Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (born 3 March 1946 as Elisabeth Young) is an American academic and psychotherapist, currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She has published a wide range of books, most notably biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, but also including poetry and a novel. Her 1982 biography of Hannah Arendt won the first Harcourt Award. Her book The Anatomy of Prejudices won the Association of American Publishers' prize for Best Book in Psychology in 1996.

Life
Her family on her mother's father's side were dairy farmers, with land near the head of Chesapeake Bay. More immediately, her mother and her mother's father had been amateur scholars. Her maternal grandmother was a Mayflower descendant, her father's family were Virginians. She grew up in Maryland and Delaware; her father worked as a teaching golf pro. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, dropped out into the New York City counterculture of the late 1960s, and then completed her undergraduate studies at The New School (then the "New School for Social Research"). There she met and married Robert Bruehl (the marriage was brief, but she kept the hyphenated surname), and became familiar with the work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Shortly after this, Arendt joined the Graduate Faculty of the New School. She became Young-Bruehl's mentor and dissertation advisor; Young-Bruehl received a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1974 and received a faculty appointment at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

The next year, Hannah Arendt died at 69; several of Arendt's émigré friends approached Young-Bruehl to take on the task of writing Arendt's biography. The resulting book, published in 1982, is still the standard work on Hannah Arendt's life. It has been translated into several languages, and a second edition came out in 2004.

Young-Bruehl's work on the Arendt biography gave her an increasingly strong interest in psychoanalysis. In 1983, she enrolled for clinical psychoanalytic training in New Haven, Connecticut. At New Haven's Child Study Center, she met several of Anna Freud's American colleagues, and was invited to become Anna Freud's biographer, leading to the 1988 book Anna Freud: A Biography.

In the 1990s she left Wesleyan and moved to Philadelphia, where she taught part-time at Haverford College and continued her psychoanalytic training at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, from which she graduated in 1999. She started a private practice as a therapist, first in Philadelphia and later in New York City. Throughout this time, she continued to publish books, including the award-winning The Anatomy of Prejudices.