Areas of Research: Human Sciences, Medical Humanities, Psychology & Theories of Mind, Women & Gender Studies
Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of the human sciences, specializing in
the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. Throughout
her career, she has been interested in the conceptual foundations of
these disciplines as well as in the social and cultural contexts in
which they have taken shape and in the critical role they have played in
the making of modernity and the modern self. Her first book, The
Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern
America (1994), examines psychiatry’s transformation from a
marginalized, asylum-based specialty to a thriving—if
contested—discipline endowed with clinical and cultural authority over
not only insanity but also normality, as focused on normal persons as on
the insane. The book was awarded several prizes, among them the John
Hope Franklin Prize and Morris D. Forkosch Prize. With Bennett Simon
she published Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case Notes from an
American Psychoanalysis, 1912 (2003), a study of early analytic
practice. Her latest book, The Americanization of Narcissism (2014)
offers a wide-ranging history of the concept, asking why the question of
narcissism has become so urgent in our culture. It has been awarded the
Courage to Dream Prize of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Lunbeck is also the co-editor of a number of books, among them with
Lorraine Daston, Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago, 2011).
She is currently writing a book on the history of psychotherapy: under
pressure from the challenges of pandemic-era practice, demands for
racial reckoning, and the development of new technologies promising
cheaper means of delivery and wider access, this book poses questions
about the shape of psychotherapy’s future and the fate of the human in
it. She is also working on several smaller projects on the personality
disorders. Lunbeck is an academic program graduate of the Boston
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and holds an MA in Counseling
Psychology.