Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism

by Naoko Wake

Overview

Private Practices examines the relationship between science, sexuality, gender, race, and culture in the making of modern America between 1920 and 1950, when contradictions among liberal intellectuals affected the rise of U.S. conservatism. Naoko Wake focuses on neo-Freudian, gay psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal theory of mental illness. She explores medical and social scientists' conflicted approach to homosexuality, particularly the views of scientists who themselves lived closeted lives. In assessing how these dynamics worked to shape each other, Private Practices highlights the limits of the scientific approach to subjectivity and illuminates its strange career in modern U.S. culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813551074
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	03/09/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	282
Sales rank:	767,328
File size:	608 KB

About the Author

Naoko Wake is a member of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science faculty of Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 A Man, a Doctor, and His Patients
2 Illness Within a Hospital and Without
3 Life History for Science and Subjectivity
4 Homosexuality: The Stepchild of Interwar Liberalism
5 The Military, Psychiatry, and "Unfit" Soldiers
6 "One-Man" Liberalism Goes to the World
Notes
Index
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"Wake offers a balanced and penetrating study of Harry Stack Sullivan, one that integrates both his private life and his public career."

Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University - Gerald Grob

"A well-written, tantalizingly ambitious, and rich reading that offers numerous insights into the development of social scientific thought on homosexuality, the new psychiatry, interwar liberalism, private treatment practices at Sheppard-Pratt, and the life of Harry Stack Sullivan."

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

"Private Practices takes up important issues and offers an analysis of Sullivan that will be useful not only to historians of psychiatry and the social sciences but also to philosophers of science, bioethicists, and anyone interested in twentieth-century gender and sexuality."

Journal of American History

"A well-written, tantalizingly ambitious, and rich reading that offers numerous insights into the development of social scientific thought on homosexuality, the new psychiatry, interwar liberalism, private treatment practices at Sheppard–Pratt, and the life of Harry Stack Sullivan."

From the Publisher