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In "re-membering" the atrocities inflicted on her body and those of her comrades in the Nazi concentration camps, the French memoirist Charlotte Delbo avoids the linear time scheme and the metaphors for self that have traditionally defined autobiography as a genre. Instead, her depiction of time is circular, and the depiction of self and other is that of dismembered bodies and fragmented psyches. As conditions for the French political prisoners improved late in the war, numbed emotions thawed and Delbo's group began to recapture their pre-Auschwitz identity by reviving their pre-Auschwitz language. In recording testimonies garnered more than twenty years after the war, Delbo demonstrates that although the women were forever frozen in the time-space continuum of Auschwitz, they were also bonded into something larger than the sum of their once "dismembered selves."

John Howard was an 18th-century English philanthropist who made significant contributions in prison reform. Despite personal tragedy and an oppositional social climate, he became an early promoter of humane treatment for prisoners. Other reformers followed John Howard, making valuable contributions, but many challenges remain in the management of forensic hospitals and prison systems. Howard's legacy is not only the modernization of prison structures and programs, but also the work of numerous worldwide societies and associations that provide services for communities and prisoners.

This investigation of discourse production in Brazil's field of hygienic psychiatry between the years of 1925 and 1934 explores the relations between psychism and human labor, endeavoring to more precisely define the field's boundaries. We have chosen to designate the knowledge and practices which result from the intersection of these two areas as Labor and mental hygiene. My analytical procedure associated elements of Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" and "genealogy of power" (Foucault, 1995; 1990; 1987), while the Brazilian Mental Hygiene Archives served as the resarch source. The latter documents subsidized analysis of the Brazilian Mental Hygiene League's discourses on relations between labor and mental hygiene. Each one of the texts was analyzed with regard to the dimensions of object, concept, enunciation and theory. The study also explores how the authors and agents of this discourse viewed the social reproduction of the industrial labor force and the status quo.

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.

Always an idealist, in his last work Robert Rapoport argues that we can achieve a global ethic in line with the UN Charter and that the inculcation of values must--and does--start in the home. This reviewer, while in sympathy with his aims, considers that the obstacles to agreement about ethical issues also need to be set out.

This investigation sought to examine mental health legislation between 1890-1990 and to appraise their effects on the care and social control of the mentally ill. The research activities included the study and analysis of archival documents, Hansard, newspapers and professional journals. The findings show that those who cared for the mentally ill were subjected to the changes brought in by successive mental health legislation. These changes affected the working condition of the "mental nurse", and the social control and rights of the mentally ill person.

This article examines the frayed relationship between psychology and Holocaust history and its consequences for scholarship, arguing the need for a reconciliation between the fields. The causes for the split are traced in part to a reductionist approach to methodological, conceptual, and moral issues common in psychology, an approach particularly misleading in work on the Holocaust. On the other hand, historians continue to make the subjective motivations of both perpetrators and victims a central concern-an implicitly psychological question. Consequently, implicit (mis)conceptions of psychology affect-distort-long-standing historical debates. Zuckier argues that a misconception of psychological intentionality (unwittingly shared by both opposing sides) has set a wrong historical agenda and led to "fluke-and-freak" accounts of the Holocaust in which the protagonists are alternately said to act out their essential dispositions or to be the victims of their own psychological compulsions and accidental history. The article explores the effects of such conceptions in the study not only of perpetrators and victims, but also rescuers, witnesses, survivors, and their children. It concludes with an appeal for a more differentiated interactional approach.

It is to be presupposed that, the more remarkable psychological characteristics of a saint were, the more they could have contributed to his/her suggestive power. Some recent neurophysiological studies of the human-brain launched the hypothesis that the ecstatic experiences, reported by so many saints, are connected with an electric micro-activity in the temporal lobes, especially the right one. However, it was not always easy to discern a mental illness from the normal variations within the limits of human health.

The overwhelming majority of psychological research on Holocaust survivors follows an idiographic model, which is concerned with studying and understanding individual personalities and how they have been affected by their experiences. Most such publications emphasize pathological characteristics, use psychodynamic theoretical formulations, and ignore criteria of rigorous behavioral science such as reliability, replicability, statistical significance, and safeguards against researcher and subject bias. This article describes a set of alternative research methods in which survivor narratives are randomly sampled and then analyzed according to established protocols. They thus provide quantitative data through means of acceptable scientific rigor. Such approaches can identify reliable, lawful patterns applicable to groups of individuals, and provide a suitable alternative to (not a replacement for) qualitative case or small-group methodology.

Despite the dire circumstances of Jews under Nazi occupation, individuals continued to persevere in their efforts to maintain patterns of everyday life. An understanding of daily routines may help us comprehend the reality of the Holocaust, but it may also contribute to the trivialization and banalization of the topic. To counter this danger, the methodology proposed in this article asserts that the individual's struggle reveals another perspective on the state of mind and the social order of various strata of Jewish society under Nazi occupation. Invoking the concepts of Berger and Luckmann in their analysis of understanding the knowledge of everyday life, this article examines the perception of reality of intellectuals in the ghetto.

The article discusses the social and cultural life among the Jewish prisoners at the Skarzysko-Kamienna forced labor camp in central Poland. The activities included organized observances of religious and national customs and creative arts and performances of many kinds. The activities served several functions for the artists and audiences. Whether as a source of income in the struggle for physical survival, or as a psychological escape from the terrible reality of daily life in the camp, or as a unifying element for the fragmented prisoner population, or as a from of political resistance, these social and cultural activities in the camp constitute a singular phenomenon in the history of the Holocaust.

This study examines whether the area of settlement of Jewish concentration camp survivors has an impact on their mental health. Using the Langner mental health index, survivors in Israel are compared with an earlier study of survivors in Montreal. Survivors in Israel score higher than their Montreal counterparts, indicating a greater degree of mental impairment. The suggestion is raised that the numerous memorials and ceremonies commemorating the Holocaust in Israel increase the salience of the survivors' remembrance of the past. These persons may, therefore, be more sensitive to the perpetually tense military situation prevalent in the country, and this may have a deleterious effect on their mental health.

In the past the natural history of disease has shown chains of causation. With the acute diseases, these chains have usually been quite short and easily broken. With the chronic diseases of today, they are far longer and more complicated. Often they involve patterns of behaviour extending over half a lifetime. These patterns are, in turn, determined partly by genetic make-up, partly by family and social environment. The study of these chains necessitated both observation and social survey methods. The breaking of the chains entails the use of propaganda or mass education. By far the most effective educational agent is the spoken word, coming from someone held in respect. The most effective persuader is fear. In social medicine we can seldom plan large-scale experiments. We have to seize such opportunities as life presents. One such opportunity was the creation of the new towns after the war. It was found that good social planning yielded good results in terms of social satisfaction, and infant-mortality and psychosis rates. The prevention of neurosis is a more difficult matter. In administration and in politics resistance to learning from the experience of others is strong. The preventive medicine of the future will necessitate the teaching of common sense applied to human behaviour to extremely resistant audiences.

The American Journal of Public Health has reflected the relationship of public health to the field of mental health over its 75-year history. The earliest volumes of the Journal addressed movements and concerns within public mental health. Quantitative analysis of mental health articles shows wide fluctuations over the last 75 years, probably due to variations in federal funding for mental health research. Topical emphases in the Journal have included social issues and improved mental health, the contributions of epidemiological studies, and technological advances in prevention and treatment.

In the decades immediately following World War II a strong coalition of professionals and reformers emerged to shape agendas, debates, and national policy on caring for the mentally ill. The heterogeneity of mental health problems, the demographic shifts in populations at risk, and the realities of designing and implementing effective programs, were often overlooked; yet profound elements of change have taken place. Components essential for maintenance of function and rehabilitation have yet to be linked into a responsible alternative to long-term or episodic hospital care.