Comparison, Transfer and Histoire Croisée in the History of Psychiatry

Southampton, 3-4 September 2005

The number of comparative historical research projects is increasing - in Britain as well as in Continental Europe. This conference aims at getting together researchers who employ comparative methodologies in the history of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, c. 1800-2000, and provides an opportunity for the dissemination and discussion of individual research project findings.

We would also like to encourage further debate on the value of comparative approaches to historians of psychiatry/psychology/psychotherapy. We are therefore particularly though not exclusively interested in papers that engage with concepts such as comparison, transfert, transfer analysis, transnational history, entangled histories, and histoire croisée, and reflect on their merit in regard to regional, diachronic or inter-'national' perspectives. We will focus on questions such as:
· Are particular comparative approaches really mutually exclusive (such as, for example, 'systematic comparison', as strongly supported by German social historians, on the one hand, and the analysis of transfer/transferts, favoured by French historians since the late 1980s, on the other)?
· What is the value of research restricted to a narrowly national focus, especially in view of the increasing level of globalisation during the course of the modern period?
· What are the limitations of approaches to the history of psychiatry that favour a 'transnational' perspective, Entangled Histories, and histoire croisée? In what ways are they conceptually and methodologically more sophisticated than the more traditional historiographic approaches, and do they indeed adequately recognise individual characteristics, regional and cultural diversities?
· Finally, it needs to be assessed to what extent engagement with questions such as the above is likely to enhance the rigour and scope of scholarship in the field of history of psychiatry/psychology/psychotherapy.