Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was born in 1946, the middle child of a mother whose family had lived for many generations on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and a father from an old Virginia family. She grew up on her mother?s family?s farm and in the town of Newark, Delaware, where her father, then an ex-Marine, took a job as a teaching golf professional. After high school, she escaped from the provinces to the metropole ?to New York. She completed her undergraduate degree and went on to do a PhD in Philosophy at the New School for Social research, just at the moment that Hannah Arendt became a member of the Graduate Faculty there.<BR><BR>For five years Elisabeth was Arendt?s doctoral student, finishing her degree and joining the faculty at Wesleyan University shortly before Hannah Arendt died in 1975. Arendt?s émigré friends asked her to write the biography that appeared in 1982 to much acclaim: Hannah Arendt-For Love of the World.<BR><BR>For the next twenty years, Elisabeth had an academic career, writing a number of books, including the one that drew her into the world of psychoanalysis: Anna Freud -A Biography (1988). She did psychoanalytic training, first in New Haven, working with Hans Loewald, and then in Philadelphia, where she graduated in 1999 and was certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association two years later, after opening a practice in New York. In recent years, starting with The Anatomy of Prejudices in 1996, her writing has been predominantly in the field of psychoanalysis, its practice and history.
