Prozac on the Couch

Psychiatrist and women's studies scholar Jonathan Michel Metzl shows that there's a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Metzl provides a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of several "wonder drugs" from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. In the process, he reveals how Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of "pills for everyday worries." "Prozac on the Couch is a creative, intelligent, and provocative challenge to the notion that biologic psychiatry has replaced psychoanalysis as the dominant therapeutic model in psychiatry."--Delese Wear, New England Journal of Medicine "Full of genuinely fascinating observations...Prozac on the Couch is a thought-provoking and useful book." --Lisa Jervis, Bitch "Prozac on the Couch is a totally fresh and mind-altering work of medical history and cultural criticism that challenges us to think about psychiatric medications in ways that are both uncomfortable and inspiring: in other words, in ways that challenge us to change our points of view about what we swallow and why."--Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary "Jonathan Michel Metzl's book is an original and insightful exploration of the lively cultural meanings he locates in the spaces between the person, the psychotropic drug, the physician, and the neuroscientist."--Emily Martin, author of The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction "Prozac on the Couch combines a bold thesis regarding the persistence of Freudian categories of sexual difference amid the paradigm shift in psychiatry, documentation spanning professional and popular discourses, and lively, clear prose."--Mari Jo Buhle, author of Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis