| Summary: | "Between 1880 and 1920 in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russia the mind sciences (psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience) began to first take shape. These new demographically applicable studies of the mind were soon integrated into the modern nation-states. In Psychic Empire, Cate Reilly examines how writers explored the increasng presence of a calculable, scientific regulation of mental health. She demonstrates how literary texts revealed the impact of this development on the collective mental landscape, tracing its consequences both for subject formation and in the popular, literary imagination. Reilly focuses on writers whose work offers an account of the psychiatric subject living under a developing psychopolitical regime. She considers the growing divergence between psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin's empirico-statistical methodology and Freud's individualized, language-focused practice. Subsequent chapters follow how a German-Jewish Expressionist play (written by Kraepelin patient Ernst Toller) contested the racialized, proto-fascist aspects of Kraeplin's psychiatric taxonomy and how a Soviet novel by Vsevolod Ivanov sheds light on psychopower's implications for dominant economic systems. Reilly also examines psychopower's new interface with the judicial system via a German transgender memoir tied to a psychiatric legal case (Daniel Paul Schreber), and then turns to a Bolshevik mass spectacle that utilized empirical psychology to catalyze Marxist-Leninist political "consciousness." In discussing the work of these writers, Reilly argues that aesthetic objects are tools to understand mind sciences rather than illustrations of them"--
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