Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Why Psychiatry Gave up on Freud and Embraced the Brain: What Really Happened and What Really Happened Next

Wed, March 25, 2020
Dinner Program
Anne Harrington (EVENT POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE)

In the 1980s, American psychiatry underwent a rapid pivot away from previously dominant psychoanalytic and social science perspectives and instead embraced an approach focused on drugs, biology, and the brain. The standard understanding is that this happened because, after years of wandering lost in a Freudian desert, the field had finally gained some fundamental new biological understandings of mental illness. Anne Harrington, professor of the history of science, director of undergraduate studies, and faculty dean at Harvard University, refutes that standard understanding and instead urges the search for a new and better understanding of what really happened in the 1980s, not least because choices then have directly shaped the world of mental health care with which we all live today.  

Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, director of undergraduate studies, and faculty dean (head of house) of Pforzheimer House at Harvard University, an undergraduate residential community of 375 undergraduates. She has written widely in the history of psychiatry, brain science, and medical practice, and is the author of four books, including "Reenchanted Science," "The Cure Within," and, most recently, “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (2019). Her courses are some of the most popular at Harvard University.

Professor Harrington's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

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