“‘A General Revolt in the Name of Soul’: The Mind-Cure and Psychotherapy Movement in America”

Bessette, Matthew D. “‘A General Revolt in the Name of Soul’: The Mind-Cure and Psychotherapy Movement in America.” Diffractions: Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture, no. 1 (2013): Crisicism – The Cultural Discourse of Crisis: 1-36.

Although there are few references to Mary Baker Eddy specifically, the value of this article is Bessette’s analysis of the historical milieu that resulted in the late Victorian era’s “birth of the therapeutic.” Besides Eddy, Bessette taps into the various social, religious and psychosomatic thinkers of this period along with the New Thought and Emmanuel movements, and how they shaped a more unified “whole man” view of mind and body. Women, plagued by nervous illnesses, were helped by these spiritual self-healing methods, finding a sense of control and inner strength in the face of the growing materialism and “artificialism” (6) of an industrialized society and medical orthodoxy. However, in seeking to not upset the harmonious “affliction-free balance within the self” (8), one needed to screen out the larger world, thereby still conforming to the social status quo which reinforced women’s domesticity. Bessette asks if the seeker was overcoming nervous illness through spiritual transcendence, or evading the problem altogether? He further observes that today’s commodification of personal well-being narratives by pharmaceutical, psychotherapy and government experts “denies the very freedom it is supposed to uphold” (24), leaving little space for “a deeper sense of selfhood and moral obligation to even take place” (25).

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ISSN: 2183-2188

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34632/diffractions.2013.937

See also annotations:

“Women Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism” by Alison Piepmeier