George Makari

George Jack Makari is a historian, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. He serves as Director of The Institute for the History of Psychiatry, which encompasses the Oskar Diethelm Library at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he is also a Professor of Psychiatry.Makari's work has been widely reviewed and is well known among historians of the mind sciences, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for Revolution in Mind, The Creation of Psychoanalysis, and his recent work, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.

Makari received his bachelor's degree in 1982 from Brown University and his M.D. in 1987 from the Medical College of Cornell University. Makari did his psychiatric residency at Cornell's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan, and then received a fellowship (De Witt Wallace/Reader's Digest Research Fellow) at the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell's Medical College. In 1997, Makari completed his psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 2017, he was awarded the Benjamin Rush Award by the American Psychiatric Association for his body of work.

In his 2008 Revolution in Mind, Makari argues that the creation of psychoanalysis (as both a body of ideas and a movement) can be best understood by focusing on the way psychoanalytics and psychoanalytic communities were created, broken apart, and then rebuilt in the period before World War II.Specifically, Makari declares that early psychoanalytic theory emerged from Sigmund Freud's engagements with French psychopathology, biophysics, psychophysics, and sexology. Accordingly, he writes, Freudian theory was essentially a synthesis, one which quickly drew interest from Freud's contemporaries, many of whom coalesced around him and in the process developed the first psychoanalytic community.However, this community proved fragile.

According to Makari, the period that followed the Nuremberg Congress of 1910 saw a series of schisms, both theoretical and interpersonal, which shattered the Freudian movement and forced early analysts to rethink their work and professional networks.This 'rethinking' resulted in the creation of a variety of new psychoanalytic communities that were more independent of Freud, both conceptually and geographically. These communities placed less emphasis on Freud's personal authority and theories, and instead sought to bind their members with a commitment to shared technique, increased empiricism, and a process of professionalization. Eventually, Makari argues, the rise of fascism led to the destruction of most European psychoanalytic communities, sparking battles for control in the two major psychoanalytic centers that remained: London and New York.

In Soul Machine (2015), Makari turns to the Enlightenment to historicize the creation of the Western mind. The book recounts the story of how the mind—an emerging concept—evolved as a potential solution to questions about the nature of inner life. These questions, which reached back to the origins of modernity,stemmed from the crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution. The "mind" supplied a possible answer that was, as Makari notes, "part soul and part machine but fully neither."

The book is a synthetic history of the mind and the emergence of psychological man in the West World. It was rated one of the Best Books of 2016 by author Andrew Solomon in The Guardian and was called "brilliant" and "essential reading" by the Wall Street Journal.

Makari is the son of medical researcher Jack Makari.