The Politics of Psychiatry and the Vicissitudes of Faith Circa 1950: Karl Stern's Psychiatric Novel

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
The Politics of Psychiatry and the Vicissitudes of Faith Circa 1950: Karl Stern's Psychiatric Novel
Abstract
The German-born Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist Karl Stern (1906-1975) immigrated to Montreal via England at the outbreak of the Second World War where he worked under Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Soon after Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute opened in 1943, Stern began to work at the Geriatric Unit (the first in Canada) and taught courses as an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University. In 1943, after much soul-searching, Stern converted to the Catholic religion. He was the author of The Pillar of Fire (1951) and three nonfiction books on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and religion. His novel, Through Dooms of Love (1960), written with the assistance of his friend and admirer Graham Greene, covers a number of topics that were to psychiatric theory, treatment, and research at mid-century, and reflects several features of his own personal and professional vicissitudes. Stern left Montreal in the 1950s to become a clinical professor of psychiatry at the new Medical Faculty of the University of Ottawa.
Publication
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume
Vol. 51
Issue
no. 4
Pages
351-365
Date
Fall 2015
Language
en
Citation
Burston, Daniel. “The Politics of Psychiatry and the Vicissitudes of Faith Circa 1950: Karl Stern’s Psychiatric Novel.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol. 51, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 351–365.
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