From solitary vice to split mind: Psychiatric discourses of male sexuality and coming of age, 1918–1938∗

I would like to thank the anonymous readers of this paper for their helpful comments and Elizabeth Graham for her suggestions and patience.

Abstract

Early in this century, adolescence began to emerge as a discrete, biologically based and, therefore, ‘natural’ subject category. The psychiatric profession engaged in the discursive production of the adolescent through the identification, classification and use of the psychiatric illness of adolescent insanity. The mental disease of youth, dementia praecox, drew young men into a tutelary relationship with psychiatrists, who were eager to delineate the appropriate strategies for avoidance of the age‐specific mental disease.

Notes

I would like to thank the anonymous readers of this paper for their helpful comments and Elizabeth Graham for her suggestions and patience.