'Racial differences have to be considered': Lauretta Bender, Bellevue hospital, and the African American psyche, 1936-52
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
History of Psychiatry
Abstract
This paper examines one US psychiatrist's engagement between 1936 and 1952 with a racialist strain of evolutionary thought. When Lauretta Bender began working with Bellevue Hospital's disproportionately black population, the psychiatric literature still circulated the crude evolutionary proposition that blacks remained stuck at a more primitive stage of development. In the 1930s, drawing insights from holistic, mechanistic and environmentalist thinking on the relationship between mind and body, Bender developed her own more circumspect racialist position. Although she largely abandoned her underdetermined version of racialism in the 1940s for an approach that left out race as an active factor of analysis, this paper contends that she probably never wrote off black primitivity as a theoretical possibility. © The Author(s) 2010.
First Page
206
Last Page
223
DOI
10.1177/0957154X10365193
Publication Date
6-1-2010
Recommended Citation
Doyle, Dennis, "'Racial differences have to be considered': Lauretta Bender, Bellevue hospital, and the African American psyche, 1936-52" (2010). Liberal Arts Faculty Publications. 20.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X10365193
https://collections.uhsp.edu/liberal-arts_pubs/20