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When Tanya Luhrmann joined the department of anthropology at the University of California in San Diego in 1989, she was, she tells us, a “relative newcomer” to the field of psychological anthropology. That field, according to her, traces its lineage back to Margaret Mead, who “used a loosely Freudian understanding of childhood experience in different societies to explain their adult behavior” (p. 3). For years, graduate students in anthropology at UCSD had been encouraged to attend lectures on psychoanalysis given to psychiatric residents, and Luhrmann, as a new faculty member, followed suit. She quickly became intrigued with the culture of psychiatric training itself, deciding to make it the subject of her next anthropological investigation. The results of this inquiry are reported in Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry.
Luhrmann reports that the field work for this project, undertaken between 1989 and 1995, was conducted primarily among several groups of psychiatry residents, most of them from two major universities: “a public university on the West Coast” (studied over a period of at least three years) and “a private university on the East Coast” (studied over a period of ten to twelve weeks). As a participant observer of residency training, Luhrmann interviewed residents, sat in on patient evaluations, attended lectures, read assigned texts, and attended professional conferences (including those sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association, the Society for Biological Psychiatry, and the American Psychoanalytic Association). She also interviewed training directors, psychiatrist educators, administrators, and “elite research scientists” from several hospitals. Finally, she was trained as a volunteer psychotherapist, treating several patients under supervision up to twice weekly for a year, and was treated in