Why read The Psychiatric Persuasion?

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

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Psychiatric Persuasion as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Owen Whooley

Author

No list on the dubious history of psychiatry would be complete without a book about psychiatry’s efforts to control women. This is a classic in this regard. Focusing on the first quarter of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Lunbeck shows how psychiatrists, in an effort to assert their relevance and professional authority, brought issues related to marriage, sexuality, and gender into their ambit.

This book is deft in revealing how psychiatrists wielded the power to define normality to pathologize nonconforming women and insinuate themselves into our most intimate spheres. Although the history that Lunbeck recounts is now a century in the…

From Owen's list on psychiatry’s troubled past.