Abstract: The study is devoted to research optics in historical science in the realm of history of psychiatry in the Russian Empire, in the framework of relevant today historiography of modernity. The study presents the main critique of this historiography. Thanks to multiple-actors method and entangled history, genealogy of M. Foucault and transnational approach fundamental questions about how you want to study the process of institutionalization of psychiatry in the Russian Empire and what can be the specificity of the object of study in the framework of these approaches are problematized. In today’s historiographical situation formulated in the Journal Ab Imperio and by a number of other leading historians, confessional and multi-ethnic phenomenon of Nouveau “empire” can no longer be studied in terms of the national unidirectional teleology. This in turn implies the creation of complex, multi-level and wide construct of a specific “imperial” reality that goes beyond national boundaries, where the empires are closely bound, exchanged ideas and confronted each other. Thus, the researcher in such an approach is interested in a network of relationships of such actors and transnational, comparative analysis of their interactions. The researcher proposes to consider the process of formation of scientific knowledge (psychiatry) and professionalization of scientific societies (psychiatrists) in the Russian empire not from the perspective of the traditional institutional history, where the leading role is given to one actor the state as the main organizing force but from the position of a plurality of separate rival and joint teams: emerging psychiatric community, provincial and provincial zemstvos, different medical models of hospitals (for example, a district madhouse and a modern district hospital Kazan, Tomsk, Vinitskaya and others. Transnational approach should pay great attention to “inter-imperial” scientific communities of psychiatrists and international psychiatric congresses, in order to understand how to build an international scientific network and form conventional knowledge of the “science of the soul.” In conclusion, the researcher comes to the idea that it is correct rather to talk about “the institutionalization”, rather than of some singular and universal draft reform of psychiatry in the Russian Empire at the end of XIX century.