BiblioVault - Books about Burnham, John

Accident Prone

A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age

John C. Burnham

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, Accident Prone offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences.

Here, John C. Burnham shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism.

Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, Accident Prone is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

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After Freud Left

A Century of Psychoanalysis in America

Edited by John Burnham

University of Chicago Press, 2012

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This volume brings together a stunning gallery of leading historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud’s legacy in the United States in the century since his visit.

There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud’s life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud’s work had monumental intellectual and social impact. The essays in After Freud Left provide readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans’ psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century. After Freud Left will be essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American history, general intellectual and cultural history, and psychology and psychiatry.

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Jelliffe

American Psychoanalyst and Physician and His Correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung

John C. Burnham

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945) was a distinguished American physician who became one of the first psychoanalysts in the world. This book, an account of his life and times, also includes his unpublished and hiterto unknown correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, a correspondence of nearly thirty years which continued long after the historic break between Freud and Jung. John Burnham, a well-known historian of medicine and psychoanalysis, and William McGuire, the executive editor of Jung's collected works, have based this book on the recently discovered Jelliffe papers, an important collection once believed to have been lost in a fire.

Jelliffe's colorful and versatile career led him from botany and neurology (he was coauthor of a neurology text that remained standard for some forty years) to psychiatry, psychoanalysis (of which he was a founding father in the United States), and psychosomatic medicine (in which he also pioneered). Jelliffe also made outstanding contributions to medical journalism. With William Alanson White he founded the Psychoanalytic Review, and his work as editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease from 1902 to 1944 may have set a record for editorial longevity. Jelliffe was a charismatic speaker and teacher who in all his roles induced physicians and other thinkers to explore new ideas and ways of thinking.

Jelliffe's correspondence with Jung and Freud illuminates the personal and professional lives of the three men. The letters help to clarify concepts in both the Jungian and Freudian schools. The shifting emphasis of Jelliffe's relationships with the two masters of psychoanalysis—first when the two were colleagues, then for the greater span of time when they were rivals and adversaries—is revealing of Jenlliffe's own flexible views.

Jelliffe, furthermore, provides insights into the history of medicine and medical institutions and customs through Jelliffe's frank accounts of the developing medical profession in America. Jelliffe describes, for example, what it was like for a young M.D. to set up an economically viable practice in the 1890s. In addition, Burnham explores the problem of measuring the influence of a man like Jelliffe upon the history of ideas and institutions.

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