We Have Never Been Therapeutic: Quaker Faith and the Birth of the Asylum

At the 2025 meeting of the Psychology and the Other conference here in Boston, I will present a paper titled “We Have Never Been Therapeutic: Quaker Faith and the Birth of the Asylum”. The paper takes a genealogical view of the origins of the therapeutic ethos by bringing together two threads of inquiry, one historical, one theological.  On the one hand, I consider of the role of the York Retreat, founded by Quakers in 1792, which is credited by historians for establishing the basis for a humane psychiatry and ultimately therapy itself as a curative technique.  On the other hand, I argue that the Quaker humanism that structured treatment at the York Retreat was itself grounded in a Reformation theology of mortification and mysticism in which Christian love plays a central role.  So, my case is that the origins of the therapeutic are tied up with a Quaker adaptation of agape, or Christian love, and of the ecstatic element of that love, which imagines transformation through self-abandonment.