Between liberation and constraint

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, psychiatry’s spatial regimes changed drastically. Under the heading of “freer” forms of treatment, agricultural colonies, family care and early discharges signified a more open and permeable asylum system. At the same time, through the system of guarded wards, bed and bath therapies, psychiatric spaces became increasingly medicalised. Using space as an interpretive category, this article addresses the continuum of liberation and constraint from the perspective of medical records. How did the asylum as an ever-changing assemblage of medical staff, administrative rules and material settings answer to certain individual behaviours? What similarities can be discerned to changes in penal carceral regimes? The article stresses the adaptability and flexibility of institutional spatial practices and, via analysis of the trajectories of four patients from institutions in the German state of Württemberg, the asylums’ remarkable ability to create situational permeabilities becomes visible. However, it also becomes clear that overcrowding and cost efficiency were often the driving force behind many patients’ mobilities. Moreover, focusing on medical records and patients’ experiences, medicalisation appears as an ambivalent process of liberation. Although openly visible constraint was reduced, other forms of coercion became more salient.