Name George Makari Role Historian | Books Revolution in Mind | |
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Education Brown University, Cornell University | ||
On sigmund freud psychobiography with dr gail saltz and george makari
George Jack Makari is a historian, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. He serves as Director of The Institute for the History of Psychiatry and their Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also a Professor. In addition, he is the Director of the Long Term Psychotherapy Clinic, a part of the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. Makari is best known for his work on transference theory, seduction theory, and the history of psychoanalytic communities. Makari's work has been widely reviewed and is very well known among historians of psychoanalysis, particularly his most sustained treatment of Freudian psychoanalytic communities: Revolution in Mind, The Creation of Psychoanalysis. His most recent work is Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.
Contents
- On sigmund freud psychobiography with dr gail saltz and george makari
- Education
- Revolution in Mind
- References
Education
Makari received his bachelor's degree in 1982 from Brown University and his M.D. in 1987 from the Medical College of Cornell University. Makari did his psychiatric residency at Cornell's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan, and then received a fellowship (De Witt Wallace/Reader's Digest Research Fellow) back at the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell's Medical College. In 1997, Makari completed his psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Revolution in Mind
In Revolution in Mind, Makari argues that the creation of psychoanalysis (as both a body of ideas and a movement) can be best understood by focusing on the way psychoanalytics and psychoanalytic communities were created, broken apart, and then rebuilt in the period before World War II. Specifically, Makari declares that early psychoanalytic theory emerged from Sigmund Freud's engagements with French psychopathology, biophysics, psychophysics, and sexology. Accordingly, he writes, Freudian theory was essentially a synthesis, one which quickly drew interest from Freud's contemporaries, many of whom coalesced around him and in the process developed the first psychoanalytic community. However, this community proved fragile.
According to Makari, the period that followed the Nuremberg Congress of 1910 saw a series of schisms, both theoretical and interpersonal, which shattered the Freudian movement and forced early analysts to rethink their work and professional networks. This 'rethinking' resulted in the creation of a variety of new psychoanalytic communities that were more independent of Freud, both conceptually and geographically. These communities placed less emphasis on Freud's personal authority and theories, and instead sought to bind their members with a commitment to shared technique, increased empiricism, and a process of professionalization. Eventually, Makari argues, the rise of fascism led to the destruction of most European psychoanalytic communities, sparking battles for control in the two major psychoanalytic centers that remained: London and New York.