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

by E. Lunbeck

Overview

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? Here, Elizabeth Lunbeck examines how psychiatry grew to take the whole world of human endeavor as its object.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400844036
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	445
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elizabeth Lunbeck is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Psychiatry between Old and New

2 Professing Gender

3 The Psychiatry of Everyday Life

4 Pathways to Psychiatric Scrutiny

5 Classification

6 Institutional Discipline

7 Woman as Hypersexual

8 Hysteria: The Revolt of the "Good Girl"

9 Modern Manhood, Dissolute and Respectable

10 The Sexual Politics of Marriage

11 Women Alone and Together

Conclusion

Appendix

Note on Sources

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Elizabeth Lunbeck seeks to probe the dynamics and underlying cultural assumptions of psychiatric thought and practice. In a significant way, she lays the foundation for an understanding of the subsequent emergence of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychiatry. Not only will her book be of interest to social and cultural historians, but it will also find an audience among those concerned with gender-relates issues."—Gerald N. Grob, Rutgers University

Grob

Elizabeth Lunbeck seeks to probe the dynamics and underlying cultural assumptions of psychiatric thought and practice. In a significant way, she lays the foundation for an understanding of the subsequent emergence of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychiatry. Not only will her book be of interest to social and cultural historians, but it will also find an audience among those concerned with gender-relates issues.
— Gerald N. Grob, Rutgers University

Editorial Reviews

"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

"[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

"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

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

From the Publisher

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.

The Women's Review of Books - Susan Stanford Friedman

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