Recovery oder die Geschichte der psychiatrischen Heilung von ihrem Ende her erzählt?

The introduction to this special issue is a programmatic attempt to historicise the research object of psychiatric ‚cure‘, articulating possible paths of historical analysis and current research desiderata. Psychiatry’s structural, pharmacological and conceptual change after the Second World War is accompanied by the redefinition of therapeutic success. Under the heading of ‘recovery’ many movements gathered that pursue alternative notions of success. Thus, a narrow concept of cure that predominantly follows medical standards has lost its function as an implicit and explicit guideline of psychiatric practice. Starting from this observation, this special issue investigates into the transformation processes of cure during the 19th and 20th century. For this purpose, our introduction maps out cure as a historical object of research, assessing its significance in clinical practice and psychiatrists’ theoretical reflections. After systematising the sparse previous research findings in a literature review and building on the results, we outline some heuristic demarcations from the psychiatric practices of diagnosis, care and prevention.