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.
Claude Brown's seminal 1965 memoir "Manchild in the Promised Land" appeared when Americans were trying to make sense of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. A "bildungsroman", Brown's autobiography details how he, a former juvenile delinquent and residential treatment center client, became a stable adult once he left his troubled Harlem neighborhood. This paper argues that Brown's book revealed just how much liberal midtwentieth century efforts to combat poverty and crime in segregated black communities by offering more mental health services struggled to fully grasp and address the relationship between mental health and environment. Between 1938 and 1965, officials and mental health experts with the Wiltwyck School for Boys, New York Domestic Relations Court and the New York Bureau of Child Guidance imagined that Harlem would become a more stable, lawabiding community if populated with emotionally healthier people. Methodologically, this paper compares the archival record of those programs' goals with Brown's memoir. Brown's own experience as both a former charge of those institutions and a resident of Harlem led him to doubt that urban ghettoes were environmentally suited to support individuals struggling to overcome mental illness. In locating Brown's recollection of his postwar youth within the context of local efforts to provide New York City's black juvenile delinquents with psychiatric care in the postwar era, it becomes apparent that those liberal policies and programs were designed to produce therapeutic outcomes that proved difficult to sustain amid the challenging circumstances residents faced in socioeconomically depressed communities. As an intervention into the burgeoning literature on the US history of race and psychiatry, this research represents one of the first attempts to compare the intentions of mental health professionals seeking to improve the health care of African Americans and the perspectives of their African American clients.
In 1946, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a small outpatient facility run by volunteers, opened in Central Harlem. Lafargue lasted for almost thirteen years, providing the underserved black Harlemites with what might be later termed community mental health care. This article explores what the clinic meant to the African Americans who created, supported, and made use of its community-based services. While white humanitarianism often played a large role in creating such institutions, this clinic would not have existed without the help and support of both Harlem's black left and the increasingly activist African American church of the "long civil rights era." Not only did St. Philip's Church provide a physical home for the clinic, it also helped to integrate it into black Harlem, creating a patient community. The article concludes with a lengthy examination of these patients' clinical experiences. Relying upon patient case files, the article provides a unique snapshot of the psychologization of postwar American culture. Not only does the author detail the ways in which the largely working class patient community used this facility clinic, he also explores how the patients engaged with modern psychodynamic concepts in forming their own complex understandings of selfhood and mental health.
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