Office: 3647 Peel St., Room 211
Phone: 398-6249
Email: allan.young@mcgill.ca

Biography

Allan Young is an anthropologist and the Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine. His current research focuses on the ethnography of psychiatric science, specifically the valorization of (new) diagnostic and therapeutic technologies and the institutionalization of standards of evidence; and the ethnography of psychogenic trauma as a clinical entity and as a subject of laboratory and epidemiological research.

Publications

BOOKS

1995 The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton: Princeton Unversity Press.

This book is simultaneously a history of traumatic memory, based on contemporary reports, and an ethnographic account, based on the author's field research in a Veterans Administration psychiatric unit specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of the memory's characteristic malady, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The discovery of traumatic memory in the nineteenth century challenged ideas about the moral autonomy of the self - specifically the mind's capacity to know and attempt to put into action its beliefs, desires, and intentions. Traumatic memory and the psychophysiological mechanisms on which it is based created a new language of self-deception ("repression" and "dissociation" now made it possible for the mind to keep secrets from itself) and justified the emergence of a new class of medical and moral authorities.

Most of what has been written about traumatic memory and PTSD until now has described these developments from the perspective of clinicians, researchers, and patients who assume that (1) the memory and its disorder are timeless realities, dating back to the dawn of recorded history, and (2) the standards and formal procedures practised by psychiatric science (e.g. psychometrics, randomized and control group experimental research) are external to the formation of these realities. This book's thesis is that (1) traumatic memory and psychiatric science are both historical products, and (2) PTSD is a techno-phenomenon, glued together by the nosological practices, clinical and research technologies, and narratives through which it is identified, treated and represented, and by the social interests, institutions, and moral arguments through which the required clinical and scientific resources are mobilized.

1992 Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, with Charles Leslie, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

ARTICLES

Bodily memory and traumatic memory, in Trauma, Culture, and the Sciences of Memory, M. Lambek and P. Antze, eds. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

1996 Suffering and the origins of traumatic memory, in Deadalus, 125:245-260.

1994 Symptom attribution in cultural perspective, with L. Kirmayer and J. Robins, in Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 39:585-595.

1993 A Description of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder), in Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, Shirley Lindenbaum and Maragaret Lock, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 108-128.

1992 Reconstructing rational minds: Psychiatry and morality in the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, in The Social Construction of Illness, J. Lachmund and G. Stollberg, eds. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 115-124.