The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America

(Paperback)

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In the years between 1900 and 1930, American psychiatrists transformed their profession from a marginal science focused primarily on the care of the mentally ill into a powerful discipline concerned with analyzing the common difficulties of everyday life. How did psychiatrists effect such a dramatic change in their profession's fortunes and aims How did their new cultural authority affect their relationship with their patients How did they treat social workers, all of them women, who were striving to develop their own professional identities In answering these questions, Elizabeth Lunbeck focuses on the revelatory ideas of gender that structured the new "psychiatry of the normal", a field that grew to take the whole world of human endeavor as its object. Lunbeck locates her study in early twentieth-century Boston, providing a vivid picture not only of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, upon whose patient records she has drawn extensively, but also of the increasingly urbanized society that shaped its goals and practices. These Boston psychiatrists made strenuous attempts to deal with the treatment of syphilis and with other newly urgent social issues, such as immigration, poverty, delinquency, and drunkenness. More significantly they gained unprecedented entree into the private realm of the home. Lunbeck follows psychiatrists as they turned the problems they identified there - sexuality, marriage, relations between the sexes - into the stuff of their science. In the process, issues of gender and personal identity assumed a new prominence in psychiatric thought. Lunbeck's sweeping narrative, in fact, deals not just with the development of psychiatry but with the uncertain and oftenstormy advent of sexual modernity, a modernity that many have suggested was enabled by psychiatry. The new psychiatry would continue to deal with recognized mental illness, but the question of what and who was normal increasingly would engage the psychiatrist's interest. As

Reviews

Winner of the 1994 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the Best Book in Intellectual History Winner of the 1995 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association Winner of the 1995 History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science Society "Lunbeck has found a fascinating archive [at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital] and she has read it meticulously... The story of the men and women who transformed psychiatry from a nineteenth-century hodgepodge of moralism, religion, and charlatanism to a twentieth-century human science ... is told here with more detail, more immediacy and more insight than ever before."--The New York Times Book Review "Beautifully written, elegantly conceived... A major contribution to the growing literature on the history of the professions. It will interest not only historians of science but also scholars in a variety of fields who are concerned with issues relating to gender, power, and the rise of sexual modernity."--The Journal of American History "If you like stories, you will like this book, as I do. It's a good read... for its rich depictions of the contradictory modernism of early twentieth-century psychiatry. It offers a feast of telling stories."--Susan Stanford Friedman, The Women's Review of Books "[With] the tools of a historian and the skills of a talented writer, [Lunbeck] ... uses a social context to examine how psychiatrists viewed society and how society shaped the development of psychiatric thought... Her book will be of interest to students and professionals in the field of mental health, as well as to historians, sociologists, and general readers interested in the early 20th century in America... highly readable, informative, and even picturesque in its evocations."--New England Journal of Medicine

Author Bio

Elizabeth Lunbeck is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.