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Falsely diagnosing women with mental illness was a scandal in the 1850s - so how did Freud get away with it?

Posted on September 03, 2008

I'm currently enjoying The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - the real-life English country house murder story by Kate Summerscale - and to my delight I've discovered that it contains some wonderful insights into Victorian attitudes to mental illness.We learn, for example, that the Victorians believed madness was generally passed down from the mother, and that the most likely recipient was the daughter. Summerscale writes: Another theory - psychological rather than physiological - was that brooding on one's hereditary taint of madness could itself bring it on. What particularly surprised me the other...

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mental illness , organic