This volume offers a supra-regional view of how psychiatry developed in Central and Eastern Europe during the long nineteenth century. Case studies from the German lands, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Russian Empire show that the field did not follow a single linear story of medical progress. Instead, it grew through circulation of ideas, local adaptation, and often ongoing negotiation among institutions and actors. The chapters trace psychiatry’s Enlightenment roots in debates on the soul and passions, then follow its legal and institutional consolidation under absolutist and later constitutional regimes. They also examine changing diagnostic and therapeutic practices and the everyday encounters they produced among doctors, patients, clergy, and administrators. Rejecting a core–periphery model, the book presents these regions as sites of conceptual innovation and institutional experimentation. By pairing local specificities with transnational connections, it helps rethink psychiatry’s history as culturally, politically, and socially deeply embedded in nineteenth-century Europe.

Eva Hajdinová is Lecturer of Early Modern History at Institute of History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Her research focuses on the cultural, social, and religious history of premodern western and Central Europe, with particular interest in Protestant minorities and the Enlightenment-era Catholic clergy, both secular and monastic.Tereza Liepoldová is a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences (Institutes of History). She earned a PhD from Charles University. Her work traces medicine and science in the Habsburg Monarchy, with emphasis on state medicine, medicalisation, secularisation, and the interplay of medicine, law, body, and mind.Jaromír Mr.ka is Head of the Prague Branch of the German Historical Institute Warsaw and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on violence, state formation, and everyday life in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, as well as urban, gender, and queer histories.Daniela Tinková is a historian, professor at the Institute of History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, specializing in the cultural and social history of Europe (particularly the Czech lands) in the 18th and early 19th centuries, focused on the Enlightenment and the history of science and medicine.

Introduction
Part I: Emerging Psychological Therapies Before Psychotherapy
Toward a Psychological Medicine of the Soul: Moral and Aesthetic Therapy of Imagination in Michael Alberti and the Stahlian School
Between Body and Soul: Johann Christian August Heinroth and the Multi-Disciplined Origins of Psychiatry at the Turn of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
From Dissociation to Individuation: Discovering the French Connection of Jungian Psychology - Ivana Ry.ka Vajdová
Part II: Psychiatry in the Web of Social Ties and State Structures
Law, Madness, and the State: Forensic Medicine, Anatomical Pathology, and Approach to the Mentally Ill in the Habsburg Monarchy in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century - Tereza Liepoldová
Asylum Bylaws as Instruments of Psychiatric Policy in the Late Habsburg Monarchy - Clemens Arthur Ableidinger
The Role of Catholic Clergy in Caring for the Mentally Ill in the Late Eighteenth Century Against the Backdrop of Medicalization and Professionalization of Psychiatry - Petra Hanáková
Part III: Awkward Diagnoses
Patients Versus Diagnoses? the Creation of Diagnoses in Prague Mental ‘Protoclinic’ in the First Half of Nineteenth Century - Daniela Tinková
“She Prays a Lot of Rosaries and Swears in Between”: Early Psychiatry and Catholicism in Tyrol, 1830–1850 - Maria Heidegger
Trust in Science and Save the Family’s Fortune: Incapacitation Processes as a Space of Negotiation in Late Imperial Russia - Birte Kohtz
Conclusion
Index