Elizabeth Lunbeck Research Articles

Book Review: Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism

Book Review: Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. ISBN: 978-0674724860 (Hardback). 367 Pages. $35.00.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Is America becoming more narcissistic? With this question, posed in a short introductory chapter, Elizabeth Lunbeck effectively lures in the reader. It is the same question social critics have been asking - mostly to answer it themselves - with increasing frequency for almost half a century. Lunbeck never answers the question, nor does she attempt to. This is partly because there is no exact science to measure narcissism, and partly because the author's focus is to capture the contradictory and ambiguous nature of narcissism rather than contribute to an already opinionated debate. While most of us spend absurd amounts of time on social media, Lunbeck's thorough and nuanced research shows that this behavior is not necessarily synonymous with an increase in narcissism.Lunbeck, Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, has written a well-researched and highly engaging book on the concept of narcissism that will satisfy both scholars and readers interested in psychoanalysis more generally. The book delicately balances the theoretical with the biographical in its portrayal of the professional and personal feuds between leading psychoanalysts in their efforts to define narcissism and, by extension, the scope and goal of psychoanalysis.The first part of the book, in the Me Decade, explores the revival of the concept of narcissism in the 1970s and then goes on to show how the concept is still being used by social critics and psychoanalysts, albeit with differing meanings and intentions. Part two, Dimensions of Narcissism from Freud to the Me Decade and Beyond, offers an historical overview of how the concept evolved through the twentieth century, focusing in particular on Freud and Freudian theory as well as Heinz Kohut, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst based in Boston. A vehement protector of orthodox Freudianism early in his career, Kohut would eventually revise many of the fundamental teachings of his idol, in particular the concept of narcissism.Already on page one, the author draws the battle lines by juxtaposing Freud's seminal essay On Narcissism: An Introduction, published in 1914, with cultural critic Christopher Lasch's polemic The Culture of Narcissism (1978). Lasch deliberately turned the focus from the individual and the psyche to society in his depiction of a greedy and consumption-fixated society bereft of American core values such as selfreliance, asceticism, and a strong work ethic. Grandiosity, vacillating self-esteem, devaluing of others, seductiveness, manipulation, loneliness: these are some of the keywords Lasch invoked in The Culture of Narcissism, a book that was largely responsible for bringing the concept of narcissism into popular conversation. However, and this is a point I wish Lunbeck had stated more clearly herself, social critics like Lasch were much less concerned with the actual definition of narcissism than its apparent ability to capture in one word the discontent of modern society. Narcissism soon became a blanket term used by social critics to contain all the ills of post-WWII America, among which consumption, abandonment of tradition, and a re-orientation from self-sacrifice towards personal gratification were the most salient.Consumption and individualism might define modern America, but it is not so clear, however, that one should conflate this development with an increase in narcissism. As a matter of fact, most psychoanalytic definitions of pathological narcissism emphasize a compulsion to avoid dependency of any kind, and to the extent that narcissists crave personal gratification, they don't seek it in worldly goods but rather in other people's idolization. …

Elizabeth Lunbeck: The Americanization of Narcissism

Elizabeth Lunbeck: The Americanization of Narcissism

The Americanization of Narcissism by Elizabeth Lunbeck (review)

The Americanization of Narcissism by Elizabeth Lunbeck (review)

Book Review: Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism

Book Review: Elizabeth Lunbeck, <i>The Americanization of Narcissism</i>

AMERICANIZING PSYCHOANALYSIS

The general theme that unites the works to be discussed here is the history of psychoanalysis in America over the past hundred years, particularly during the heyday of its public impact from the 1950s through the 1970s. The broad outlines of this story have been well known for some time. Interesting about the volumes discussed here is the step that each book takes in its own way beyond a narrow focus on Freud and his followers or the institutional history of the psychoanalytic profession to examinations of so-called neo-Freudianism and of the entry of psychoanalytic discourse into American middle- and highbrow popular culture. The question whether, how, or to what extent psychoanalysis became “Americanized” in the course of all this is addressed explicitly in the volume by Elizabeth Lunbeck, and implicitly in the other books under review. In the following I will discuss each volume in turn, pointing to linkages among them along the way.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism

Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism

Elizabeth Lunbeck. The Americanization of Narcissism

Elizabeth Lunbeck. The Americanization of Narcissism

The Americanization of Narcissism. Elizabeth Lunbeck (2014) Cambridge, MA

The Americanization of Narcissism. Elizabeth Lunbeck (2014) Cambridge, MA

The Americanization of Narcissism, by Elizabeth Lunbeck

"The Americanization of Narcissism, by Elizabeth Lunbeck." Canadian Journal of History, 49(3), pp. 534–535

Review of] "Lorraine Daston and Elisabeth Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of Scientific Observation, Chicago, 2011"

Modern philosophy of science, as Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck remark in their introduction to this magnificent volume, usually opposes observation “as the mere registration of data” to experimental intervention as a more “active” mode of research (pp. 3–4). Until recently, this meant that the attention of both philosophers and historians of science was myopically directed to the experimental sciences, occluding the rich and varied history that observational practices have had in natural history disciplines, not only in the early modern period, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. It is only recently, with the rise of so-called “data-driven research” in the sciences, that this long-term trend has come to an end. The volume under review is therefore more than welcome, because it presents a concerted and thought-through effort to come to terms with the history of observation, both as concept and practice, in a wide variety of disciplines and across the ages. As other edited volumes that came out from long-term projects in Lorraine Daston’s department at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin – such as Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2008; co-edited with Michael Stolleis) or Things That Talk: Object Lessons from the History of Art and Science (Zone Books 2004) – this one as well is an astounding achievement in terms of weaving a coherent tapestry out of the infinity of stories one can tell given such a broad epistemic category as “observation”. The first part of the collection of essays under review, consisting of a set of three papers by Katharine Park, Gianna Pomata, and Lorraine Daston, is expository in nature, and covers the thirteen centuries it took for observation to rise to prominence as a widely used term to describe scientific activity. Katherine Park shows that scientific observation was “marginal” to scholastic intellectual life (Park, p. 5), but resists the temptation to reduce the medieval meaning of observatio to its religious sense of exacting observance of monastic rules. Instead, she points out ancient associations with divination, astronomy, and meteorology, which structurally remained at work in the calculation of daily hours for prayer and religious feasts (Park, pp. 21-23). Gianna Pomata picks up the thread were Park leaves it, namely with the emergence of more systematic (and often collective) meteorological and astronomical observational practices in the late medieval period. The rise of observationes as a distinct genre of scholarly literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was connected, according to her, with “new urge to share […] the knowledge of particulars collected in the daily practice” of disciplines such as astronomy, jurisprudence, and medicine (Pomata, pp. 48, 59–60). In contrast to what in this age was characterized as experientia or experimentum, namely the knowledge gained from training or personal experience, observationes had a “community building role” (p. 64). Lorraine Daston, finally, looks at how this genre was then consolidated “into an epistemic category essential for all the arts and sciences” in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how observation and experiment – now in the sense of active interference with natural processes –became coupled as a tightly interlocked pair of complementary categories (pp. 81–82). The rest of the volume, comprising fourteen papers, seems to fall apart, despite the effort that the editors have put in providing short introductions to the sections into which they have grouped them. The reason for this is evident. With the advent of modern science came the carving out of distinct fields of inquiry which eventually took on the form of disciplines in the context of which observation acquired widely different meanings. One would search in vain for a unified answer to the question what “scientific” observation is, as one reviewer of the volume demanded in Isis recently, given that the contributors to this volume present convincing case studies of the use of observation with respect to such different phenomena as the colour of blood (Domenico Bertoloni Meli on Malpighi, Boyle and Hooke), insect paedogenesis (Michael D. Gordin on the Russian entomologist Nikolai Petrovitsch Vagner), Brownian motion (Charlotte Bigg on the French physical chemist Jean Perrin’s attempt to test the reality of atoms), prize movements (Harro Maas on economists Mill, Jevons, and Keynes), or the relation of climate and disease (J. Andrew Mendelsohn on late eighteenth century medicine). What these case studies do convey successfully, however, is just how much natural history there is even to those sciences that like to refer to themselves as “exact”, and conversely, how far removed observation actually is from a passive, unmediated contemplation of nature. Observation, one can learn from this volume, takes as much discipline, mastery of technology and media, and above all patience, as experiments do.

Histories of Scientific Observation (review)

Reviewed by: Histories of Scientific Observation Harold J. Cook Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 460 pp. Ill. $27.50 (978-0-226-13678-3). Recent years have seen a transformation in the aims of the history of science, which now has more room for the histories of related topics, such as medicine. When considering science as something done rather than something thought, all kinds of interactions with nature are fair game, not only those constituted by certain kinds of theories. The volume at hand is a fine example of the current state of the argument, drawing on many sorts of documents to rethink the practice of “observation” and the significance of it for other scientific activities from medieval to contemporary moments in Europe and its colonies. The editors consider their work to be an “epistemic history,” and in that sense it continues to give pride of place to the history of thought. But readers of this journal will appreciate that its outstanding introduction and many of its fine essays bring the examination of human and animal bodies, plants and remedies, and other “medical” topics into the conversation. [End Page 468] In their introduction, Daston and Lunbeck argue that observation is a subject that not only is important but also can be tackled historically. They show that observation, as a means of finding out about the natural world, and even as a self-conscious category, was closely associated with experienced investigation, being separated from and subordinated to “experiment” only in the 1820s. They conclude (clearly stated on pp. 3–5) that as a consequence the history of scientific observation shows how our historical attention has been deeply prejudiced by modern philosophical opinions. For them, history both deconstructs and reconstructs the categories by which we organize our ideas, opening up new vistas. The first three essays—by Katharine Park, Gianna Pomata, and Lorraine Daston—establish the deep history of the subject, examining the rise of the term to a prominent place in European philosophical discourse. Park shows that medieval clerics used the word far more in conjunction with the “observance” of precepts than with looking. The normative sense of observing rules far outweighed any value placed on witnessing and recording natural events. But she also gestures toward the different values imported from Arabic texts, and notes some distinctions between the values of the residents of monasteries and cities. Park finds in the example of the later-fifteenth-century Nuremberg merchant Bernhard Walther (associated with Peurbach and Regiomantanus) a clear interest in recording a series of observations of the heavens. Pomata in her turn shows that something new appeared in the sixteenth century, when the term “observatio” began to appear as a term in the titles of medical books, associated with “experientia” and similar words. The proliferation of the plural form, indicating that carefully noting and writing up the phenomena of bodies had high value, was clear in medical works, although she also indicates the presence of other authorial voices, including legal ones. Her causal suggestions go on to point to neo-Hippocratism as the intellectual source for a new epistemology of collective empiricism. One might also ask about the causal role of alchemy and Paracelsianism, exotic botany and commerce, and other changes in the period, but Pomata makes a persuasive case for a noticeable shift in the production of academic medical literature, and how it became an example to other investigators of nature. Daston follows by describing a change in the eighteenth century, from observation as an epistemic genre to observation as an epistemic category: by about 1750, it had moved from a way of life and a set of techniques to a self-conscious “way of reasoning.” One might say, then, that observation possessed its greatest epistemic authority from the later eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. These three powerful essays provide a fundamental history of ideas framework for observation as a method of scientific practice. The remaining essays, divided into four further sections, present case studies that are mainly focused on more recent periods, written by some of the best current authors. Part 2 explores the relationships between...

Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 460. $75.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper); $7.00–$27.50 (e-book).

Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. <i>Histories of Scientific Observation</i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 460. $75.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper); $7.00–$27.50 (e-book).

&lt;i&gt;The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950 Howard H. Chiang The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950. By Chandak Sengoopta. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 360. $45.00 (cloth). Following Michel Foucault's astute observation concerning the nineteenth-century transfer of the technology of the sexual self from the spiritual realm of pastoral confession to the secular discourse of medical science, historians of sexuality have gone a long way to go inside what he called scientia sexualis and probe the historical relationship between sexuality and science in the past two centuries.1 Notable examples include the work of Steven Angelides on the subject of bisexuality, Bernice Hausman and Joanne Meyerowitz on transsexuality, Jennifer Terry and Vernon Rosario on homosexuality, and Alice Dreger and Anne Fausto-Sterling on intersexuality.2 A relevant corpus of literature has addressed similar issues with a more immediate focus around the locus of the body as a material site of historical interrogation and periodization.3 All in all, it seems that many important works in the field of the history of sexuality have been produced by historians of medicine and the life and human sciences in particular. Chandak Sengoopta's The Most Secret Quintessence of Life typifies the convergence of all these historiographic threads: as a historian of biology and medicine, Sengoopta traces a century [End Page 360] of transformation of the body in concert with how conceptualizations of sex shifted in accordance to the rise and decline of endocrine hegemony in both the laboratory and the clinic from 1850 to 1950. To be more precise, the body that Sengoopta's story seeks to interrogate historically is decisively a "sexual" and, I would add, biologized one. In adopting Lesley Hall's terminology "the sexual body,"4 Sengoopta's definition "includes everything embraced by the notion of the secondary sexual characters: sexual appearance, sexual attractiveness, sexual function, and all that might be related to those attributes" (3). Whereas the relationship between the psyche-soma dimensions of sexuality and the human sciences (psychiatry and psychoanalysis) has been the spotlight of analysis in the works of other scholars such as Ronald Bayer, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Harry Oosterhuis,5 Sengoopta's book takes an alternative approach to the sexual body by historicizing how it had been constructed through the biomedical discourse of glandular science—how it had been "mediated and produced by the internal secretions" (3). Shifting our attention away from the human sciences and toward biomedicine, Sengoopta chronicles a refreshing perspective on the historical relationship between science, medicine, and sexuality in Western culture by bringing into sharper focus less familiar terrains of sex research such as gynecology, physiology, neurology, and biochemistry. Sengoopta's emphasis on biomedicine stems from his interest in demonstrating that at the heart of the historical trajectory he traces concerning how the body was conceived, shaped, and mediated through endocrine science lies something even more fundamental than an argument about sex or sexuality per se: in his words, "The Most Secret Quintessence of Life shows how the gonadal secretions became fundamental to sex and how sex itself became a virtual synonym for life itself" (2, emphasis added). Given its overarching character, this central thesis of Sengoopta's book is certainly verifiable by his methodological approach. Drawing on minimal private correspondences and archival documents, Sengoopta instead synthesizes a meticulous range of scientific and medical publications (114 pages of notes for 213 pages of text) across two continents and disciplinary boundaries, an approach particularly adequate for testing his claim that sex came to be perceived as the essence of life between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. If social history and conceptual history represent two extremes of a continuum, the strengths of this book definitely [End Page 361] lean toward the conceptual history end, although a convincing argument certainly can be made about how medical experts' account of their patients could be treated as evidence of experience and as signposts of social and historical happenings. The general narrative arc of the book can be summarized as follows: since the seventeenth century and before the advent of endocrine science, the nervous system...

Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives. Edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 288. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives. Edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 288. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Science without laws: model systems, cases, exemplary narratives - Edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and N. Norton Wise

Science without laws: model systems, cases, exemplary narratives - Edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck and N. Norton Wise

College Mental Health Since the Early Twentieth Century

Editor: Elizabeth Lunbeck, PhDCho Seung-Hui's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in April 2007 and similar events at Louisiana Technical College and Northern Illinois University in early 2008 have p...

Primitive Madness: Re-Writing the History of Mental Illness and Race

In the view of most historians of psychiatry, knowledge about mental illness is textured by the social and political context in which it arises. Gerald Grob, arguably the doyen of the field, has made this point on a number of occasions, cheerfully reciting Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1860 observation that “‘[t]heoretically [medicine] ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public opinion. But…[there is] a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of the time, than would at first be suspected.’”1 Important works by the likes of Elaine Showalter (gender), Elizabeth Lunbeck (gender), Paul Lerner (class), and Jonathan Metzl (culture), have extended the point, showing how social factors have shaped and directed knowledge about the mind and its disorders. Missing from this large body of work, however, is any consideration of how race has affected the creation of psychiatric knowledge, or shaped the application of that knowledge.

On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

782 A preliminary draft of this paper was prepared for a colloquium at Princeton University entitled ‘Model Systems, Cases, and Exemplary Narratives’, 11 December 1999. I would like to thank Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise for the invitation to contribute and for the reflections of my commentator, Carl Schorske, as well as incisive comments by Anthony Grafton and the late Gerry Geison. Since then, it has benefited from the responses of Lauren Berlant, Martin Kusch, and John Burnham, to whom I’m very grateful. I learned much from a recent conference at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, entitled ‘Kuhn and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, March 2006, organized by Ipek Demir and Kusch, in particular the contributions of Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Kusch, and Simon Schaffer. In the final stages of preparation I received very useful advice from Berlant and the coeditors of Critical Inquiry and an extensive detailed commentary from and email exchange with Kuhn’s son Nathaniel Kuhn (who also shared with me his mother’s, Kay Kuhn’s, memories), for which I’m extremely grateful; late and crucial clarifications I owe to Adam Phillips. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Kassler (1951–2002), with whom I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On Kuhn’s Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm

Family romance, family secrets: case notes from an American psychoanalysis, 1912

This work, which presents an early psychoanalyst's session-by-session notes on a case of hysteria caused by severe sexual trauma and incest, offers a vivid portrait of psychoanalytic practice in the second decade of the 20th century. Accompanying these notes are commentaries by Elizabeth Lunbeck and Bennett Simon that situate the case historically and throw light on the many difficulties that both analyst and patient encountered in the treatment. The book should be of interest to students of the history of psychoanalysis and other psychological therapies, to those interested in the history of women and gender, and to clinicians struggling with the treatment of severely traumatised patients.