Critical Psychology Group

Monday 27 February 2006

5.00-6.00pm

GN 101 (Arthur Edwards building, The Green)

Stratford Campus

University of East London

Gail A. Hornstein is Professor of Psychology at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA) and for 2005-2006, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University. Trained as a personality/social psychologist, her recent work has focused broadly on the history of twentieth-century psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (Free Press, 2000; Other Press, 2005), the story of a maverick psychiatrist who pioneered the use of psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients. Unlike most scholars who study mental illness, Professor Hornstein has always been as interested in patients' experiences as in doctors' theories. She has compiled a bibliography of first-person narratives of madness which lists more than 600 titles, and her book in progress, Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness, uses patient experience to radically reconceive fundamental assumptions about madness and mental life.