The First World War was the first Western military conflict to witness desertion and symptoms of “madness” in soldiers on a mass level, leading to the use of military psychiatry and courts-martial to stem the flow of soldiers away from the front. In Germany, so-called nervous casualties and deserters took on particular significance during this period, with many psychiatrists and politicians blaming these soldiers for defeat and the ensuing revolutionary upheaval. By contravening standards of the German soldier ideal, they were deemed to have fallen short of national expectations of masculinity, whiteness, health, and sanity, and were cast as a risk to military discipline, public health, and the political order. As a result, psychiatric treatment of “mad,” deserted, or revolutionary soldiers did not always aim to return them to full health but instead sought to address the national security risk they posed. This means that psychiatry functioned not only to achieve medical outcomes, but to address specifically political and national concerns. Beyond merely working as a mechanism to (re)produce social order, psychiatric care more crucially functioned as a technology of security to constitute the sovereignty of the German nation and the German state.
This paper argues that state sovereignty, nationalisms, and psychiatry are deeply imbricated, with specific psychiatric care practices contributing to the constitution of sovereign states. I make this claim by reading Foucauldian literatures on state formation and madness alongside queer and feminist scholarship on the differential production of human subjects. I will analyze these caring practices of statecraft by asking how conceptualizations of the human impact understandings of sovereignty, and how sovereign statehood is produced through material practices of the body. I then proceed to investigate how figurations of danger are made to appear different through feminization, cast as perverse through sexualization, and labelled as fanatical through racialization. While this paper argues that psychiatry plays a significant role in the reproduction of national, sovereign states, the dynamics analyzed here should not be understood as unique. Instead, the case presented in this paper is the particular and contingent expression of a more extensive relationship that can be traced wherever the institutions of psychiatry and sovereign statehood coincide.

I am a second-year PhD candidate in international relations at the University of Sussex. My doctoral research, supervised by Cynthia Weber and Synne Dyvik, is located at the intersection of queer/feminist international and political theory, critical race and disability studies, history, and sociology, and investigates imbrications of care, embodiment, and sovereignty. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which the disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and neurology, (military) justice, and domestic and foreign policy discourses in late Wilhelmine and early Weimar Germany used attributions of „madness,“ „perversion,“ and „fanaticism“ to cohere national collectives.
I hold a BA (Hons) degree in history and sociology from Goldsmiths College, and an MA in political science from Freie Universität Berlin. My doctoral research is funded by studentships from the ESRC and the Sussex School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

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