INTRODUCTION

THE AGE OF NERVOUSNESS

When August Strindberg visited Paris in the 1890s, he was overwhelmed by his sense impressions. The enfant terrible of Swedish intellectual culture asked himself, what is happening to me? Are my nerves undergoing an evolution towards over-sensitivity and are my senses becoming much too delicate? Am I shedding my skin? Am I becoming a modern man?1 Upon entering Paris, Strindberg, a native of the still rather rural Sweden, was entering a new age, the Age of Nervousness, which made him and many other Europeans “lose breath and get nervous”.2 Paris of the 1890s, like other urban metropolises in Europe, was a veritable hotbed of nervous illnesses, the most fashionable of which was neurasthenia, ‘nervous exhaustion’. When Strindberg articulated his feelings and thoughts in the new language of nerves, he was indeed becoming a ‘modern man’. Strindberg was one of the rst Swedes to enter the Age of Nervous- ness and exhibit nervous symptoms that increased people’s distress without making them serious invalids. Or, rather, Strindberg was one of the rst nervous intellectuals in Sweden: while he walked the streets of Paris and wondered what was going on in his nervous system, his working-class compatriots were consulting doctors at the newly-opened Neurological Outpatient Clinic at the Sera mer Hospital in Stockholm. These workers, farmers, artisans, petty of cials and their wives were nervous, depressed, overstrained; their sleep was disturbed; they were plagued by diffuse pains, dizzy spells and headache; and their symptoms could not be explained by reference to any organic illness or lesion.

1 August Strindberg, “Förvirrade sinnesintryck” (1919–20), in Samlade Skrifter Vol. 27: Prosabitar från 1890-talet (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1987), 540. All translations from Swedish to English are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Ibid., 540. Strindberg’s essay was rst published in the French newspaper Le Figaro in the autumn of 1894. 2 introduction

A considerable number of these patients, some of whom were aware of the new epidemic of ‘nervousness’ or ‘weakness of nerves’, were diagnosed as suffering from hysteria or neurasthenia, two grand neuro- ses of the late nineteenth century. As a cultural metaphor, the Age of Nervousness had been inspired by the violent historical events of the time, since both an American president ( James A. Gar eld) and a Rus- sian czar (Alexander II) had been assassinated in 1881, and there had been violent terrorist acts in London in 1883. For a growing number of late nineteenth-century Europeans and North-Americans, the world had become more unpredictable, unstable and nervous.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic

This book examines the history of neuroses in Swedish medicine and culture from 1880 to 1950. These turbulent years comprise a major part of what I would call the ‘Nervous Century’ (1880–1980), since it was a period in western culture during which so-called weak nerves, together with a myriad of diffuse somatic symptoms, haunted count- less people whose ailments were diagnosed as hysteria, neurasthenia, traumatic neurosis, psychoneurosis, psychasthenia, depression, or just plain neurosis. In twentieth-century psychiatry, neurosis and psychosis constituted the two major illness categories: ‘psychosis’ was a generic term for such severe mental illnesses as schizophrenia and manic-depres- sion (the bipolar disorder), while ‘neurosis’ was a generic term for milder mental af ictions, such as neurasthenia, psychogenic depression and psychoneurosis.3 To simplify: if your medicalised symptoms of distress were not so severe that they seriously impaired your mental functioning and social interaction, and you had insight into your own state of mind, then during the period under research you were likely to be diagnosed as suffering from neurosis. What today are called depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder were once labeled as neuroses.

3 For a historical study of these two dichotomies, see Dominic M. Beer, “The Dichotomies: Psychosis/Neurosis and Functional/Organic: A Historical Perspective,” HP 7 (1996): 231–55.