Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / By focusing on the predominance of semi-conscious and unconscious states in both nineteenth-century British literature and psychology, this dissertation outlines the recognizable and multi-faceted relation existing between literature and psychology. Besides their obvious prevalence in sensation novels later in the period, these states, which I call ecstatic states, appeared in many of the most prominent, canonical novels of the nineteenth century. Prominent Victorian psychologists, such as Robert MacNish, John Abercrombie, James Cowles Prichard, and Forbes Winslow among others, connected ecstatic states, including fiction reading, to insanity, since these states exhibited an underlying component of self-loss in which the boundaries of the conscious self--time, will, and identity--dissolved. They were a troubling, yet common phenomenon of the mind that preoccupied the entire spectrum of middle class Victorian intellectual life--businessmen, novelists, literary critics, and psychologists--and these states are still fascinating neuroscientists today. This study shows how the Victorian medical practice of moral management sought to control these states by calling for the regulation and often the confinement of the imagination. What began as a method used solely in the insane asylum came to undergird much of Victorian life, including the many hostile reactions to the addictive and class-leveling powers of the novel. My dissertation emphasizes how certain Victorian novelists not only took up the role of psychologists themselves but also resisted and revised accepted psychology within their novels. Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot reacted in distinctive ways against the oppressive tenets of moral management. My readings of the novels Jane Eyre, Villette, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Mill on the Floss, and Romola show how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination that creates the various forms of mania and becomes ultimately devastating to the self. For these novelists, the dismantling of conscious thought and will, so alarming to the advocates of moral management, formed the crux of personal growth, moral choice, and ethical responsiveness. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

In Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 short story, "Half a Life-Time Ago," Susan Dixon faces a difficult choice regarding her younger brother, who has gone insane after an illness: should she try to care for him at home or commit him to the nearby Lancaster Asylum? Although fictional, Susan's situation highlights an important Victorian debate about the care of the insane and the reformation of public asylums. This debate, and the changes enacted by nineteenth-century asylum reformers as a result of the cultural conversation, brought new attention to the relationship between the mind, the body, and the will as the concept of moral management as a method of treatment for the insane gained popularity. Dr. Samuel Gaskell, Commissioner in the English Lunacy Commission, Supervisor of the Lancaster Asylum, and Elizabeth's brother-in-law, dedicated his career to implementing the tenets of moral management in the institutions within his purview. For proponents like Dr. Gaskell, the moral management method of treatment restored dignity to patients by giving them the responsibility to bring themselves--through self-discipline, labor, and the exercise of will--back to sanity and thus back into the communities from which their illness excluded them. Many who supported asylum reform regarded moral management as a revolutionary tool with the power to restore happiness and peace to individuals, families, and institutions struggling to deal humanely with insanity. Susan Dixon's exploration of the parameters of moral management as a method of treatment for her bother, however, calls its effectiveness into question. Although Susan is an exemplary moral manager and diligently attempts to re-train her brother by utilizing the principles that Dr. Gaskell used to reform Lancaster Asylum, her implementation of moral management causes the destruction of the Dixon household and the physical, social, and mental disintegration of Susan herself. As Susan and her brother demonstrate in what might be regarded as Gaskell's fictional case study of her brother-in-law's beliefs, no amount of moral management can successfully treat insanity, and insisting that such a program might be undertaken by the insane--or by others on their behalf--is woefully miscalculated.

L’émergence de la psychiatrie comme discipline distincte de la médecine somatique, dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle, s’inscrit dans le cadre de la réforme de la législation sur les aliénés, qui conduit à la création de nouveaux asiles publics dédiés au traitement des malades mentaux en Angleterre, dont celui du Comté du Middlesex, à Hanwell, en 1831. L’Asile de Hanwell, situé près de Londres, est un asile pour aliénés indigents, qui fonctionne de manière complémentaire par rapport à des institutions telles que les workhouses – emblématiques de la nouvelle Loi sur les Pauvres de 1834 – dans la prise en charge d’individus qui sont dans l’incapacité de subvenir à leurs besoins. Sous la direction du docteur John Conolly (1794-1866), qui, dès sa nomination à la direction médicale de l’établissement en 1839, met en place une politique de non-restraint (abandon des moyens de contention mécaniques) à une échelle jusqu’alors inédite, l’Asile de Hanwell est explicitement conçu comme un outil dont la fonction première est thérapeutique, dénué de toute intention punitive. L’influence que cet établissement exercera sur les institutions similaires en Angleterre dès les années 1840 contribue à l’optimisme thérapeutique quant au traitement des aliénés qui prévaut alors, et l’asile victorien, en dépit de ses imperfections, se veut un authentique refuge et un lieu de soins. La conception thérapeutique du Dr Conolly s’inscrit dans la continuité du traitement moral défini par le médecin français Philippe Pinel, mais s’inspire également des expériences menées à La Retraite (York), ou à l’asile de Lincoln. Cette thérapie innovante a la particularité de mettre l’accent sur la qualité de l’environnement et du mode de vie des patients, ainsi que sur les distractions diverses qui leur sont proposées : jeux, fêtes de Noël, kermesses, lecture, musique, sport et danse. La logique de soins qui s’applique alors, le moral management, repose sur une thérapie d’occupation. L’originalité de ce traitement sur le plan médical s’accompagne d’une dimension sociale, voire politique. En effet, loin de limiter ses ambitions au strict domaine médical, le Dr Conolly, connu pour son engagement en faveur de l’éducation populaire au sein de la Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, tout autant que pour son soutien au mouvement chartiste, mène un combat permanent, de 1839 à 1852, pour que les patients, hommes et femmes, aient accès à une instruction au sein de l’école de l’Asile, dont la création et le maintien sont loin de faire l’unanimité. Conolly envisage l’éducation comme un élément central, qui va bien au-delà d’une simple distraction pour les malades et représente un véritable outil d’insertion sociale et d’émancipation des classes populaires. Il rejoint en cela une conception owéniste de l’éducation, et l’école de l’Asile de Hanwell copie quasiment trait pour trait l’école de New Lanark telle qu’elle se présentait au début du XIXe siècle. Robert Owen (1771-1858) rend d’ailleurs visite à John Conolly dès sa nomination, au printemps 1839. Étudier l’expérience menée dans cet établissement emblématique sous l’autorité de John Conolly – non sans lien avec les expériences sociales menées par les owénistes – et l’influence que cette expérience a pu avoir par la suite dans le paysage psychiatrique victorien, permet d’analyser le non-restraint dans sa dimension thérapeutique, sociale et politique. L’Asile de Hanwell sera pendant près de trente ans une référence dans le traitement des aliénés, et servira de modèle à bon nombre d’institutions, particulièrement en Angleterre. L’influence de Hanwell s’estompera dans les années 1870, qui verront l’émergence de théories de l’hérédité peu compatibles avec le traitement moral. / The emergence of psychiatry as a separate discipline from general medicine, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was linked to the Lunacy Reform movement (County Asylums Acts) that led to the creation of new public asylums dedicated to the treatment of the mentally ill in England. The Middlesex County Asylum in Hanwell, built in 1831, was one of them. Hanwell Asylum, situated in the western suburbs of London, was a pauper lunatic asylum that operated as a complementary institution to the numerous workhouses – symbols of the New Poor Law of 1834 – taking care of people who were deemed unable to take care of themselves. As soon as he was appointed medical superintendent of the institution, in 1839, Dr John Conolly (1794-1866) implemented a whole new policy of non-restraint, applied on an unprecedented scale, and Hanwell Asylum under his leadership was explicitly and primarily intended to be a therapeutic tool, devoid of any punitive purpose. The influence of Hanwell on similar institutions, from the1840s onwards, contributed to the prevailing therapeutic optimism of the time, and Victorian asylums, despite their defects, were meant to be genuine places of refuge and care. Dr Conolly’s therapeutic methods were coherent with “moral treatment” as defined by French doctor Philippe Pinel, but were also based on previous experiences conducted at the York Retreat or Lincoln Asylum. One of the main features of this pioneering treatment was the special emphasis it placed on the high quality of the patients’ environment and way of life, as well as on the wide range of entertainment offered to them: games, Christmas parties, summer fêtes, reading sessions, music, sport and dancing. The approach favoured in terms of health care, a “moral management” approach, was grounded on the principles of occupational therapy. The originality of this treatment from a medical point of view was reinforced by its social and, indeed, political dimension. From 1839 to 1852, far from limiting his ambitions to a strictly medical field, Dr Conolly – well-known for his commitment to the cause of popular education, as a member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as well as for his support of the Chartist movement – actually kept on fighting for the right of male and female patients alike to receive proper instruction within the asylum school, which remained highly controversial and constantly threatened with closure. Conolly viewed education as a central element, going far beyond a mere distraction for the insane and truly constituting a tool for social insertion and a means of emancipation for the lower classes. His views on education were similar to the Owenite conception of education and the asylum school at Hanwell was a faithful replica of the New Lanark School at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Besides, Robert Owen (1771-1858) came to Hanwell Asylum and visited John Conolly soon after he was appointed superintendent there, during the spring of 1839. Studying the case of this emblematic institution and the experience carried out within its premises under John Conolly’s authority – an experience which may not be unrelated to Owenite social experimentation – and analysing the impact this experience may have had within the Victorian psychiatric landscape in the years that followed, is an invaluable way of understanding the non-restraint movement through its various dimensions: therapeutic, social and political. For nearly thirty years, Hanwell Asylum remained a benchmark in the treatment of the insane, and served as a model for many other institutions, particularly in England. Its influence began receding in the 1870s, with the emergence of theories of heredity that were hardly compatible with the tenets of moral management.

A recent meta-analysis of Anderson and colleagues (2010) shows that violent behavior in computer games promotes violent behavior in real-life and inhibits prosocial behavior. A couple of studies conducted by Greitemeyer and Osswald (2010) lead to the conclusion that helping behavior in computer games furthers helping behavior in real-life. There exist no studies examining the combined effect of violence and helping in computer games, although this combination is typical for violent video games (Anderson et al., 2010). In violent RPGs, a lot of tasks consist of helping someone by using violence. The present study addresses this issue and bridges the current empirical gap by investigating if violent emergency assistance furthers helping behavior and/or violent behavior in real-life. To accomplish that, the role-playing game “Oblivion” was modified to create four different experimental conditions: (1) violent emergency assistance, (2) killing, (3) helping, and (4) treasure hunting. Comparing these conditions, violent emergency assistance seemingly reduces helping behavior in real-life and at the same time furthers violent behavior. The results are in unison with the moral management model (Hartmann & Vorderer, 2010; Hartmann, in press), which is based on Banduras Theory of Moral Disengagement (Bandura, 2002).