Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry, and African American Religions
Judith Weisenfeld, PhD
Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion
Princeton University
Abstract: This talk will explore late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind.” It will demonstrate how white asylum doctors drew on works from popular and scientific racial discourse as well as History of Religions scholarship to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and the role of racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Center for Bioethics & Health Law’s Healthcare and Religion Lecture Series