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/

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

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