Book Review

摘要

At the outset of her study, Stefanie Coché asks why and how people have been committed to psychiatric institutions and what their commitment says about German society in the 1940s and 1950s. In search of answers to these questions, she argues that admissions practices involved the interaction of a variety of actors, each with its own specific claims and jurisdictions. She deploys a power-centred analysis to explore the diversity of agents and historical contexts that were in play on the threshold of psychiatric institutionalisation.