Making the Physical Real in the Psychical: How Intoxicants Intervened in the Formation of the Biological Subject in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract This paper explores the formative role of substances of intoxication in the social and scientific establishment of the biological subject in late nineteenth-century Germany. Sourcing the emergence of substances of intoxication as “vital substances” from Brunonianism, this narrative traces their initial significance for Romantic physiology, followed by their rejection from neo-mechanical scientific physiology. Emphasis is placed on late nineteenth-century psychological research on the effects of intoxicants on the mind as the site of a dynamic encounter between theories of the mind and the body, particularly through Kraepelin’s concept of intoxication as model psychosis, and his related research. The biological subject, here, is anti-vitalistic, and, yet, conceptually distinct from neo-mechanism.