Elizabeth Lunbeck & Barbara H. Rosenwein "Love and Hate in History"

The CIRCUS-funded Anxiety Research Network, the Centre for Medical Humanities, the Department of Literature and the Department of History of Science and Ideas invite you to a double open lecture on the theme "Love and Hate in History".

Elizabeth Lunbeck: "Loving Hate: How psychoanalysts normalized a destructive emotion"

My paper traces how some noted psychoanalysts, starting in the 1930s and 1940s, embraced hate as a necessary and even productive emotion in both their patients and in themselves—and, importantly, toward their patients.  In normalizing hate, I ask, did they minimize its destructive potential?  How has Freud’s self-description as a “good hater” resonated through the history of psychoanalysis?

Barbara H. Rosenwein: "Love: Let me count the ways"

My title is from a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I argue that she was right to imply that there were innumerable ways to love, but she wasn’t quite honest about what they were.  In my lecture I will talk about different kinds of loves, related to and yet defined against one another and therefore (unlike Barrett’s love) quite conflicted.

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Biographies:

Elizabeth Lunbeck is Professor of the History of Science and Chair of the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of the human sciences, and in particular psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has published influential works both on the histories of psychiatric treatments and knowledge, and specifically on the epistemology of these fields.

Barbara Rosenwein is Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago, Department of History and a historian of the middle ages. Her work has established emotions as an object of study in the humanities and created bridges to other disciplines by historicizing contemporary research in neuroscience and psychiatry regarding the biological and social ontology of emotions. Her most recent work is on the long history on anger and love.

Illustration by Open AI.