The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon : Toward a Political History of Madness / Laure Murat.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murat, Laure, Author.

Contributor:

Bell, D. A. (David A.)

Dusinberre, Deke.

Standardized Title:

Homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Projective identification--France--History.

Projective identification.

Mentally ill--France--History.

Mentally ill.

Mental illness--France--History.

Mental illness.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial-and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from "revolutionary neuroses" and "democratic disease" to the "ambitious monomania" of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry-but of a wholly new sort-The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword

Translator's Preface

Preamble

One. Revolutionary Terror, or Losing Head and Mind

Two. Asylum or Political Prison?

Three. The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

Four. Morbus Democraticus

Five. Reason in Revolt

Postamble

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226025872

022602587X

OCLC:

887802558