Shrinks

Jeffrey A. Lieberman

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, reveals, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth. Here, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity--beginning after World War II--as a science-driven profession that saves lives. It's a history full of fanciful theories--from Franz Mesmer's nineteenth-century notion of "animal magnetism" to the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder as late as the 1970s--and reckless treatments, including "coma therapies" and ice-pick lobotomies. It's also the story of a field divided against itself, torn between mind-focused psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud, whose...