Both mysticism and the new psychology are techniques for transforming hidden, introspective knowledge into public language. The mystics had communicated the inner presence of the divine through the body. In the new psychology of religion, the sacred—which had once stood outside the individual—was relocated within the field of memory. The new psychologists tried to reveal the lost or subliminal inner life of man, but in place of hidden processes of growth and ideas obscured from the waking consciousness, the new psychologists substituted a body of knowledge constructed through statistical techniques and experimental investigation. The new psychology based its appeal to pedagogy on a presentation of the child as a complex of historical forces demanding expert interpretation and control. The most straightforward of these forces, the individual's habits, had long been a concern of British psycho-physiologists, who presented habit as a mechanism through which action and emotion could be physically inscribed upon the nerves.

This chapter explores the tension between different ways of knowing the past and the conflicting understandings of selfhood entailed in them. It is a conflict, which is sustained by different conceptualisations of death. These different conceptualisations determined both the form of the historical object and the imagined shape of the historian's insight. Christ emerged as a historical character in the Christologies of the nineteenth century through reference to his carnal limitation. His being and consciousness were portrayed as entities bounded in the kenosis by death. Similarly, the authority of the historical text was itself dependent on an implicit understanding of the limits of the historian's self. Within the new professional discipline of history, interpretations only became acceptable if they could demonstrate that the interpreted object was somehow insulated from the infective or partisan concerns of the interpreter.

This chapter describes the conflict between the opposed visions of the relationship between history and identity. It argues that it was the appearance of new forms of religious narrative and theological argument in early nineteenth-century Europe which made possible the emergence of the modern understanding of history, authority, narrative and identity. Over the past three decades, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and literary theorists have all produced fine works making competing claims for the origin of this new form of deep subjectivity. This chapter also explores how new forms of historical enquiry has opened up new ways of imagining the self. The rise of historical criticism moved in tandem with a new theological understanding of the nature of Christ and man, making selfhood move from being simply oppositional to be seen as somehow unnatural or pathological.

The twentieth-century Pentecost, the Welsh Revival of 1904–5, was the last flourish of mass resistance to the triumph of the historicist perspective. For a brief moment, the new rules of historical and psychological discourse were rent asunder. Their core assumptions, the narrative exclusion of the supernatural and the containment of the sacred within the field of memory, were challenged as miraculous events tore apart the fabric of everyday life. The movement began on the edge of industrial Wales, in 1904. It was characterised by charismatic worship and its converts were credited with the establishment of the Pentecostal Churches. The movement's emergence is attributed variously to the power of secret prayers, a conservative reaction to the decline of Welsh culture, and the psychological frustration of the disenfranchised.

In 1917, as World War I was at its height, the gothic novelist Arthur Machen attempted to describe the growing sense of fear and unease that haunted the United Kingdom. He depicted a rootless and invisible emotion, a nameless terror, that moved silently across the land leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Frightened horses, suicidal farmers, and paralyzed children mapped out the emotion's itinerary across the kingdom. Machen's tale of a transformative horror was rooted in a tradition of gothic literature that had been reinvigorated in the late nineteenth century. However, its central device of an epidemic of fear and its disease-like transmission across the population drew upon different sources: the scientific literature on the pathology of collective emotions that served as a precursor for psychiatric epidemiology in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Even without its supernatural overtones, this tale seems curiously remote from contemporary psychiatric epidemiology. The distance between the epidemics of feeling described in those early writings and the organization of contemporary practice is striking. Although there was a large literature on the relationship between mental disease and poverty, there is little attempt to map the movements of affect or read transformations of emotion as an index of social or historical change. Instead such epidemics of feeling were read through the psychological concept of suggestion— as a form of primitive and unconscious communication—anchored in the evolutionary frameworks of crowd psychology and the herd instinct.

By the end of World War II this epidemiological understanding of fear had been transformed. Insecurity, terror, and anxiety were no longer seen as capricious forces but instead understood as environmental conditions that could be defeated through political interventions and social planning. Fear was tamed. It moved from being a fickle and fantastic force to become instead an object of political calculation. Indeed in the wake of the war, it would provide the grounds for a new program of social and material reconstruction. As this chapter will partly show, the architects of the welfare state in the 1940s and 1950s saw their task as the engineering of a society in which individuals would be freed from the pathological anxieties of financial insecurity, unemployment, and homelessness. Aneurin Bevan, widely seen as the architect of Britain's National Health Service, complained that modern lives were wrecked by anxiety.

Introduction: Stress and the Problem of Temporality

Implicit within every model of stress is a particular understanding of time. Stress disorders, in their myriad forms, are variously attributed to the fears and terrors of an anticipated future, the pressure of present circumstances, or traumas arising from events buried deep in the individual's past. They are also associated with temporal experience being connected to the increased velocity of life or its slowing down through long episodes of boredom or sensory deprivation. Psychosomatic medicine, in its various forms and iterations over the past two hundred years, has sustained these different temporalities through reference to a rich armamentarium of psychological and physiological objects—ranging from the practices of “expectant attention” described by nineteenth-century mental physiologists through to the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis that plays a central role in twenty-first-century understandings of the stress response.

The sheer number of concepts deployed in descriptions of the stress response and the broad variety of narratives that these make possible have attracted widespread critical comment from anthropologists, historians, cultural critics, and practicing stress researchers. Stress is derided as a sort of “conceptual glue” that can connect forms of physiological and psychological disturbance to any number of experiences and events. While these criticisms are rich and often provocative it is not my intention to rehearse them again here. Rather, I want to concentrate on how stress disorders have been connected to specific life events and ways in which those connections have been stabilized.