The Rise of Psychopower

Ian Ellison reviews Cate I. Reilly’s “Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State.”

By Ian EllisonFebruary 23, 2025

• Literary Criticism

IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM of the late-19th-century Austro-Hungarian empire, everyone studied psychology during the last two years of school. A relatively new discipline at the time, it was seen to be not only part of a rounded education but also an essential foundation for anyone going on to university, regardless of their field of interest. Along with Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, an entire generation of pupils learned about psychology from their teenage years onward.

As Carolin Duttlinger notes in her 2022 book Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture, all of them would have even studied the same 1880 textbook, the Lehrbuch der empirischen Psychologie (Manual of Empirical Psychology), written by Gustav Adolf Lindner, who held the first chair of psychology, pedagogy, and ethics at the Charles University in Prague. Lindner’s theory of the mind holds that we interpret the world through a form of mental assimilation called “apperception.” For Lindner, the point of psychology is to create a stable reality, yet one of his key concerns is what happens when we experience something so radically shocking that it explodes our understanding of the world.

Franz Kafka’s diaries record that his teacher, the polymath Catholic priest Moritz Gschwindt, used Lindner’s textbook in the classroom. In The Trial, which Kafka was working on in late 1914 before abandoning it the following January, there is a fascinating, rarely translated passage that he originally wrote for the first chapter but later deleted. In it, as Duttlinger makes clear, he sketches out almost exactly Lindner’s theory of the mind’s maintaining a stable sense of the world, before breaking off mid-sentence:

Someone, I can’t remember who it was, once said to me, isn’t it strange how when we wake up in the morning generally speaking everything is still in the same place as the night before. It seems that while sleeping and dreaming we were in a state that’s fundamentally different from waking life, and it takes, as that man quite rightly said, a boundless presence of mind or, better, alertness to grasp things, as it were, in the place we’d let go of them the night before. That’s why the moment of awakening is the riskiest moment in the day; once we’ve passed it without having been dragged away from our place to somewhere else, we can be calm for the rest of the day. What conclusions that man—by the way, I’ve remembered who it was, though the name of course doesn’t matter …

The moment we wake up in the morning is so dangerous for Kafka because, as soon as we open our eyes, we have to attune ourselves to the world. Only by being extremely alert to our surroundings are we able to make sure everything is still the same as it was before we fell asleep.

Although this is one of Kafka’s most inspired meditations on the mind’s inner workings, he likely chose to remove it from his original manuscript as it gives away too much of what’s going on in The Trial. As with Kafka’s earlier story The Metamorphosis (1915), the novel begins with its protagonist waking up in the morning. Instead of being able to reconstruct the world as it usually is, Josef K. is interrupted by a guard coming in and arresting him. After that, nothing is ever the same again. Lindner’s theory of psychology suggests, however, that if Josef K. had been a little more alert that morning, then maybe his trial wouldn’t have happened. As Duttlinger has elsewhere argued in a chapter on Kafka and psychology from her 2017 edited collection Franz Kafka in Context (which also reproduces the deleted passage), this alternative opening has enormous implications for the novel as an (albeit incomplete) whole, suggesting that “the reasons behind K.’s trial are not criminological or judicial but psychological—one fatal moment of absent-mindedness which leaves K. forever at the mercy of unfolding events.” That’s not to say The Trial is all just an illusion or a dream, but Kafka’s knowledge of Lindner gives some crucial insight into how Kafka thought about his eventually unfinished novel. He’s more concerned with what’s going on in Josef K.’s head than with what might lie behind oppressive bureaucratic systems or faceless authoritarian institutions.

In 19th-century Imperial Germany, as well as in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, understandings of the mental landscape were continually transformed by the emergence of cutting-edge scientific fields, from clinical psychiatry and empirical psychology to psychophysics and neuroanatomy. These disciplines still exert an immense structuring influence on perceptions of modernist literature today.

For Cate I. Reilly, however, modernist literature is not just created in psychology’s image; rather, she argues in Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State (2024), modernist texts in numerous national and linguistic traditions should be read as critical responses to objective scientific models of the psyche. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, works by many writers—including dramatist and poet Georg Büchner, theater director and dramatist Nikolai Evreinov, writer and journalist Vsevolod Ivanov, neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, judge and schizophrenic autobiographer Daniel Paul Schreber, and expressionist playwright Ernst Toller—historicized the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon. They understood mental illnesses as akin to physical phenomena and sought to interrogate the legal and political consequences of representing mental life on the page and on the stage.

Upending modernist literature’s well-documented relationship to psychoanalysis and paying close attention to key writers often left out of Anglocentric discussions of modernist culture, Psychic Empire traces the roots of current accounts of psychopathology in 19th-century research on mental health of national populations. In the process, Reilly traces the development of non-Freudian taxonomies and vocabularies of psychological illness that would become a precursor to today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Indeed, they emerge over the book’s seven substantial chapters as “a source for troubling one of the most outwardly unassailable components of evidence, knowledge, and truth: measurement.” In this regard, the rewards of Reilly’s interdisciplinary approach are manifest. After all, as Mieke Bal wrote in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1978), cited as of one of the epigraphs to Psychic Empire, “classification […] is not a self-serving aim for the literary scholar. Its use is instrumental: only when classification helps achieve greater insight into the phenomena constituting the classes is it meaningful in describing the text.”

In its exploration of the intersection of literary and scientific attempts to understand the mind’s inner workings, Psychic Empire weaves a fascinating and detailed narrative that spans diverse locations and literary forms. All the texts under examination share a profound concern for what Reilly terms “psychopower.” Riffing off the Foucauldian notion of biopower, this term proves a useful heuristic, encapsulating “a new technology of knowledge-power and new mode of subjectivation that began in the nineteenth century but has dramatically grown in scope and force since its inception.” It entails, in short, “the mass management of popular mental health through measurement as a new expression of sovereignty in modernity.” The forms of empire evoked by the book’s title, moreover, are not limited to the imperial regimes that dominated the period under discussion. After all, “the issue of representing popular sovereignty was also entangled with a nineteenth-century scientific shift in the representation of the mind.”

Reilly begins her investigation with an analysis of Georg Büchner’s magnificent fragmentary drama Woyzeck (1836), a play whose conceptual origins lie in the 1824 beheading of a man in Leipzig who was convicted of murdering the widow he had been living with. Rather than attempting to divide the mind into quantifiable categories, Woyzeck engages with the tensions between “dualist psychiatry”—which separated the mind and body—and the emerging “materialist” psychiatry that viewed mental illness as a consequence of physical ailment or deformity. For Reilly, Büchner’s play refuses to offer any specific diagnoses, instead providing a critique of the “scientific conflict” unfolding in Europe during this period. The book also plumbs the depths of the intellectual divide that emerged in the late 19th century between clinical psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The case of Freud’s famous patient the Wolf Man illustrates the fundamental differences between his psychoanalytic approach and Emil Kraepelin’s psychiatric model, as Reilly reveals. While Kraepelin aimed to paint a collective portrait of mental illness, Freud’s work pushed back against such schematic forms of classification. Nevertheless, as Reilly argues, Kraepelin’s approach to psychiatry, with its emphasis on the quantification of mental states and collective treatment, was a crucial development in forms of psychopower as the clinical management of mental health on a mass scale began to crystalize in the early 1900s.

Reilly moves on to discuss Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), examining how Schreber’s self-diagnosis challenged more traditional views of mental illness. Under Emil Kraepelin’s influence, Schreber contended that his malady constituted a nervous rather than a mental illness, pushing against the established boundaries of psychiatric categorization. Crucially for her narrative of psychopower’s development, Reilly argues that Schreber’s writing proposes that there is a “measurable and provable normal.” His struggle to prove his sanity, while not focused on treatment, reveals the civil and legal implications of mental illness, as well as a hierarchy of gendered biases: to be classified as mentally ill might have resulted in the loss of legal rights, effectively reducing a male citizen’s standing to that of women or children. Ernst Toller’s Masse-Mensch (1920), a dramatic narrative about a woman attempting to spark a mass revolution, also offers fascinating insights into intersections between revolutionary politics and psychopower. Intriguingly, Reilly juxtaposes Toller’s play with Kraepelin’s psychiatric analysis of Toller himself. Kraepelin viewed Toller’s revolutionary actions as symptomatic of “a dangerous plague of hysterical psychopathy sweeping the nation,” which he attributed both to Toller himself and to the broader social context. Toller’s paradoxical position as both an individual and a representative of group pathology reflects the tension between personal and collective identity, a theme that resonates throughout Toller’s play and Kraepelin’s psychiatric reports.

Turning her attention to Vsevolod Ivanov’s 1933 novel U, Reilly reveals the development of a “non-Freudian psychic economy,” in which psychological, economic, and narrative structures intertwine. Ivanov’s novel, she argues, critiques the “evidentiary, mathematized psyche” of Kraepelinian psychiatry, advocating instead a more speculative, psychoanalytic approach. U’s linkage of economic models with psychological theories reflects a fundamental divergence between Freudian and Kraepelinian thought, highlighting a prevailing tension in the depiction of mental processes and the management of the psyche. Reilly’s subsequent reading of Nikolai Evreinov’s The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) likewise offers a provocative take on Soviet mass spectacle. Evreinov transformed the genre of monodrama, which had generally focused on the inner experience of a single individual, by using it to stage what Reilly calls a “representation, built on the principles of coexperiencing, of unified collective consciousness for a larger psychopolitical purpose.” Shared experience of revolutionary history thus forges a single collective consciousness.

Finally, Reilly’s analysis of the unlikely resonances between Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s neural drawings from the late 1880s and Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 film The Headless Woman raises fascinating questions about the intersection of biology, psychology, and narrative in the “neural landscapes of the Argentine Dirty War.” Though direct lines of connection between these works may initially seem negligible, Reilly nonetheless highlights how Martel’s portrayal of head trauma and psychological fragmentation engages with larger questions about the regulation of sanity. By examining the fragmented mental state of Martel’s protagonist after an automobile accident, Reilly underscores the film’s critique of the use of medically validated accounts of sanity as regulatory mechanisms in politically charged contexts.

Reilly’s Psychic Empire offers an eye-opening and mind-expanding account of the myriad ways that literature and psychiatry have shaped modern subjectivity, adopting a refreshingly welcome noncanonical, non-Anglophone focus. The modernist texts Reilly examines in her seven substantial chapters are in many ways dedicated, as she outlines in her rigorous introduction, to “the quantification of mental experience, a population-level conceptualization of psychical life, and a partnership between the systematized classification of mental pathology and a normative definition of mental health.”