Elizabeth Young-Bruehl
12-07-2011
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
March 3, 1946-December 1, 2011
Many in the Arendt community know Elisabeth Young-Bruehl as Arendt's former student and first biographer. Her magisterial Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, has introduced many of us to the life and ideas of Hannah Arendt.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl left academic philosophy and turned to psychoanalysis. Most recently she has practiced psychoanalysis in Toronto, where she was living when she passed away on December 1, 2011.
Click here to read Young-Bruehl's obituary in the New York Times.
Click here to read Young-Bruehl's obituary in the GlobeMail.
Click here to read a lovely biographical remembrance in the GlobeMail.
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Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on Hannah Arendt
In light of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent and untimely passing, we thought it would be appropriate to post two different clips of her speaking about Hannah Arendt. Young-Bruehl was, of course, a student of Arendt as well as her biographer.
The first is an NPR interview from 2006 which marked what would have been Hannah Arendt's 100th birthday. While Young-Bruehl addressed Arendt's writings about Eichmann and the banality of evil, she also discussed Arendt's thoughts on McCarthyism and her fear of close-minded thinking in the United States:
But she, of course, was more worried as the 1950s went on about the implications of the way in which America and its allies opposed Stalin. She was as concerned about this as she was about the Stalinist regime.
Then she was most worried there had come about in America a kind of frame of mind that was quite rigid and obsessional itself, and Joseph McCarthy was the exemplar of this, that found any means to justify the end of anti-communism reasonable.
Listen to the NPR interview here.
The second piece, considerably longer, is a lecture Young-Bruehl delivered at an April, 2010 Conference on Hannah Arendt. Her lecture is entitled, "The Promise of Hannah Arendt's Politics." One of the topics she discussed was Arendt's Post WWII perception of cosmpolitanism and the negative impact of statelessness:
While efforts were being made after the War toward a world politics, a politics in which states could put their resources to the world concerns they shared, working for world peace, intellectuals of various backgrounds were considering the meaning of cosmopolitanism in that historical moment –a window of opportunity before the so-called Cold War gripped the world. In 2002, looking back on this post-war moment ...two British political theorists, Fine and Cohen, contributing to an essay collection called Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, named the moment “Arendt’s moment.” Hannah Arendt had offered an analysis of “crimes against humanity” that was, they argued, defining of the moment.
By concentrating their attention on Arendt’s thoughts about international law and the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Fine and Cohen overlooked, I think, the centerpiece of Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which was her critique of the late 19th and 20th century sovereign nation-states, which, she emphasized, were states that had turned on groups of their own people, eliminating some and creating wave upon wave of stateless others.
No leaders ... had, in Hannah Arendt’s estimation, grasped fully the key stumbling block to any harmonious world organization of nation-states and any Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the problem of statelessness.
Listen to Young-Bruehl's speech here.
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Here are what people are saying about Elisabeth Young Bruehl:
Dominique Browning: "Elisabeth was my teacher for three years at university; together we read our way from Plato to Heidegger. Our teacher. So many of us were smitten by the life of the mind, under her tutelage. I remember someone asking, What is the point of a degree in philosophy? What happens with jobs? Elisabeth fixed that gaze on us, and said: "No matter what you are doing--even if you are washing dishes--at least you will know how to think, and have something interesting to think about." Her friend Jerry Kohn said what is true for so many of us: "Some of the best conversations I ever had in my life were with Elisabeth."
Click here to read more.
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Steven Maslow: "As a professor, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl had continuously astonished us with her ability to recognize the patterns of thought in the great philosophers. She could instantly identify the author of unattributed passages, and was at her most fascinating when pointing out why a given philosopher was incapable of conceptualizing this or that thought. I can only imagine the power of such a mind attuned to listening to her patients, and the patterns of their thoughts. She must have seemed uncommonly gifted and insightful, because she was uncommonly gifted and insightful."
Click here to read more.
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Arie Amaya-Akkermans: "Her work is not only very loyal to the legacy of Arendt – if there can be said to be one – but also the confirmation of that “decent world” that Arendt envisioned: One in which in spite of the overriding anxieties with which we are faced, it is possible to think in the open without fear. Now that both Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl are gone, we are left with a little more than fragments that other than enlarge the size of our bookshelves, should serve as an inspiration to think decently, that is, to think always for its own sake and not in the ultimate pursuit of other ends. If I could sum up the work and the life of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I would say that it was “care for the world”. "
Click here to read more.
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Yale University Press: "Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s work has been shaped and influenced by important figures her her life, and in turn she has shaped and influenced the development of multiple disciplines, as well as those around her, with her insightful and pioneering writing. Yale University Press is proud to have worked with her. As her publisher and friend, we owe her our thanks."
Click here to read more.
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Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University: "Elisabeth was a philosopher, psychoanalyst, teacher…a great friend and mentor to many of my fellow-students at Wesleyan in the 1970s and for many years afterwards. She was a presence in the College of Letters, where she taught everything from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary political theory. Although I did not study with her myself, I remember her vividly. Her questions from the back of the room at the Monday night Center for Humanities lectures often punctured the puffed up and pretentious, yet she was given to warm, easy laughter. We knew one another from a distance, but the devotion she inspired from her students was always evident. Evident and admirable."
Click here to read more.
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Yale Press: “The struggle against childism is one of the most important battles we will ever wage, for it is a fight for the future,” writes Elisabeth in the Introduction to her new book. Next month, when we publish Childism, we will also have an interview with Young-Bruehl, conducted earlier this fall. Reading all the social media attention had excited Elisabeth to contribute more blog pieces on the book, but in her memory, we will champion her cause to not only raise awareness within our society, but to suggest and provide ways that we can fight oppression of children."
Click here to read more.
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Mario Cotto: "She was brilliant. This is sad. She was one of my favorite professors."
(Via Twitter)
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Margalit Fox, The New York Times: "As a biographer of a psychoanalyst who was also a psychoanalyst herself, Ms. Young-Bruehl had a singular perspective on the process of empathic ingestion that is essential to the biographer’s art."
Click here to read more.
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Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center: "Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was a towering figure both inside and outside the world of Hannah Arendt. She was the perfect biographer for Arendt because she was so like Arendt: brilliant, independent, and possessed of unerring judgment. She followed her own, independent path, and like Arendt, never came to be dependent on academic standards or privileges. Her sudden loss leaves those of us who knew her and the thousands who have come to know her through her teaching and writing,
deeply saddened."
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Sandra Martin, Globe and Mail: "On first dipping into a cache of letters and papers, all biographers must tremble with hope and fear about what might – or might not – be there. Imagine finding a reference to yourself, especially a flattering one. That’s what happened when Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a newly graduated PhD, began sorting through her mentor Hannah Arendt’s documents. There, on a little piece of paper was a note Arendt had written seven years earlier, on first meeting Young-Bruehl: “Knows Greek and has the most amazing blue eyes..
After that initial conversation in which the applicant’s intellectual attributes – a knowledge of ancient Greek – and an identifying physical trait – her blazing blue eyes – were both noted, Arendt agreed to accept Young-Bruehl as a student.
By the time Young-Bruehl had finished her own dissertation, “Freedom and Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy,” in 1974, the two women, 40 years apart in age, were friends."
Click here to read more.
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Patrick R.: "EYB was a professor of mine in the 90s at Haverford College. In such a bland, PC atmosphere, Elisabeth and everything about her–her demeanor, her cowboy boots, her wild gray hair, her ideas–struck a dissonant and refreshing chord on campus. "
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Kathy Jones: "I am in shock. We had invited Elisabeth to a conference in San Diego this summer, a psychoanalytic conference at which she was to be a speaker and I her moderator. She accepted and was so looking forward to being in San Diego. I cannot believe this! What a loss. The work she was doing on Winnicott was going to be landmark."
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Geoffrey A. Robinson-Wood: "Not intended to detract from those others' expertise since my relationship as Dr. Young-Bruehl's analysand, but her ability to plumb and mine the nature of the psychological apparatus, and enter into its near boundless use of tropes was nothing less than a marvel to me. As profoundly gifted as she was as researcher, scholar, lecturer, biographer, she was even more the recondite analyst. I despair as I contemplate her passing, and deeply regret having not told her the extent to which I cherished her."
Click here to read more.