Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (U.C. Berkeley)
And the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)
Justin Suran
U.C. San Francisco, History of Health Sciences
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Psychiatric Experts and the Therapeutic Ethos in the San Francisco Bay Area
In the late 1970s, the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch might have had Berkeley or Marin in mind when he denounced the era's culture of narcissism, including the contemporary popularization of psychiatric modes of thought. Lasch was writing at the end of the Me Decade, but the integration of a psychotherapeutic ethos into the civic culture of the Bay Area began decades before the Age-of-Aquarius hot-tub retreats and hotel-ballroom est workshops. This talk explores some of the deep connections between elite-guided institution-building projects centered in the San Francisco Bay Area and the emergence of a postwar culture of psychotherapy in the 1940s and 1950s.
4:00PM
Monday, September 19
140 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: diana@berkeley.edu
