Voices from the Asylum

Voices from the Asylum analyses the writings of four female psychiatric patients in France (1850-1920). These women provide articulate descriptions of the experience of psychiatric treatment from the point of view of the patient, which in the historiography of psychiatry has traditionally been sidelined. The book uses psychoanalytical theory to closely analyse the texts, and contributes to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history,by bringing to light an unrecognised writing tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir. It views 'delusional' utterances as meaningful when read as metaphorical representations of real suffering, or compensatory strategies to ensure the survival of the self, in a social contextthat oppressed women who deviated from traditional sex-role stereotypes. Writing by patients constituted an act of resistance prefiguring revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.