Manuscript Collection MS COLL 00759 - Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Papers

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1946-2011) was an author, biographer, psychoanalyst, and scholar. She was born in Maryland, and spent much of her professional life in New York and Philadelphia, before moving to Toronto in 2007. Young-Bruehl began her academic career studying poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and went on to attend the New School in New York to pursue post-graduate degrees in philosophy. There, she became Hannah Arendt’s only PhD student, and completed her dissertation on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers in 1974. After Arendt’s death in 1975, Young-Bruehl took on the challenge of writing Arendt’s biography. Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (1982), won the Harcourt award went on to become the definitive account of Arendt’s life and work.
Young-Bruehl occupied teaching positions at Haverford College, Wesleyan University, and Columbia University, and would also go on to write a biography of Anna Freud, along with scholarly works on philosophy, psychology, and politics. Young-Bruehl devoted much of her later life to her psychoanalysis practice; after moving to Toronto, she also co-founded Caversham Productions, an organization dedicated to the development of psychoanalytic training materials.