Young, Allan - Anthropology

Personal Information
First Name: 
Allan
Last Name: 
Young
Department / Program: 
OTHER
Other: 
Social studies of medicine
University Affiliation: 
McGill University
Phone: 
5143986249
Email Address: 
Area of Research
Discipline: 
Anthropology
Subject: 
Biology
Psychology
Geographical Region: 
Europe
North America
Time Period: 
19th and 20th Century
Current
Specific Area of Research: 
psychogenic trauma, notably posttraumatic stress disorder; clinical practices and changing; the psychiatric science of trauma, specifically the epistemology and social determinants of psycho-neuro-hormonal research, epidemiological research, and diagnostic conventions; developments affecting the diagnosis of individual and collective trauma in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center; the 'social brain', its associated psychopathologies, and emergent clinical and theoretical interests in empathy; cruelty, understood as a legacy of human evolutionary biology
Academics
PHD Program: 
Anthropology
PHD University: 
University of Pennsylvania
PHD Date: 
1970
Major Publications: 
2012. Empathic cruelty and the origins of the social brain. In Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory, S. Choudhury and J. Slaby, editors. Pp. 159-176. Oxford:Blackwell. 2012. Logic and sensibility in social neuroscience’s “New Unconscious”. Logic and Sensibility. Watanabe, Shigeru, ed., pp. 91-106. Tokyo: Keio Univ. Press 2012. Logic and sensibility in social neuroscience’s “New Unconscious”. Logic and Sensibility. Watanabe, Shigeru, ed., pp. 91-106. Tokyo: Keio Univ. Press 2008. Kultur im Gerhirn: Empatie, die menschliche Natur und Spiegelneuronen. Wie geht Kultur unter die Haut? Emergente Praxen an der Schnittstelle von Medizin, Lebens- und Socialwissenschaft. J. Niewöhner, C. Kehl, and Stefan Beck eds., pp. 31-54. Bielefeld (Germany): Transcript Verlag. 2008. Psychiatric Diagnosis in the Era of the Social Brain: How Evolutionary Narratives May Shape Psychiatry's Future. In: Vera Saller, Mirna Würgler and Regula Weiss, eds. Neue Psychiatrische Diagnosen im Spiegel sozialer Veränderungen/New Psychiatric Diagnoses as Reflection of Social Change. pp. 21-37. Zurich: Seismo. 2008. A time to change our minds: anthropology and psychiatry in the 21st century. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32: 298-300. 2007. PTSD of the virtual kind – trauma and resilience in post 9/11 America. In Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law. Austin Sarat, Nadav Davidovitch, and Michal Alberstein eds., pp. 21-48. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 2006. La psychiatrie à la recherche d’un esprit post-génomique. Sciences Sociales et Santé 24 : 117-46. 2006. Remembering the evolutionary Freud. Science in Context.19:175-189. 2006. Traumatisme à distance, résilience héroïque et guerre conte le terrorisme. Revue Française de Psychosomatique 28 :39-62. 2004. When traumatic memory was a problem: On the antecedents of PTSD. In Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Issues and Controversies, edited by G. Rosen, pp. 127-146. London: Wiley. 2004. How narratives work in psychiatric science: An example from the biological psychiatry of PTSD. In Narrative Research in Health and Illness, edited by B. Hurwitz, T. Greenhalgh and V. Skultans, pp. 382-396. Oxford: Blackwell. 2002. The self-traumatized perpetrator as a “transient mental illness.” Evolution Psychiatrique 67: 26-50. Published simultaneously in French as: L’auto-victimization de l’aggresseur: un ephémère paradigme de maladie mentale. L’Evolution psychiatrique 67: 1-25 The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (1995) Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge (1992)
Courses Taught: 
undergraduate/graduate anthropology