Psychiatry, Race, and African American Religions in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
FAIN: FEL-257073-18
Judith Weisenfeld
Princeton University (Princeton, NJ 08540-5228)
Research and writing of a book-length study of interpretations of African American religiosity by psychiatrists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This project examines the intersections of psychiatry and racialized understandings of religion in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America and explores the impact on African Americans of the racialized religious framing of "the normal mind." I trace the contours of white psychiatrists' understandings of the role of religion in shaping African Americans' mental states, explore how racialized religious conceptions of the sane and insane influenced court decisions about competency and the treatment of African Americans in mental hospitals. I also consider the construction by police, media, and courts of mental illnesses attributed to the practice of "voodoo" or participation in religious groups outsiders labeled "cults." I argue that racialized ideas about religion were constitutive components of psychiatric constructions of the normal and insane in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Media Coverage
Deemed Unfit for Freedom (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Catherine Zandonella
Publication: Discovery Research at Princeton Magazine
Date: 12/17/2020
Abstract: A profile of my research on race, psychiatry, and African American religions.
URL: https://discovery.princeton.edu/2020/12/17/deemed-un%EF%AC%81t-for-freedom/
A New Book Explores the History of Racialization in Psychiatry (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Emma Wenner
Publication: Publishers Weekly
Date: 11/1/2024
Abstract: "Scholar Judith Weisenfeld explains how U.S. psychiatrists pathologized Black religious belief after the abolition of slavery."
URL: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/96363-a-new-book-explores-the-history-of-racialization-in-psychiatry.html
Author Judith Weisenfeld unpacks historic links between religion, race and psychiatry (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Adelle M. Banks
Publication: Religion News Service
Date: 5/12/2025
Abstract: Q & A with reporter Adelle M. Banks.
URL: https://religionnews.com/2025/05/12/author-judith-weisenfeld-unpacks-historic-links-between-religion-race-and-psychiatry/
Associated Products
Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions 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 on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 10/3/2018
Location: New York University, Program in Religious Studies, Lerner Lecture on Religion and Society
Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions 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 on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 10/9/2018
Location: Dartmouth College, Department of Religion, Orr Lecture on Culture and Religion
Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry and African American Religions
Abstract: As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions 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 on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Date: 04/02/2019
Location: Sacramento State University, Festival of the Arts
Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake (Book)Title: Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake
Author: Judith Weisenfeld
Abstract: In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect.
As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse, psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.
Year: 2025
Primary URL:
https://nyupress.org/9781479829781/black-religion-in-the-madhouse/Publisher: New York University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781479829781
Copy sent to NEH?: No