SEEING THE INSANE IN TEXTBOOKS OF ABNORMAL-PSYCHOLOGY - THE USES OF ART IN HISTORIES OF MENTAL-ILLNESS

Pictures in historical chapters of textbooks convey information about the values and assumptions of the authors' professions and the larger culture. We scrutinized 15 recent abnormal psychology textbooks for re productions of art created before 1900. Thirteen works appeared in thr ee (20%) or more textbooks. Overall, these pictures support a ''Whiggi sh'' account of history that celebrates the present and gives a distor ted, incomplete rendering of the past. The 13 pictures tended to depic t the mentally ill as an underclass who are released from their litera l and metaphorical shackles by men who are ''ahead of their time'' in their struggles against prevailing ignorance. The pictures also emphas ized the difference of the mentally ill by presenting a catalogue of s tereotypic visual elements attributed to insanity throughout Western h istory. We argue for the inclusion in textbooks of ''history for the s ake of the past'' as a way of genuinely engaging different ideologies and thereby stimulating interest in our own implicit values and biases .