19世紀の自殺と精神医学論

Kushner, Howard I., “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Social Thought”, Journal of Social History, (1993), 461-490.
必要があって、19世紀の精神医学と自殺論の関係の研究を読む。私が大学1年生のときに習った「社会学」の授業では、デュルケムの自殺論が社会学に特徴的な視点を打ち出したことが強調されていた。この論文は、むしろ、デュルケムに至る、都市化の精神への影響と自殺の関係を考察する長い歴史を記述している。

In the early nineteenth century numerous European and North American commentators warned that the growth of cities would be accompanied by an assortment of social ills, all of which could be traced to the destruction of traditional social relations. The assertion in 1820 by Etienne Esquirol, the leader of the French asylum movement, that “madness is the disease of civilization” was emblematic of these views. 461.

From the very first, hypotheses about the causes of suicide were tied to sentimental visions of the family and to an ambivalence toward social change. Thus, warnings of nascent suicide epidemics were coupled with nostalgic portraits of rural life. Since the nineteenth century, experts have concluded that the best safeguards against suicide lay in the restoration of traditional values, especially the patriarchal family. 461

Why, asked Voltaire in the Dictionnaire philoshophique (1764), do we have fewer suicides in the country than in cities? The reason, according to Voltaire, was that “in the fileds it is only the body which suffers; in the city it is the mind. The ploughman doesn’t have time to be melancholic. It is, the idle who kill themselves. 462

The secular view, as evidenced by Voltaire, Dumas, and Mercier, contrasted the sheer exhaustion and emotional equilibrium of rural life with the alleged psychological anxiety of urban existence. At bottom, however, both religious and secular assertions that modernity led to suicide were founded on the shared belief that humans were unable to negotiate the variety and choice that urban life offered. By the early nineteenth century, these two strands become so conflated that their differences became difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle.
This merging of religious and secular fears of modernity found its clearest expression in the medical rhetoric of the moral treatment. 463.

Joan Scott’s caveat: statistics are neither totally neutral collections of fact nor simply ideological impositions. Rather they are ways of establishing the authority of certain visions of social order, or organizing perceptions of experience. 476.