The Freud of Prozac: Tracing psychotropic medications through American culture, 1955--2001

The Freud Of Prozac: Tracing Psychotropic Medications Through American Popular Culture, 1950--2000 examines the popular and medical discourse surrounding the success of Miltown, Valium, and Prozac, the three best selling psychotropic "wonder drugs" of the latter half of the twentieth century. I explore the development of brand named psychotropic medications both as forms of treatment and also as metaphors of cultural inquietude, made to listen and to talk back in response to the perception of social change. My specific focus is upon the ways in which definitions of mental illness and its brand-named treatments were partially responding to the threat of the women's movement, and its explicit challenge to existing gender roles in the postwar period. I trace the notion of "pills for everyday worries" through medical journal articles, popular magazine articles from the 1950s informing readers about the demise of psychoanalysis and the ascent of the "amazing" tranquilizers, advertisements introducing and promoting psychotropic medications in psychiatric journals from the 1960s to the 1990s in which images of married women are depicted as in need of treatment, and works of American literature, 1993--1999, in which Prozac appears as a character. Combining medical historiography with feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, I ultimately consider the ways in which the "new" notion of wonder drugs became metabolized with preconceived, psychoanalytically-defined anxieties about gender roles. Further, I consider the ways these anxieties helped shape the ways "mental" problems came to be understood and treated at different points in time. The larger goal of my project is to reconfigure the ways in which many histories of psychopharmacology assume the flow of "information" from science to "culture," and to then rethink the centrality of gender tensions to the formation of this process. By offering a social history of medications in the context of popular culture, my research thus shifts the primarily scientific emphasis of much existing literature on the history of pharmacology.