the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Elisabeth Young Bruehl

Designing the History of Psychoanalysis

This lecture took place on October 13th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Dr. Young-Bruehl will talk about how the history of psychoanalysis has been written since the 1950’s, when Ernest Jones’ three-volume biography of Freud appeared to mark Freud’s centenary. Since then, there has been a battle of Freud biographies, many efforts to seize leadership in psychoanalysis with partisan histories, and even an episode in the 1980’s and 1990’s called “The Freud Wars.” To date, there has been very little reflection on what all this construction, deconstruction, and contestation means, for psychoanalysis and for the general culture in America or globally.  Dr. Young-Bruehl will offer her reflections along these lines, but also present a graphic: a timeline of the history of psychoanalysis from 1900 to 2000. This part of her talk will give Cooper Union students an opportunity to reflect on how a complete history can be represented visually, in a reflectively designed educational product.

About Elisabeth Young Bruehl

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has her PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where she was Hannah Arendt’s student –and eventually became her biographer in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982;2006). She has also written a biography of Anna Freud (1988; 2008) and many books in the field of psychoanalysis, including The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996). She has recently retired from her clinical practice of psychoanalysis in New York City and lives now in Toronto where she writes as an independent scholar and co-directs Caversham Productions (“Psychoanalytic Educational Resources”).

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.