Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran
Stanford University Press, 2016, 328 pages
Orkideh Behrouzan’s first ethnographic endeavor, Prozak Diaries (2016), explores a question that has provoked much interest in the Middle East in recent years: what’s with all the talk about depression nowadays? The influence of Western clinical psychiatry seems to traverse language: the …
Commentary and speculation after this election have focused on voters’ motives and emotional states, and, especially in the day or two after the result, why experts didn’t know in advance how this would turn out. Why did public opinion polling skew the way it did? What does this teach us about voting and its psychological and social dimensions? These questions …
Last September, a group of scholars gathered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro for “Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: A Cross-Cultural Workshop”. The event was organized by Clarice Rios, a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Elizabeth Fein, a professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and funded by the …
The The Americanization of Narcissism
Harvard University Press, 2014, 384 pages.
Historians have not handled psychoanalysis very well. The clumsy reductionism of much of the psychohistory movement is usually Exhibit A, though historians such as Dominick LaCapra and Joan Scott have been developing more nuanced ways of using psychoanalytic ideas for History. But the historiography of psychoanalysis has also had …
The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain
2013, Cambridge University Press, 284 pages
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped nearly 50,000 tons of bombs over Britain. In 1940, at the height of these air raids during World War II, the celebrated British poet Edith …
The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy
Cornell University Press, 2013. 280 pages.
In ‘The Pathological Family’, Deborah Weinstein argues that in mid-20th century America, researchers and clinicians developed a new mode of therapy to treat families focusing on structural and relational aspects of family life. In doing so, they implicitly acknowledged …