The language and ideas of psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are influencing almost all areas of everyday life today from gender relations, to parent-child interactions, to the discourse and treatment of war trauma, discussions of sexuality and of sexual minorities and the treatment and taxonomy of human emotions and mental predicaments. But how did these sciences of the self grew into such influential roles, impacting the lives of men, women and children from the 18th century to today?

In this seminar we will concentrate on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis and explore how they shaped and remade the lives of modern men and women. Using interdisciplinary scholarship from history, critical theory, and psychology topics will include: gender and the birth of modern psychiatry and psychology; the medicalization of gender and ethnic difference; psychology and the history of sexuality; sexology; gender, neurosis and trauma; psychoanalysis, men and women; gender and hysteria; gender, science and anti-Semitism; masculinity, war and shell shock; and gender and the rise of the “Prozac Nation."