Owen Davies (Oxford University Press)
IN EARLY 2020, 5G mobile technology got caught up in a conspiracy theory that saw cellphone towers being set on fire across Europe.
This kind of delusional belief has quite a history. A medical note from 1889 reports on the plight of one Henry Staples, who 鈥渇ancies telegraph wires are over his head鈥� and 鈥渢hat messages are being sent to people as to his character鈥�. A year later, Janet Sneddon from Glasgow, UK, told doctors that she had a wire 鈥渃onnecting her to the post office鈥�.
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Both delusions feature in Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the supernatural in the age of the asylum by social historian Owen Davies, who has written extensively about magic 鈥� and also about popular medicine. This is his account of how early clinicians met and dealt with irrational belief.
En route, he builds a cast-iron defence of the asylums established across western Europe in the 1830s. There were abuses, but asylums were also places of compassion and sensitivity, writes Davies, producing 鈥渁n extraordinary cultural space where under one roof prophets, messiahs, the bewitched, and the haunted, wrestled with angels, devils, imps, and witches鈥�.
Growing up imbued with Enlightenment values, doctors such as pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his pupil Sigmund Freud believed the concept of magic was 鈥渁 diseased survival of a benighted mediaeval past鈥�, and that 鈥渕adness鈥� was largely determined by the prevailing values at a given time.
For them, ignorance had spread superstition, superstition had fertilised irrational beliefs and irrational beliefs drove people into mania. Educate people into thinking rationally and mental well-being follows.
But Davies explains how irrational beliefs weren鈥檛 irreconcilable with modernity after all, but simply florid offshoots of rule-of-thumb thinking. Sometimes, we need to quickly spot and trust regularities and patterns without pausing to interrogate them. If we didn鈥檛, life would be impossible.
This has been a humbling lesson for psychology, a discipline that, when it started, imagined the problems and mysteries it confronted could be cleared up in a generation. Thanks to works as insightful as this one, we can better appreciate the early efforts to understand the mind, which enjoys reason, but doesn鈥檛 need reason to be right.
Simon Ings is a writer based聽in聽London
