Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

By:  Jessica Harlem-Siegel

        After Elisabeth Young-Bruehl passed away at the end of last year, I began to learn about her life and work from the perspective of other writers who were reacting to her passing.  A prolific writer and psychoanalyst, Young-Bruehl was a leading thinker and advocate in the fields of philosophy, politics and social justice.  
As an author, she is famous for her role as biographer of both Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. In the weeks following her death, newspaper obituaries appeared alongside bloggers’ personal tributes to her memory.   There was an outpouring of intimate statements of grief and discussion of her legacy on blogs and news sites.  Her own blog, Who’s afraid of Social Democracy? became a public archive and memorial for those that new her and her work.
        After completing a doctorate in philosophy at The New School for Social Research, Young-Bruehl taught at several universities including Wesleyan and Haveford College and authored over ten books including Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, a biography of the political theorist and Anna Freud: A Biography both published in the late 1980s.  She later wrote a book about her process as a biographer,
which incorporated the perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism and social theory. Her most recent work was about childism: socially and politically founded prejudice against children, which was a continuation of her psychoanalytic take in The Anatomy of Prejudices (which was often misprinted with the singular prejudice) in which she argued for the existence of multiple kinds of prejudice.
        Young-Bruehl died unexpectedly in December after suffering a pulmonary embolism while with her partner in Toronto, where she lived.   At the time of her death, she had begun work as General Editor of the Collected Writings of D.W. Winnicott and several of her recent blog posts were crisp and candid reflections on how his perspective was influencing her own. In general, Young-Bruehl’s blog writing was exemplary of the perspective of an analytic scholar and philosopher as well as an advocate of social justice.  She eloquently combined her reflection on her scholarly projects and current social events with her psychoanalytic, philosophical and political perspective.  Many of the points that she presented in her posts were compelling and inspiring, including one where she argued that a person cannot be considered “mature” and a society cannot be considered “free” without having achieved a level of responsibility to a child or
to an other and others in the future that trumps one’s own selfish needs, a position which she discussed within the context of the economic protests, environmental policy and universal healthcare (See:
http://elisabethyoung-bruehl.com/2011/07/16/58-socio-political-assessment-and-diagnosis/).
        Here is a link to some of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s writing and writing about her on her website. I think the piece by Dominique Browning is a touching introduction to the tribute as a whole.
http://elisabethyoung-bruehl.com/2011/12/05/in-memoriam-elisabeth-young-bruehl-written-by-dominique-browning/