FOR 3031:  NORMAL#VERRÜCKT Zeitgeschichte einer erodierenden Differenz

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 419057548

The history of psychiatry is a history of the difference between normality and madness. How-ever, this difference is progressively eroding. On the one hand, with the opening of psychiat-ric institutions and the social integration of inmates, madness is becoming everyday normal-ity; on the other hand, reaction patterns and behaviours such as intoxication, stress or atten-tion deficit are pathologised. The collapse of this basic dichotomy calls the interpretative power of extant historical narratives of psychiatry back into question.This is the starting point and basic assumption of the proposed research group: It does not attempt to track changes in concepts of insanity, but focuses on the erosion of the difference between normal and pathological in dealing with psychic alterity. The overarching goal of the projects participating in the FOR is to mobilize hitherto underexplored tendencies in psychia-try as a resource for contemporary history.This goal will be achieved by a decentralisation of the previous topography of the history of psychiatry. Phenomena cutting through established themes shall come into focus: 1. Actor-constellations involving other professional groups than psychiatrists; 2. Logics and spaces that, besides the conventional institutions and their traditional alternatives, include economical and participatory rationalities, thus revealing other ecologies and artistic interven-tions; 3. Methodical approaches to practices and techniques of interaction and negotiation in the psychiatric field, including the use of media, strategies of communication and of appropri-ation. Through this de-centring of the history of psychiatry, the FOR aims not merely at cata-loguing the conspicuous erosion of traditional categories, but especially at outlining a history of change in the relations with alterity, which challenges the extant historiography. The final aim is to sketch a contemporary history of psychiatry on the model of an anthropology of the present, capable of making the present interpretative schemes of normality/madness amena-ble to historical analysis.In order to include ethnological/ethnographic, historical/sociological, cultural and lit-erary approaches, the research group consists of scholars from different disciplines. At the same time, it keeps a focus on medical history in order to include the reference disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and social work in the research.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg

Projects

• Alterity and Disorder in Psychiatry and Literature since the 1970s (Applicants Borck, Cornelius ;  Schäfer, Armin )
• "Antipsychiatry" and the city. On the interrelation of psychiatry-critical practices, social movements and urban spaces (Applicant Binder, Beate )
• Berlin on drugs. Heroin use in the „Mauerstadt“ between psychiatric reform and AIDS phobia in the 1970s and 1980s. (Applicant Beddies, Thomas )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Fangerau, Heiner )
• Dangerous(ly) insane. West-German forensic psychiatry in the field of opposing flows (1960–2000) (Applicants Fangerau, Heiner ;  Marazia, Chantal )
• in#sane The contemporary history of an eroding difference (Applicant Majerus, Benoit )
• Insane rationalities: Media techniques and protest movements, 1967-1991 (Applicant Hess, Volker )
• Normal#crazy art. Works from a psychiatric context between diagnostics and aesthetics after 1945 (Applicants Rotzoll, Maike ;  Röske, Thomas )
• The "Concerned Self" – Mental Disorder Prevention in the FRG and GDR, 1949-2000 (Applicant Balz, Viola )
• “Women in de-ranged Realities” – Discourses and practices in managing “insanity” in the West German Women’s Health Movement from the 1970s to the 1990s (Applicant Nolte, Karen )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Heiner Fangerau