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In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. Modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity.Looking beyond modernism’s well-studied relationship to psychoanalysis, this book tells the story of the non-Freudian vocabulary for mental illnesses that forms the precursor to today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s, this psychiatric taxonomy grew from the claim that invisible mental illnesses were analogous to physical phenomena in the natural world. Reilly explores how figures such as Georg Büchner, Ernst Toller, Daniel Paul Schreber, Nikolai Evreinov, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal understood the legal and political consequences of representing mental life in physical terms. Working across literary studies, the history of science, psychoanalytic criticism, critical theory, and political philosophy, Psychic Empire is an original account of modernism that shows the link between nineteenth-century scientific research on the mental health of national populations and twenty-first-century globalized, neuroscientific accounts of psychopathology and sanity "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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