The award-winning writer and scholar, George Makari, M.D. is the Director of Cornell’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College, a member of the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia University, and Visiting Associate Professor at Rockefeller University. His ground-breaking research on the history of psychoanalysis has won numerous awards, including the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Essay Award for most important publication of the year (awarded twice). His research was the impetus for an international conference in 1998.
Makari lectures widely and has delivered honorary lectureships at Yale, Columbia, and Cornell Universities. A leader in his field, he serves as co-editor of Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry and sits on the editorial boards of numerous journals including History of Psychiatry, Psychiatrie, Sciences Humaines, Neurosciences, and Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. He has written for a general audience, including an essay on medical internship that was short-listed for Best American Essays of 2002. Makari’s epic history, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis is forthcoming from HarperCollins in January, 2008.
Revolution in Mind is a definitive, radically new history of Freud, his disciples, and the tumultuous history of the movement that has had a profound impact on the modern world. This authoritative book accounts for the birth, development, and near-death of psychoanalysis in Europe between 1870 and 1945. Deeply illuminating and even-handed, it is organized around two essential questions: how did Freudian theory come together as a body of ideas, and how did these ideas attract followers who then altered, developed, and spread this model of the mind throughout the West? Makari answers these questions in a sweeping, lucid, grand narrative that introduces the reader to fascinating characters and intellectual movements, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten. A groundbreaking, fascinating study, Revolution in Mind will be avidly read by all those who want to go beyond polemic, myth and jargon to understand the 20th century’s dominant model of inner life.
A graduate of Brown University and Cornell University Medical College, Makari completed his psychiatry residency at the Payne Whitney Clinic in 1991 and his psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Center in 1998. He was a Lilla Wallace-Reader’s Digest Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College from 1991 to 1994. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.
Advance Praise for Revolution in Mind:
“George Makari has written nothing less than a history of the modern mind. He has uncovered the philosophical, scientific, and historical ideas that revolutionized the way we think about our own mental processes. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and an unprecedented gift for synthesis, he takes his reader on a European journey that begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the cataclysm of the Second World War. There are many characters in this book—a contentious, brilliant, motley, flawed, sometimes comic group of human beings—who together forged the ideas we have inherited. But Revolution in Mind is also a tragedy. It is the moving story of what we lost when the old world went up in flames.
— Paul Auster
“Histories of psychoanalysis have tended to split into idealizing biographies or vituperative denunciations of one man, Sigmund Freud. So tiresome! Revolution in Mind is like the curtain going up on a vast opera with many competing voices, all determined to sing the inner life of humankind. This is a marvelous history which captures the passions and complexities of one of the most determined intellectual efforts of the twentieth-century.”
—Jonathan Lear, Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago