Bookmarks Post-Game: Gabe Brownstein’s The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim

Gabe Brownstein speaking about Bertha Pappenheim

Yesterday afternoon in the Writing Center, the English Department marked the turn into October by gathering to celebrate the publication of Gabe Brownstein’s book, The Secret Mind of Berthan Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure

It was a great pleasure to bring together a lively group of undergraduate students, faculty, and special guest-stars including our former Dean Jeff Fagen and former student Steve Williams. We have been hosting Bookmarks events for a long time – the first one I can remember was for Dohra Ahmad’s amazing collection of nonstandard English writing, Rotten Englishpublished 17 years ago in 2007 (!) – and I always think these events capture something special about the intellectual diversity, collegiality, and the stunning range and genius of the writers we support. It’s not just faculty either – we’ve had quite a few student- and alum-published books in the series! Let me know if you have a book you want featured in the series!

What I love most about these events is the feeling of coming together as a community of writers. It’s a difficult and often lonely task to write and publish a book. It’s also hard, as students at all levels know, to write the things our classes require of us! Bookmarks events are celebrations and explorations of why the hard task of writing remains worth doing. In this case we dug into a great book about the relationships between mind and body, patriarchy and early feminism, and the eye-opening ways that twenty-first century doctors are responding to dilemmas that the age of Sigmund Freud got very wrong and also, perhaps, oddly right.

Our next English department event during the fall semester will be Whitman on Walls!, on Saturday afternoon 10/26! Details to follow – but I hope many of you are saving the date!

Details of future Bookmarks events coming soon!

About Steve Mentz 1278 Articles
I teach Shakespeare and the blue humanities at St. John's in New York City.

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