Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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.