Elizabeth Lunbeck

Professor of the History of Science in Residence
Elizabeth Lunbeck speaking at microphone during symposium
(617) 496-5226
lunbeck@fas.harvard.edu
Faculty Assistant: Ellen Guarente

On sabbatical academic year 2026-2027.

Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of the human sciences, specializing in the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology.  Throughout her career, she has been interested in the conceptual foundations of these disciplines as well as in the social and cultural contexts in which they have taken shape and in the critical role they have played in the making of modernity and the modern self.  

In The Psychiatric Persuasion:  Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (1994) she examines psychiatry’s transformation from a marginalized, asylum-based specialty to a thriving—if contested—discipline endowed with clinical and cultural authority over not only insanity but also normality, as focused on normal persons as on the insane.   

Romance, Family Secrets:  Case Notes from an American Psychoanalysis, 1912 (2003), written with Bennett Simon, MD, examines the earliest extant record—spanning five years and 300 sessions—of a psychoanalytic treatment in Europe or the US carried out by an pioneering American Freudian. 

The Americanization of Narcissism (2014) offers a wide-ranging history of the concept, asking why the question of narcissism has become so urgent in our culture. 

Lunbeck is the co-editor of four additional books, among them with Lorraine Daston, Histories of Scientific Observation.    

Lunbeck is currently writing a book, The Therapist:  A Short History from Freud to ChatGPT, tracing the long term therapeutic project of disciplining and mechanizing the human in the name of science and exploring the ways in which this project laid the groundwork for the emerging landscape of chatbot therapy. 

Lunbeck holds a PhD from Harvard, is an academic program graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and holds an MA in Counseling Psychology.  She is co-chair of the University Forum of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a board member of PsiAN (Psychotherapy Action Network).   


Books

Americanization of Narcissism Lunbeck book cover

The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Courage to Dream Prize, awarded by the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2014

Family Romance Family Secrets Lunbeck book cover

Family Romance, Family Secrets:  Case Notes from an American Psychoanalysis, 1912, with Bennett Simon, MD (Yale University Press, 2003)

Psychiatric Persuasion Lunbeck book cover

The Psychiatric Persuasion:  Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 1994; paperback 1996)

John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, awarded by the American Studies Association, 1995

Morris D. Forkosch Prize, awarded by Journal of the History of Ideas, 1995

History of Women in Science Prize, awarded by the History of Science Society, 1995

Edited volumes

  • Histories of Scientific Observation, edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (University of Chicago, 2011).  German, Arabic and Spanish translations in preparation
  • Science without Laws:  Model Systems, Cases and Exemplary Narratives, edited by Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise (Duke University Press, 2007)
  • Science, Technology, and Medicine in the 20th Century:  The Difference Feminism Has Made, edited by Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
  • Proof and Persuasion:  Essays on Authority, Objectivity, and Evidence, edited by Suzanne Marchand and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Brepols Publishers, 1996)

Articles on narcissism

  • "The Allure of Trump's Narissism", Los Angeles Review of Books, August 1, 2017
  • Freud, with Introduction by Elizabeth Lunbeck. 2017. The Herd Instinct. Aeon
  • “Narcissism,” in Re-thinking Therapeutic Culture, ed. Timothy Aubrey and Trysh Travis (University of Chicago Press, 2015).   
  • “Heinz Kohut’s Americanization of Freud,” in After Freud Left, ed. John Burnham (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 209-31.
  • “The Narcissistic Homosexual:  Genealogy of a Myth,” in History and Psyche: Psychoanalysis and the Past. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (Palgrave Macmillan, Global Intellectual Histories, 2012), 49-67.
  • “Narcissism:  Social Critique in Me-Decade America,” in Engineering Society, ed. Kerstin Brückweh, Dirk Schumann, et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 198-212.
  • “Empathy as a Psychoanalytic Mode of Observation:  Between Sympathy and Science,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 255-75.
  • “Borderline Histories:  Psychoanalysis Inside and Out,” Science in Context 19 (2006): 151-73. 

Media: Interviews & Podcasts

Recent Courses

Prof. Lunbeck has recently taught the following courses in the department.

Psychotherapy and the Modern Self

How can we understand the appeal of psychotherapy, widely recognized as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, and what does it offer that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not?

The demand for therapy is currently at an all-time high, bolstering its century-long dominance as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, even as it is under sustained attack from critics characterizing it as self-indulgent as well as from platforms that would replace human therapists with chatbots and analysts with algorithms. This course explores the conflicts and controversies that characterize today’s psychotherapeutic landscape, addressing questions concerning its present condition and future prospects. We will look at the development, methods, aims, efficacy, and limitations of a range of psychotherapeutic modalities—among them psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, manualized, evidence-based, and AI-informed treatments as well as family, sex, and group therapies—and explore how each took shape, who it is intended to treat, and how clinicians evaluate its effectiveness. We will examine therapy’s long-overdue, on-going reckoning with racial issues, gendered identities, and access to treatment. We will explore the various modern selves envisioned by psychotherapy, from the highly relational to the independently sovereign. You will leave the course prepared to recognize and evaluate claims regarding therapy’s rationale and impact in a range of sites, from the clinician’s office to the modern workplace to the media, as well as to assess the ways in which happiness, contentment, and satisfaction in life are subject—or not—to therapeutic intervention. Does psychotherapy work, and, if so, how? Do we suffer less and enjoy greater self-knowledge one hundred years after the invention of the talking cures?

Reading Psychoanalysis in Turbulent Times

Freudian thinking has been assimilated into large swaths of our cultural and political life, even as it has been widely declared outdated and outlandish.  Does Freud—and the discipline of psychoanalysis that he founded—still matter?  Is there a place for psychoanalysis in the contemporary social theorist’s toolkit?

This course explores 1) the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking, from Freud’s time to our own, has been shaped by and responded to the political and social turmoil of the long twentieth century; and 2) the enduring utility of some of this thinking vis-à-vis our own tumultuous times.  Each week tacks back and forth between psychoanalytic theory and writings and reflections on our present condition. 

Psychoanalysts in the United States are, at present, bitterly divided on the question of their discipline’s proper remit.  Their divides notwithstanding, psychoanalytic thinking on some of the most intense sources of conflict in our world today is at once powerful and, for the most part, barely visible.  Examining a selection of these issues week by week, we will together use analytic insights to address the common and plaintively put question—why can’t we all just get along? 

Spring, 2026

Psychopathologies of Modern Life

For more than a century, psychological experts (and popular commentators) have explored the relationship between cultural change and individual pathology, arguing that the challenges of modern life are implicated in the emergence of new forms of psychic distress and mental illness. Experts have identified new emotions, dissatisfactions, and disorders, producing an expansive catalogue of modern woes and fashioning a range of remedies. In some cases they have laid blame on civilization and its stresses; in other cases they have found fault in individuals characterized as unequal to the demands of modernity. We start our exploration of this topic by reading Sigmund Freud’s masterwork, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), the locus classicus for the argument that the restrictions of civilization are at odds with human nature—especially what he argues is our innate aggressiveness. We then turn to the personality disorders (narcissism and borderline personality disorder), conditions around which the link between social ills and individual illness was made early in the twentieth century and endures to this day. Pathologies traceable to a purported decline in social cohesion are next: trauma, disorders of attachment, and loneliness, which many argue has now reached epidemic levels. Then we examine pathologies involving society’s impingements on the individual: anxiety, race-based discrimination and violence, burnout, and imposter syndrome. We end by looking at a range of behaviors organized around opting out of modernity, especially among young people. Are they on to something? Does living in modernity take too big a toll on us? If so, how might we envision different ways of being in our world?

Knowledge Production and the University in the Age of AI

Faculty Seminar

At this time of seismic change for the university, and the research systems of which we are a central part, it is hard to find a moment to pause and ask: how should we make knowledge in the future?

Learn More About the Seminar
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