiatrist Michael Stone, is the first comprehensive English history of psychiatry in the last three decades, decades in which the enormous changes in the neurosciences have profoundly affected the understanding and practice
of psychiatry. Thus, slightly more than 50% of the volume's text pages deal with developments since 1960. Although trained as a psychoanalyst, Stone joins Sigmund Freud in emphasizing biological factors alongside psychological issues. His is a very broad approach.
In the prologue, Stone links psychiatry to religion: “in early society, both the understanding of the mind and the healing of its troubles were the province of religious adepts” (p. xi). Telling and agreeable anecdotes illustrate each of the world's major religions, except for Islam, which is not mentioned. The history of psychiatry proper is presented in six parts.
The Early Period, 100 BCE to the 15th century, covers the “long and winding road from the Old Testament to early Christianity” and the Middle Ages to the Inquisition in 5% of the pages. Part two, one fourth of the text, deals with the gradual evolution of modern psychiatry in the revolutionary rumblings of the 16th century, 17th-century empiricism, and the 19th-century “rise of rationality.” Five chapters present 19th-century contributions in the major Western countries. All of this covers well-traveled ground in a clear, lucid, and essentially familiar manner.
Almost three quarters of the text is devoted to the 20th century. Stone is aware of the paradox and the pitfalls in writing “contemporary history.” Being so close to, and even a participant in, the evolution of the field presents a quandary in the evaluation of recent and contemporary contributors and of the long-term significance of proximate developments. A longer time perspective would significantly reduce this predicament. Yet it is precisely in Stone's presentation and discussion of our passing century that the unique and usefu