In the years between 1900 and 1930, American psychiatrists transformed their profession from a marginal science focused primarily on the care of the mentally ill into a powerful discipline concerned with analyzing the common difficulties of everyday life. How did psychiatrists effect such a dramatic change in their profession's fortunes and aims? How did their new cultural authority affect their relationship with their patients?

How did they treat social workers, all of them women, who were striving to develop their own professional identities? In answering these questions, Elizabeth Lunbeck focuses on the revelatory ideas of gender that structured the new "psychiatry of the normal," a field that grew to take the whole world of human endeavor as its object.

Lunbeck locates her study in early twentieth-century Boston, providing a vivid picture not only of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, upon whose patient records she has drawn extensively, but also of the increasingly urbanized society that shaped its goals and practices.

These Boston psychiatrists made strenuous attempts to deal with the treatment of syphilis and with other newly urgent social issues, such as immigration, poverty, delinquency, and drunkenness. More significantly they gained unprecedented entree into the private realm of the home. Lunbeck follows psychiatrists as they turned the problems they identified there - sexuality, marriage, relations between the sexes - into the stuff of their science.

In the process, issues of gender and personal identity assumed a new prominence in psychiatric thought.

Lunbeck's sweeping narrative, in fact, deals not just with the development of psychiatry but with the uncertain and often stormy advent of sexual modernity, a modernity that many have suggested was enabled by psychiatry. The new psychiatry would continue to deal with recognized mental illness, but the question of what and who was normal increasingly would engage the psychiatrist's interest.

As an explanation of how this came to be so, this book will interest students of the history of psychiatry and of science, as well as those readers concerned with gender issues and the development of American culture in general.