Category Archives: Vol. 4 No. 1

Modernization in Late Qing: Never a Success?

by Jiang Yukun

In high school history textbooks standardized by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese students learn about the prosperity and cultural export of the great Tang Dynasty, the power of the unrivaled Mongolian cavalry of the Yuan Dynasty, and the technological advancements and economic development of the Song Dynasty. However, when the same students turn to the section on the Qing Dynasty, they will only see decline, the consequent Chinese suffering under imperialism, and a loss of sovereignty. This is a common perspective on the Qing Dynasty shared by many Chinese scholars after the rise of China in the last three decades. For example, historian Chen XuLu argues that after the first Opium War, “the Qing Dynasty [was] forced to start modernization under the fire of western guns” (54). However, I argue that scholars should not ignore the active role of the late Qing Dynasty in modernization, particularly with emphasis on educational reform as an essential component of modernization. More broadly, in this essay, I will not focus on the Qing Dynasty’s feudal limitations and failures, but, rather, take a contextual view that Late Qing laid a solid foundation for further modernization. The Qing government, I argue, did not override the educational system by fully adopting Western science, but, rather, made sophisticated political efforts to localize Western science in ways that would nurture well-rounded talents for the country. Furthermore, the Qing government’s retainment of title rewards in the new exam system was a sophisticated move that both encouraged more students to participate in the new education system and stabilized the court.

Incorporation of Western Science into the Curriculum

Scholars, such as Wang Kai, often argue that modernization attempts by the Late Qing Dynasty inherently introduced and strengthened Western imperialism into the Chinese education system. After the First Opium War (1840-1842), the Qing Dynasty started the “self-strengthening movement,” in the hopes of, as Wei Yuan argues, “defeating foreign invaders by learning from their advantages” (qtd. in Ju 101). According to the Chinese standard Textbook of High School History, one of the most essential parts of educational reforms by the late Qing government was sending young students abroad (1). Many scholars have criticized this attempt. Wang Kai, Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, for instance, argues that the educational reform actually aggravated and solidified Western Imperialism in China through “disciplinarized institutionalization of western science.” In particular, Wang uses statistical evidence to show that the vast majority of study abroad students were assigned decent positions in the government later, which helped to “root western Imperialism into feudal Chinese society during the process of educational reform” (5). In this interpretation, Wang suggests that the study-abroad students served as the medium for Western Imperialism.

However, Wang overlooks the complex dynamics of science circulation in the Qing Dynasty. Specifically, I argue that the Qing government made sophisticated political efforts to localize Western science to better suit the needs of educational modernization at that time. To demonstrate this, firstly I will analyze “The Constitution of the Imperial Academy” from The Draft History of Qing, which was the first document on the national educational system by the Qing government. The Constitution reads:

Although the political and educational atmosphere of China and foreign countries were originally different, their advantages should be made use of… [S]ubjects taught in each level of schools should contain Confucian cultivation, classics reading, mathematics, poetry, Chinese and foreign history and politics, physics, chemistry, martial arts. (“The Constitution of the Imperial Academy”)

In other words, the document stipulates that “Confucian cultivation” subjects— such as “classics reading,” “poetry,” and “martial arts”—as well as Western science subjects—such as “politics, physics, [and] chemistry”—should be taught in the new schools. The introduction of Western science did not totally supersede the imperial exam system and traditional Confucian subjects, but, rather, they were combined to co-exist in the same educational system. In particular, those once considered inferior manufacturing subjects, such as physics and chemistry, were given equal status in education for the first time in history. This fact sheds light on the Qing’s philosophy then: that Western science and Confucianism were not considered inherently contradictory to each other, but, instead, they could be applied simultaneously for a better civil education.

Revolution of the Imperial Examination System

In addition to incorporating Western science into the curriculum, the imperial examination system during the late Qing Dynasty also underwent tremendous changes to better select talent for government positions. In the imperial exam system, students in ancient China studied Confucianism, took imperial exams, and received three levels of rewards upon passing—“Xiu Cai,” “Ju Ren,” and “Jin Shi.” These title rewards are analogous to “Bachelor,” “Master,” and “Doctoral” degrees respectively in Western education systems (Pang 41). According to the new education system under the late Qing Dynasty, if a student finished each stage of the new exam system, which included both Confucianism and Western Science, he would receive title rewards that were the same as the old exam system, which only included Confucianism (“The Constitution of the Imperial Academy”). In other words, the Qing government made it so that even if a student chose to take the new Western science education, this student could still obtain the same benefits as his Confucian counterparts.

Traditionally, Chinese scholars criticized this retainment of title rewards. For example, Yaqun Zhang argues in The Institute of High Education Research Journal that the way the Qing government linked education and the system for selecting officials was counterproductive to the modernization process because imperial title rewards led to instrumentalism in education, which prevented “pure-science learning” (4). In other words, Zhang believes students would study to obtain official positions rather than pursue knowledge. Similarly, Wang Yao argues that the presence of title rewards in the new exam system indicates that the Qing government still deemed education more as a method of selecting government officials than a way of equipping individuals intellectually (5). In addition, scholars also find fault with the negative social effects of the new exam system. In journalist Wang YingYing’s paper, she argues that the advent of the new exam system shook the student body and created chaos and disorder in society (Wang 3).

However, such criticism ignores the potential harm brought by a sudden separation between education and the selection of government officials. I argue that it was precisely the retainment of title rewards that shaped a smooth transition in the Qing educational reform. First, the retainment of title rewards encouraged students to make the transition to the new exam system. According to Confucian ideals, “he who excels in learning shall be an official, and uses what he has learned to serve the country” (“The Analects of Confucius”). In other words, students can only serve the country if they excel in learning and receive government positions. Both are indispensable prerequisites for serving the country. Under the old imperial exam system, once a student passed the exam and received the title rewards, he could choose to be a government official and fulfill this Confucian ideal. However, if the Qing Dynasty did not choose to retain title rewards in the new exam system, students would have to choose between sacrificing government positions (and the social benefits associated with them) or the Western science knowledge necessary to equip the country with advanced military defenses. In this situation, students would face a dilemma, in which it would be impossible for them to fulfil the Confucian ideal of serving the country. Therefore, the Qing’s retainment of title rewards was beneficial because it allowed students to achieve the maximal effect of promoting study in the new education system at a time when feudal Confucian notions were deeply rooted in people’s minds. According to Pang, in the first four years, 829 students won title rewards by taking the new exam system, which constituted twenty percent of all title rewards granted in that period (42). The surge from zero to twenty percent within only a four-year period undoubtedly demonstrates the effectiveness of the Qing’s retainment of title rewards. In a nutshell, the retainment of title rewards stimulated more students to study under the new education system.

Secondly, the retainment of title rewards ensured a stable political situation in the Qing Dynasty. As mentioned before, the vast majority of government officials at that time won their positions through title rewards from the imperial exam. If title rewards were to be abolished, a great proportion of government officials would be concerned about the validity of their positions. Under such circumstances, factions might develop between those officials in favor of the new exam system and those who advocated for the old exam system, resulting in an unstable government. However, in the perilous condition of the late Qing Dynasty, what it really needed was cooperation in order to advance the country militarily and defend it. Therefore, I would deem the Qing’s retainment as a strategic concession to maintain political stability in the court. Furthermore, with the increase of students participating in the new education system, the Qing government had a more diverse talent pool for court and could, therefore, better equip itself politically and militarily.

In brief, incorporating Western science into the curriculum and revolutionizing the imperial exam system, to a great extent, exemplifies how the Qing government tailored Western science into its own educational system in a uniquely Qing-way. As Raj Kapil argues in his article, “scientific propositions, artefacts, and practices are neither innately universal nor forcibly imposed on others. Rather, they disseminate only through complex processes of accommodation and negotiation, as contingent as those involved in their production” (9). Kapil implies that as Western science entered Qing society, it was changed and adapted according to the Qing Dynasty’s particular political and scientific needs. In other words, modernization was not forced on China by Western Imperialism, but it rather was actively adopted and integrated by the Qing government through a process of localization and interpretation.

Conclusion

The Late Qing Dynasty exerted elaborate efforts to assimilate Western science into the Qing’s education system in such a way that was both effective and suitable for Qing society at that time. It combined traditional Confucian subjects with Western science subjects to shape well-rounded talents and, therefore, strengthen its military defense. Besides, it intentionally retained title rewards in the new exam system to increase participation in the new education system and stability within the court. With recent changes in attitude towards Qing’s efforts among contemporary Chinese historians, clearly it is high time we justified and re-oriented the critics of the Late Qing Dynasty. The late Qing Dynasty did not have the privilege of following a safe and smooth path of modernization, but had only one burdened with entrenched traditions. With outer threats from Western imperialism and inner social turmoil and instability, the Qing government took the first step towards modernization and laid a solid foundation for future Chinese-modernization processes, particularly in education. In the end, I would claim that modernization in Late Qing was a success built upon all those failures.

Works Cited

Chen, Xulu. “A Small Step in Modernization.” Jin Dai Zhong Guo She Hui De Xin Chen Dai Xie /The Evolution of Modern Chinese Society. Chinese Renmin University Press, 2005, pp.105-120.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evolution and Ethics. The Pilot Press, 1947.

Ju, Jiwu. “Wei Yuan And His ‘Records and Maps of The World.’” Geographical Research, vol. 13, no. 1, 1994, pp. 100-103.

“Key Passages in the Analects of Confucius.” The Analects of Confucius, https://friesian.com/confuciu.htm.

Klein, Thoralf. “Rethinking the Origins of ‘Western’ Imperialism in China: Global Constellations and Imperial Policies, 1790—1860.” History Compass, vol. 10, no. 11, 2012, pp. 789-801.

Kwong, Luke S. K. “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 34, 2000, pp. 663-695. ProQuest,http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/docview/38914987?accountid=12768.

Qian, Zhou. “Chronology of Yan Fu.” Journal of Fujian Normal University, Edited by GuiChun He, vol. 4, 1984.

Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science : Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900. Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2007.

The People’s Republic of China. Dept. of Education censorship. Office of Shanghai High School Textbook Committee. Gao Zhong Li Shi (Di Wu Fen Ce) / High School History (volume 5). East China Normal University Press, 2008.

Pang, Yao. “The Development of the Imperial Examination Degree System in the Late Qing Dynasty.” China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, vol. 6, 2018.

Wang, Kai. “Bending and fitting: Disciplinarized Institutionalization of Modern Science in China During the ‘Treaty Century’.” Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 4, 2017.

Wang, Yao. “A Research On the Reasons of the Abolishment of the Imperial Examination System in the Late Qing Dynasty.” The History Issue, vol. 1, Jan. 2014.

Wang, YingYing. “The Abolishment of Late Qing Imperial Examination System and the Future of Intellectuals.” All About History, 2007.

Yan, Fu. Tian Yan Lun / Theory of Natural Selection. Bei Jing Lian He Chu Ban Gong Si, 2013.

Zhang, Yaqun. “The Belated Imperial Examination Reform of the Late Qing Dynasty: Reasons and Lessons.” The Institute of High Education Research Journal, vol. 8. no. 4.

Zhao, Erxun. “Ren Yin Xue Zhi / The Constitution of the Imperial Academy.” Qing Shi Gao (Juan Ba Shi Er) / The Draft History of Qing (volume 82). Qing History Museum Press, 1927.

Faculty Introduction for “Modernization in Late Qing: Never a Success?”

Read “Modernization in Late Qing: Never a Success?”.

Jiang Yukun’s essay “Modernization in Late Qing: Never a Success?” was written for my Fall 2018 Perspectives on the Humanities course. By re-evaluating a much-maligned institution—the education system of the Late Qing era—Yukun articulates a surprising and counter-intuitive argument. I have to admit I was slightly taken aback when Yukun told me he was undertaking such an ambitious project for his final paper. But through thorough research and careful writing, Yukun crafts a compelling case for the gradualist, hybrid approach of some Late Qing educational and scientific reformers. The essay shows equal adeptness at engaging with scholarly interpretations and analyzing primary sources, which range from nineteenth-century texts to Yukun’s high school textbook. Using carefully structured paragraphs, the essay discusses Late Qing scientific education in light of recent scholarship about the global circulation of scientific knowledge. Ultimately, Yukun’s essay invites us to re-examine not just a specific period in China’s past, but also the very notion of scientific “modernity.”

—Joseph Giacomelli, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Drawing the Boundary between Psychosocial and Biomedical Disorders: The Credibility Contest between Freudianism and Neo-Kraepelinianism in the DSM

Student Essays, Vol. 4 No. 1

Image credit: Jiara Sha

by Ellen Ying

Read the Faculty Introduction.

Introduction

Published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a handbook offering a common language and diagnostic criteria for the classification of mental disorders. The fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-V), which was published in 2013, is now one of the most credible standards of diagnosis used by various social entities, including clinicians, researchers, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and even policymakers and legal systems. In contrast to the prestige of contemporary versions, the DSM did not start to gain authority or receive much attention until DSM-III, which was drastically divergent from the previous two editions, was published in 1980. In this paper, I will examine the changes from DSM-II to DSM-III as well as the historical backgrounds fueling these changes. I argue that the boundary between psychiatry and other professions in the 1960s to 1970s was blurred due to psychiatry’s adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis. In response, a new school of psychiatrists, Neo-Kraepelinianists, changed the DSM so that patient diagnosis was more based on specified symptoms and “mental disorders” were redefined as problems within individuals. In doing so, they successfully distinguished scientific Neo-Kraepelinianism from unscientific Freudianism, thus establishing their own epistemic authority and redrawing the boundary between psychiatry and other professions.

The loss of boundary of American psychiatry

To understand the driving force behind the changes from the DSM-II to DSM-III, I will first explain the ideological trend of American psychiatry in the 1960s and how it blurred the boundary of psychiatry as a scientific profession. The 1960s American psychiatry was dominated by Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives. During the post-World War II period, practitioners and students of psychiatry witnessed how this approach was effective in treating soldiers returning from battlefields with mental disorders and were therefore overwhelmingly passionate about it (Decker 341). They believed that perceivable symptoms of mental illness are mere reflections of people’s underlying psychological dynamics. To interpret and cope with these symptoms, the most effective way is to put them in the context of a person’s personality and life experiences (Mayes and Horwitz 249-250). The widely shared interest among psychiatrists in practicing psychoanalysis made Freudianism the mainstream ideology of American psychiatry at that time.

A direct consequence of the dominance of Freudian psychoanalysis was that psychotherapy, as opposed to medication, became the main treatment for mental illnesses among psychiatrists. Freudian psychotherapy features conversations facilitated by psychoanalysts that are aimed at figuring out and resolving patients’ unconscious mental conflicts. No medical training was required for the practice of psychotherapy. Psychiatrists, whose traditional approach was medication but started using psychotherapy, were still occupying the “professional monopoly” for treating patients as if they were still specialized in medication. In contrast, non-psychiatrists could only be eligible to provide counseling although their practice also focused on psychotherapy (Mayes and Horwitz 255). Practicing the same approach yet being entitled to different authorities, non-psychiatrists such as psychologists, social workers, and counselors began to question the psychiatric authority on treating patients with mental illness.

Meanwhile, the prevalence of Freudianism also led to a widespread engagement among the American psychiatrists in preventative actions for mental health problems. A side note of the Freudian view on the nature of symptoms as symbolic reflections of deeper dynamic processes is that everyone’s mental health condition ranges “along a continuum with health at one end and illness at the other” (Decker 342). There is no one definite boundary between being mentally healthy and unhealthy; all people are constantly facing the risk of having mental disorders. Therefore, psychiatrists started to make efforts to solve “social problems that made for unhealthy and impoverished environments for their patients” and to intentionally find people who had incipient syndromes of mental disorders and treat them before they started to get worse (Decker 342). They were no longer merely interested in the issues inside the clinics and started to strive for finding resolutions for social problems.

When psychiatrists started to practice psychotherapy in a way that required no medical specialty and engaged in non-medical affairs outside of clinics, the boundary between psychiatry and other professions was blurred. Although psychiatrists still claimed themselves as medical professions on the face value by using terms such as “diagnosis,” “patients,” and “treatment,” the biomedical aspect of mental disorders in fact yielded to Freudian psychoanalysis and psychotherapies (Decker 342). Psychiatric practice became essentially the same as non-psychiatric practice, and the field of psychiatry lost its prestige as a medical specialty. Thus, became subject to critiques on its authority on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.

The challenge to psychiatry’s neutrality and scientificity

With medical specialty no longer prominent in the psychiatric practice, medical and social science scholars started to question the epistemic authority of psychiatrists, criticizing their lack of scientificity and neutrality. Critiques finding faults with the scientificity of psychiatry mainly focused on the low reliability of psychiatric diagnosis. Thomas Scheff, a sociologist and also a major critic of psychiatry, for example, pointed out that mental illness was used as “an explanation of the last resort” (qtd. in Mayes and Horwitz 252). He noted that when psychiatrists could not normally explain deviant behaviors, they usually categorized them as mental illnesses even if those behaviors might have causes that can be fixed without any medical treatment. Consequently, the possibility of false diagnosis of mentally healthy people emerged, which was finally revealed by an experiment in a mental hospital. David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and lawyer, conducted a secret experiment to provide evidence for the lack of reliability in psychiatry. He asked people to visit the clinicians in the hospital and to show fake symptoms of having hallucinations. After they were admitted into the hospital, however, they immediately started to act like “normal” people. Regardless, they remained imprisoned in the hospital, with one pseudo-patient being kept for 52 days (Decker 344). From this experiment, Rosenhan successfully gave a powerful punch to the field of psychiatry by revealing that those people who called themselves psychiatrists could not even give a legitimate diagnosis to patients. This shocking picture of psychiatry posed a huge challenge to its scientific authority.

Besides, more deadly to the legitimacy of psychiatry was the practice of Freudian psychoanalysis, which is not value-neutral, but often operated under the guise of objective science. Thomas Szasz, a famous American critic of psychiatry, directly criticized the discrepancy between psychiatrists’ claims and their practices. He commented that although psychoanalytic psychiatrists merely communicated with “patients” through psychotherapy, they still talked “as if they were physicians, physiologists, biologists, or even physicists” by using terms such as “sick patients,” “treatment,” and “hospitals” to medicalize their study (Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: 4). By pointing out this inconsistency between what psychoanalytic psychiatrists do and what they say, Szasz questioned whether Freudian psychiatrists were trying to use seemingly scientific approaches to cover its unscientific essence. Freudian psychoanalysis, without a solid empirical foundation, is very likely to involve therapists’ biases and values. In the attempts of Freudian psychiatrists to fix the problems their “patients” have in living, their own religious and political orientations, as well as attitudes towards related issues such as abortion and suicide, can influence their judgements (Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness 125-126). Their ideas on the patients’ real problems and the proper means to fix them can be substantially colored by their own stances. However, all these were disguised under psychiatrists’ claim to be medical professionals who approach mental illnesses through scientific principles. According to Szasz, his behavior of “imitating medicine” served as a strategy to create a delusion that the field of psychiatry was capable of revealing the truths neutrally and objectively while it in fact could not.

Confining the classification of “mental disorders” in DSM-III

When the reliability and objectivity of Freudian psychiatry faced severe challenges, a group of neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists initiated the changes in the DSM, thus not only leading an ideological reform of the field, but also establishing their epistemic authority. Modelled on the scientific and empirical approach of Kraepelin, a renowned German psychiatrist at late 19th century, neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists asserted that psychiatry should utilize modern scientific methodologies and base itself on empirical scientific research as a branch of medicine (qtd. in Decker 348). They claimed that “the domination of American psychiatry by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking…was responsible for its unscientific character” (Decker 345). Thus, they inserted an evidence-based Kraepelinian tradition in the changes of the diagnostic standards, which was supposed to be more scientific, reliable, and neutral than Freudianism, so that the focus of American psychiatry could be shifted back to a biomedical approach.

The first neo-Kraepelinian change in DSM-III was a structural change emphasizing specific symptoms of mental illnesses as opposed to their etiologies. This is best illustrated by a comparative close reading of one of the diagnoses in DSM-II and DSM-III, “schizophrenia.” In DSM-II, the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia were as follows:

This large category includes a group of disorders manifested by characteristic disturbances of thinking, mood, and behavior. Disturbances in thinking are marked by alterations of concept formation which may lead to misinterpretation of reality and sometimes to delusions and hallucinations, which frequently appear psychologically self-protective. Corollary mood changes include ambivalent, constricted and inappropriate emotional responsiveness and loss of empathy with others. Behavior may be withdrawn, regressive and bizarre. (33)

In this entry, the psychoanalytic authors emphasize the cause of the “disturbances in thinking,’’ namely “alterations of concept formation” that serves the purpose of psychological self-protection, which is an important concept in Freudian tradition. Although it also describes the symptoms of disturbances, hallucinations, corollary mood changes, etc., the manual does not clearly specify what counts as these symptoms and leaves plenty of space for psychiatrists’ own subjective interpretations on patients’ behaviors.

In comparison, the criteria in DSM-III clearly specifies necessary symptoms, conditions, and duration of the symptoms for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. For example, one of the six symptoms is described as “somatic, grandiose, religious, nihilistic, or other delusions without persecutory or jealous content” and the duration has to be “at least six months” (DSM-III 188). Different from DSM-II, which merely mentions delusions, DSM-III specifically points out what kind of delusions a patient has and how long they should exist to be counted as an illness. Also, the language is solely focused on the symptoms without judgements on etiologies. This makes the diagnosis less dependent on psychiatrists’ own subjective perceptions of the symptoms and their interpretations of the causes of these symptoms, but more on a specific set of standards given by the DSM. The new standardized diagnostic criteria was regarded by neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists as a useful way to improve the accountability of diagnosis, and the treatment effect could be reliably tested by empirical research.

Neo-Kraepelinianists’ second important change is the addition of the definition of “mental disorder.” The DSM-III was the first version throughout the history of the DSM that gave a written definition of mental disorder. The term “mental disorder” is defined as “a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that typically is associated with either a painful symptom (distress) or impairment in one or more important areas of functioning (disability)” (DSM-III 363). Also, “when the disturbance [of an individual] is limited to a conflict between an individual and society, this may represent social deviance, …but is not by itself a mental disorder” (DSM-III 363). The significance of this definition lies in the confined scope of the term “mental disorder.” It is only defined as a syndrome associated with distress or disability within an individual, but not a problem of an individual which he/she encounters in daily life with people around, i.e. with society. The distinction between “dysfunction in” and “dysfunction of” an individual, as Kinghorn points out, “distinguishes the mental health disciplines (particularly psychiatry) from nonmedical disciplines which also attend to personal distress and social deviance” (54). In other words, this definition totally confines the object of the expertise of the new psychiatry within an area that necessarily required medication. The settled definition of mental disorders was completely different from the Freudian psychiatry’s blurred realm of psychosocial interest, a part of which would be easily influenced, or be seen as influenced by other non-medical factors. It thus created “a clinical safe space” (Kinghorn 54) for Neo-Kraepelinian psychiatry, where the practice of diagnosis and treatment could not be affected by factors like politics and could be more neutral than the Freudian approach.

Taking together the structural changes of classifications and confined definition of mental disorder, the rationale behind DSM-III was to claim that the mission of psychiatry was to identify symptoms of mental disorders inside patients and to use medicine to alleviate these symptoms. Unlike Freudianism, this new approach made psychiatric diagnosis seem easier to be tested by empirical studies, more reliable, and more etiologically theory-neutral (Kinghorn 49). Although psychiatrists later argue that the ways of classifying and defining mental disorders initiated by DSM-III still do not fully create a value-vacuum “clinical safe space” for psychiatry (Kinghorn 56), nor does psychiatry have an absolutely solid empirical ground (e.g. there is still no empirical evidence supporting a distinctive line of six-month duration for the diagnosis of mental disorders), the goal of DSM-III was not to become absolutely neutral and scientific in the first place. What Neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists tried to accomplish in the changes of the DSM was to appear to, in a relative sense, be more neutral, more reliable, and thus more scientific than Freudian psychiatry. In doing so, Neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists were doing what Gieryn calls “boundary work” of “expansion” (Gieryn 16). By claiming themselves to be more scientific than Freudianism, they tried to establish their own authority on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. During a time when Freudianism was disparaged to its lowest point, it is not surprising that Neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists successfully managed to claim their epistemic authority. The basic principles they laid out in the third version have still been used by the latest version of the DSM, even though they were still not as perfect as the Neo-Kraepelinian psychiatrists imagined them to be.

Conclusion

The changes from DSM-II to DSM-III highlight a history of ideological dynamics within the field of psychiatry. By looking at the specific historical contexts and the ways in which these changes were made, it is not hard to see how the social and professional critiques on the de-professionalization of Freudianism created a convenient environment for Neo-Kraepelinianism to lead the change in the DSM in order to establish their epistemic authority. Like Freudianism, the new diagnostic manual based on Neo-Kraepelinian tradition could not stand a close scrutiny on its scientificity. The ideological framework retains its authority even until now in DSM-V with only minor changes being made. By analyzing how Neo-Kraepelianism established its authority over Freudianism historically, we can see that the field of psychiatry as a branch of science is not only driven by scientific, empirical, and neutral knowledge or methodologies, but is also vulnerable to the influences of ideological conflicts and attempts to gain authority. Psychiatrists should therefore always view their profession critically to fully grasp the hidden dynamics beyond the simple classifications and diagnosis written in an authoritative manual. Only by doing so can the field of psychiatry keep evolving and benefitting society.

Works Cited

Decker, Hannah S. “How Kraepelinian was Kraepelin? How Kraepelinian are the neo-Kraepelinians? — from Emil Kraepelin to DSM-III.” History of Psychiatry, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 337-360.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 2nd ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1968.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3rd ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1980.

Gieryn, Thomas. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility of the Line. Chicago, 1999.

Kinghorn, Warren. “The Biopolitics of Defining ‘Mental Disorders’.” Making the DSM-5: Concepts and Controversies, edited by Joel Paris and James Philips, Springer, 2013, pp. 54-61.

Mayes, Rick, and Allan V. Horwitz. “DSM-III and the Revolution in the Classification of Mental Illness.” Journal of the History of Behavioral Science, vol. 41, no. 3, 2005, pp. 249-267.

Szasz, Thomas. “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Biomedical Ethics and the Law, edited by James M. Humber and Robert F. Almeder, Springer, 1979, pp. 121-130.

—. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York Hoeber-Harper, 1961.

Faculty Introduction for “Drawing the Boundary between Psychosocial and Biomedical Disorders: The Credibility Contest between Freudianism and Neo-Kraepelinianism in the DSM”

Faculty Introductions, Vol. 4 No. 1

Read “Drawing the Boundary between Psychosocial and Biomedical Disorders: The Credibility Contest between Freudianism and Neo-Kraepelinianism in the DSM”.

Ellen Ying wrote the essay “Drawing the Boundary” for my Fall 2018 Perspectives on the Humanities course. Our class examined how the humanities can shape our understanding of science and the role of science in society. In her final research paper, Ellen applied a critical, historical approach to one of her main academic interests, the theory and practice of psychology. Ellen’s essay chronicles and analyzes several important episodes from the recent history of the discipline. Eschewing a simplistic dichotomy between science and non-science, the paper uncovers a story of contentious politics and complex social dynamics. The essay reflects the impressive breadth of Ellen’s research. At the same time, the paper also showcases Ellen’s ability to carry out incisive “close readings” of primary sources – in this case, several editions of the DSM. Lastly, I am impressed by Ellen’s skill and creativity in applying theories such as the notion of “boundary work” to her topic.

—Joseph Giacomelli, Lecturer in the Writing Program