Prozac on the Couch ：Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs

Publication subTitle ：Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs

Author： Jonathan Metzl

Publisher： Duke University Press‎

Publication year： 2003

E-ISBN: 9780822386704

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780822335245

P-ISBN(Hardback): 9780822330615

Subject： R749.05 phrenotherapy

Keyword： Neuropsychiatry., Psychopharmacology., Psychoanalysis., Gender identity., Medicine -- Mental health.

Language： ENG

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Description

Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch, psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there’s a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of three “wonder drugs”—Miltown, Valium, and Prozac—Metzl explains the surprising ways Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of these drugs.

Prozac on the Couch traces the notion of “pills for everyday worries” from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through psychiatric and medical journals, popular magazine articles, pharmaceutical advertisements, and popular autobiographical "Prozac narratives.” Metzl shows how clinical and popular talk about these medications often reproduces all the cultural and social baggage associated with psychoanalytic paradigms—whether in a 1956 Cosmopolitan article about research into tranquilizers to “cure” frigid women; a 1970s American Journal of Psychiatry ad introducing Jan, a lesbian who “needs” Valium to find a

Chapter

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

One: Introduction: The Freud of Prozac

Two: The Name of the Father, the Place ofthe Medication: A Brief History of Psychiatry,1955-2002

Three: Anxiety, the Crisis of Psychoanalysis,and the Miltown Resolution, 1955-60

Four: The Gendered Psychodynamics ofPharmaceutical Advertising, 1964-97

Five: Prozac and the Pharmacokineticsof Narrative Form, 1994-2002

Six: Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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