Elizabeth Lunbeck

Historian, Author

Nelson Tyrone, Jr Professor of History
Professor of Psychiatry

 

Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe, with allied interests in women and gender, intellectual and cultural history, and the twentieth-century United States. Her newest book, The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014), examines the consolidation of narcissism as a clinical category and as cultural critique, from Freud's time to our own. The book has been reviewed, among other outlets, in the New Yorker, the New Republic, and The Economist. She is also the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton 1994, 1996), which traces psychiatry’s early-twentieth-century transformation from a discipline concerned primarily with insanity to one equally concerned with normality, as focused on normal persons and their problems as on the insane; it was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the History of Women in Science Prize. With the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon she wrote Family Romance, Family Secrets (Yale 2003), which focuses on an earliest surviving account of a psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria. Professor Lunbeck has also co-edited four additional volumes, most recently Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago, 2011) with Lorraine Daston. Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center, among others, have funded her research and writing. She has been named "Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator (2010)" by the International Forum of Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE). With Emily Martin of NYU and Louis Sass of Rutgers, she directs The Psyences Project, a regional seminar on the “psy” disciplines. Lunbeck currently serves as History of Psychiatry editor of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

SOURCE: 

Nelson Tyrone, Jr Professor of History
Professor of Psychiatry

 

Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe, with allied interests in women and gender, intellectual and cultural history, and the twentieth-century United States. Her newest book, The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014), examines the consolidation of narcissism as a clinical category and as cultural critique, from Freud's time to our own. The book has been reviewed, among other outlets, in the New Yorker, the New Republic, and The Economist. She is also the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton 1994, 1996), which traces psychiatry’s early-twentieth-century transformation from a discipline concerned primarily with insanity to one equally concerned with normality, as focused on normal persons and their problems as on the insane; it was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the History of Women in Science Prize. With the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon she wrote Family Romance, Family Secrets (Yale 2003), which focuses on an earliest surviving account of a psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria. Professor Lunbeck has also co-edited four additional volumes, most recently Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago, 2011) with Lorraine Daston. Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center, among others, have funded her research and writing. She has been named "Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator (2010)" by the International Forum of Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE). With Emily Martin of NYU and Louis Sass of Rutgers, she directs The Psyences Project, a regional seminar on the “psy” disciplines. Lunbeck currently serves as History of Psychiatry editor of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

SOURCE:  http://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/elizabeth-lunbeck