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Histories of family secrecy are often emotionally, morally, and politically ambivalent. They entail fear, shame, pain, and repression, but they also often involve solicitude, tenderness, and degrees of tolerance. This special issue takes secrecy practices as a lens through which to examine the emotionally charged micropolitics of the family and its intertwinements with macropolitical currents, institutional practices, economic patterns, and wider social norms. The present introduction reflects on the key concepts of secrecy and family. In addition, it places the different contributions of the issue in a wider context by outlining some of the main questions and problems related to the historical study of family secrets in dialog with existing literature on the subject.

ABSTRACTThis article is about the complicated intertwinements of state power, bureaucratic practices and the gendered formation of emotions in separation processes. Historians have long argued that 'emotional regimes' aim at regulating the emotional behaviour of different groups of people, and gender historians have demonstrated that marriage is crucial in shaping people's cognitive, social, sexual and economic possibilities in fundamentally gendered ways. This article contributes to these lines of research by suggesting that in order to understand the complex and variable nature of the state and the centrality of emotions to its gendered exercise of power, we need to interrogate the many local everyday interactions between state representatives and ordinary citizens in a variety of contexts. Concentrating on one of the public/private arenas in which these exchanges take place, the article examines separation cases from late nineteenth‐century Denmark. It employs the concept of 'emotional formation' to argue that the state played a central role in shaping the contestants' emotional dispositions in deeply gendered ways. Yet, this was not a top‐down operation, but rather a multi‐vocal process in which the boundaries between appropriate and inacceptable gendered emotional behaviour were a site of contestation.

Through a reading of administrative separation and divorce cases from late nineteenth-century Denmark, this article examines the emotional practices of separating couples interacting with the state bureaucracy. The argument is that, unlike in other European countries where achieving divorce depended on faultfinding, the Danish law, the bureaucratic procedures, and the state officials, who administered them, promoted polite emotional practices of divorce. While some couples easily met these standards, others encountered an emotional frontier and struggled to align their affective behavior with the emotional–legal logic of the law. The analysis shows a delicate dialectic between emotional practices and social class.

The family has long played a key role in the perception, interpretation, and treatment of mental illness across Europe and North America. Yet, historical studies of psychiatry tend to neglect the complex relationship between psychiatric institutions, patients, and their families. Using a Danish nerve sanatorium as a case, this article traces the shifting meanings attached to the family and the home as a potential cause and cure of mental illnesses from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. While the family figured prominently in conceptions of mental illness throughout these decades, the specific interpretations and treatment practices, as well as the degrees of secrecy, altered significantly. From offering discretion and seclusion and focusing on outer, objectively verifiable circumstances regarding family relationships, doctors increasingly emphasized internal psychodynamics between family members and encouraged openness as a path to healing. The findings call for greater scholarly attention to the complicated intertwinements of psychiatric practices, family history, and changing knowledge practices in the shifting historical configurations of experiences of mental illness.

Abstract
The article introduces the methodological concept of emotional echoing to analyze the cultural formation of individual emotions and demonstrates its utility in an analysis of young people's emotional experience of parental divorce in Denmark between 1960 and 2000. Drawing on recent theorizations within the history of emotions, we posit that emotional echoing is a key element in the historical processes through which emotions are configured. Individuals more or less consciously employ collective templates of emotionality to interpret and convey their own feelings, giving shape to experience and subjectivity in the process. We then present a study of a variety of Danish public media to examine how young people interpreted and described the experience of parental divorce. We argue that a new public emotionality emerged at this time and that this impacted young people's experiences. Growing divorce rates, the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, the rising status of children and youth, and the blooming media market all helped spur this change. Echoing each other's tropes, practices, and images, young people emphasized the difficult and painful aspects of the emotional experience of divorce. During the last decades of the century, they increasingly articulated anger toward their parents, but they also more often emphasized "bad conscience" and signaled the importance of regulating one's own emotions to protect one's parents. Through nonmechanical and creative echoing, young people processed their emotions by digesting and contributing anonymously to the public media.

DEBAT: Der er behov for at skabe oversigt over og mobilisere den danske forskningsverden i krisesituationer. Men vi vil advare imod direkte politisk styring, som tidligere forskningsminister Søren Pind efterspørger, skriver en række unge forskere.