Books in the Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry series

When Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, he began the modern study of a phenomenon that has fascinated human beings for thousands of years. At the same time he opened a new realm, the unconscious mind, to filmmakers and...

"If psychoanalysis is the return of repressed antiquity, distorted to be sure by modern desire, yet still bearing the telltale traces of the ancient archive, then would not our growing distance from the archive of antiquity also imply that we are in...

The psychiatric profession in Germany changed radically from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. In a book that demonstrates his extensive archival knowledge and an impressive command of the primary literature, Eric J. Engstrom...

Noyes documents the evolution of the concept of masochism with scenes in literature from John Cleland's Fanny Hill through Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs and Pauline Reage's Story of 0.

What would bring a physician to conclude that sterilization is appropriate treatment for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped? Using archival sources, Ian Robert Dowbiggin documents the involvement of both American and Canadian psychiatrists in...

Rudnytsky explores the dialectical interplay between literature and psychoanalysis by reading key psychoanalytic texts in a variety of genres.

"Electra's story is essentially a tale of murder, revenge, and violence. In the ancient myth of Atreus, Agamemnon returns home from battle and receives no hero's welcome. Instead, he is greeted with an ax, murdered in his bath by his wife...

A significant contribution to our understanding of early twentieth century visual culture and an exploration of how photography shaped the ways in which the great archaeologist of the human mind saw and thought about the world.

The Pathological Family examines how family therapy developed against the intellectual and cultural landscape of postwar America.

When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of...

Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work-part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract-takes us back to the origins of sexology.

Focusing on the history of the Ingutsheni Lunatic Asylum (renamed a mental hospital after 1933), situated near Bulawayo in the former Southern Rhodesia, Surfacing Up explores the social, cultural, and political history of the colony that became...

Recapturing the history of a largely forgotten New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was founded in 1946.