Gail A. Hornstein

Professor of Psychology

Specialization: History of twentieth-century psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis; psychotherapy of psychosis; first-person narratives of madness; psychiatric survivor movement

Trained as a personality/social psychologist, Gail Hornstein has published more than a dozen articles on such topics as conversational style in close relationships; perceptions of masculinity/femininity; the transition from work to retirement; the structuring of identity in midlife women; the ethics of writing about women's lives; the development of quantification in American psychology; and psychology's problematic relations with psychoanalysis. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Library of Medicine, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation. She has been awarded visiting fellowships at the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College; the History of Science Department, Harvard University; Clare Hall, Cambridge University; Magdalen College, Oxford University; and the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She chaired Mount Holyoke's Women's Studies Program for seven years, and was the founding director of the Five College Women's Studies Research Center for its first ten years.

Hornstein's current research is broadly concerned with the history of twentieth-century psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Her biography To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (Free Press, 2000) tells the tale of a pioneering psychiatrist who dedicated her life to treating very disturbed patients. Publisher's Weekly called the book "dazzling and provocative.... a major biography"; it has been translated into Spanish and reviewed in more than two dozen popular and professional publications. Hornstein notes, "One goal of the book is to show that despite the widespread use of somatic treatments—such as medication, electroshock, and lobotomy—psychotherapy can be used to treat even the most severe forms of mental disturbance."

Unlike most scholars who study mental illness, Hornstein has always been as interested in patients' experiences as in doctors' theories. She has compiled a bibliography of first-person narratives of madness, which lists more than 600 titles, and, in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, claimed that "patient memoirs are a kind of protest literature, like slave narratives or witness testimonies." Her current research focuses on the contributions that patients—past and present—have made to our understanding of psychology.

Hornstein teaches First-Person Narratives of Madness; Theories of Personality; Psychology of Women; Seminar in the History of Psychology; and Qualitative Methods.

News Links:

"MHC's Hornstein on Too Much Happiness," Vancouver Sun and Canada.com, February 14, 2008

"Gail Hornstein on Bipolar Disorder in Children," Office of Communications, September 24, 2007

"Pardoning WWI's "Shell-shock" Sufferers," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006

"Terror and Cowardice," Newsday, October 22, 2006

"Hornstein at Broadside Bookshop," Office of Communications, August 10, 2006

"Film Series Offers New Perspective on Mental Illness," College Street Journal, December 12, 2003

"Narratives of Madness, as Told from Within," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2002
Note: This link requires a paid subscription.

Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness (PDF)

"Hornstein to Read from New Biography November 30," College Street Journal, November 17, 2000

"Psychologist Hornstein Urges Therapists and Lay People to Listen to the Mentally Ill," College Street Journal, March 7, 1997