About

Katja Guenther is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, specializing in the history of modern medicine and the mind sciences. She is a trained medical doctor with an M.D. from the University of Cologne and has worked in hospitals across Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, she holds an M.Sc. in neuroscience from Oxford University and earned her Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of subjectivity and the ways in which modern ideas of the self have been shaped through the interaction of cultural and scientific norms. Guenther's first book, 'Localization and Its Discontents – A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines,' explores the shared and diverging practices within the medicine of mind and brain, re-conceptualizing the relationship between localization and connectivity in neurology. Her work has been recognized and funded by several prestigious organizations, including the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the Krupp Foundation, and the Medical Research Council. She has also been awarded the Johanna and Alfred Hurley University Preceptorship in History at Princeton. Her current research project, titled 'The Mirror and the Mind—Reflections on the Self in the Sciences of Mind and Brain,' investigates the historical use of mirrors in the sciences of mind and brain throughout the twentieth century. This project examines how mirrors, both as physical objects and metaphors, have played a role in key moments across psychoanalysis, developmental and clinical psychology, neurology, and neuroscience. Her work has earned her the 2015 John C. Burnham Early Career Award from the Forum of the History of the Human Sciences.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Law
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Developmental psychology
• Literature
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Psychotherapist
• Aesthetics
• Pedagogy
• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Art

Selected publications

• :<i>Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value</i>

  Isis · 2025-08-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Practice Makes Imperfect

  2023-06-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Educators typically conceptualize service-learning for political engagement as an empowering experience for students. Students witnessed directly the difficulties of all-volunteer, nonhierarchical models of organizing, as well as the budgetary realities and organizational limitations of small local groups. The Western Service Workers Association (WSWA), where students completed service-learning, is one of a few organizations in the area that offers assistance to undocumented workers and a wide range of services and programs beyond trying to meet immediate material needs. WSWA staff also coordinate social events intended to build community. Participating in service-learning at WSWA presented ample opportunities for students to apply and examine the themes of the course outside the classroom. Students were exposed to people and situations at WSWA that were new and unfamiliar and challenged their beliefs about social inequalities. Students in the class perceived diversity and a lack of resources—— financial and other——as barriers to successful mobilizations that would catalyze social change.

  PublisherDOI

• Camille Robcis. <i>Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Camille Robcis. Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. Get access Camille Robcis. Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. x, 220. Paper $35.00. Katja Guenther Katja Guenther Princeton University, US Email: kguenthe@princeton.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1037–1039, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad195 Published: 22 June 2023

  PublisherDOI

• 7 Diseases of the Body Image and the Ambiguous Mirror

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Um, mm-h, yeah”: Carl Rogers, phonographic recordings, and the making of therapeutic listening.

  History of Psychology · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Aesthetics
  • Psychoanalysis

  to learn how to listen well, thus allowing them to study, and to adjust, their own role in the therapeutic situation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• 8 Imperfect Reflections: Mirror Neurons, Emotion, and Cognition

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 The Mirror Test That Never Happened: Lacan, the Ego, and the Symbolic

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How to Train Your Analyst

  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Psychology
  • Epistemology

  What makes a psychoanalytic expert? In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud had this to say: every analyst needed to be analyzed herself; she needed to know about the theory of the unconscious and a bit about sexology; and she needed instruction in “the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature”—what counted as humanistic education, or Bildung. Without the latter, the analyst would have no understanding of the psychological material presented in her clinical practice. The final requirement stands out because at the time there was no means for assuring that psychoanalysts could achieve it. That is why Freud indulged in what he admitted might appear as the “fantastic” suggestion of “a college of psycho-analysis.” Such a college would teach those subjects one did not study in medical school; conversely, it would leave out those areas of study—the “anatomy of the tarsal bones” or the “constitution of the carbohydrates”—that were of no use to the analyst.1Freud composed The Question of Lay Analysis as part of an ongoing war over the nature of psychoanalytic expertise vis-à-vis medical training. Specifically, he was writing in defense of his disciple Theodor Reik (1888–1969), who had been charged by the Wiener Ärztekammer with “quackery” because he practiced without a medical license.2 For Freud, the charges were unfounded: his disciple Reik had all the qualifications Freud thought necessary. In Freud’s judgment, the real psychoanalytic quack was not the person without a medical degree but the physician trained in medical school to whom the more cultural “branches of knowledge…are remote.”3 After Freud’s intervention, the charges against Reik were withdrawn.4Reik was indeed the model of a cultured analyst. He shared Freud’s enthusiasm for Bildung, which he considered essential to psychoanalytic practice. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams for Reik was a book that “derived not from psychology textbooks but from the premonitions and visions of Goethe, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.”5 And he pursued his own cultural education with almost fanatical dedication. When Reik was a student, he installed himself in the Vienna Staatsbibliothek for a year to work his way through Goethe’s complete oeuvre: all 133 volumes of the Historical Critical Edition published by the Grand Duchess Sophie of Weimar, which included fifty volumes of letters and all of Goethe’s scientific works.6 Later, Reik provided psychoanalytic readings of Gustave Flaubert and Arthur Schnitzler. But culture was not found only in the library. Reik boasted, and eventually boasted about, personal connections with the Viennese cultural elite. In addition to his close relationship with Freud, his contacts included the musician Gustav Mahler and his wife, the composer and author Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Beer-Hoffman, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the psychoanalyst and author Lou Andreas-Salomé (who in turn was close to Friedrich Nietzsche).A decade after the charges against Reik were dropped, the conflict over expertise reemerged in a different way—and a different country. Like many analysts, Reik fled Europe when the Nazis seized power, landing in New York City in 1938. He had hoped to be met with a warm welcome, much like the one he had received from the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association in Amsterdam en route. After all, he was an immediate student of the father of psychoanalysis, a qualification both rare and prized in America, and had built up considerable administrative experience, including as secretary to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. Wasn’t he exactly what New York psychoanalysts needed? His reception, however, was decidedly frosty, again because of his lack of a medical degree. The psychiatrists at the New York Psychoanalytic Society deemed him unqualified, and denied him full membership.7Reik refused them, too. He organized his own Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology in 1941, and, seven years later, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), the first training institute for nonphysicians.8 The NPAP would soon establish its own journal, Psychoanalysis, which would become the Psychoanalytic Review and remains a major psychoanalytic publication today.9One might be tempted to associate the NPAP with Freud’s utopian psychoanalytic college. Here, the tyranny of the medical establishment would be challenged by a different form of expertise grounded in a deep engagement with and understanding of culture. But at the NPAP the only trace of the ideal of Bildung that Reik embraced and Freud had hoped to institutionalize was a reference to an “intuitive capacity for psychological understanding.” As the use of “intuitive” suggests, this capacity would not be covered in the NPAP’s curriculum, which was oriented exclusively toward psychoanalytic theory and practice.10For many reasons, an expertise derived from Bildung might have proved hard to institutionalize. What was its actual content? Could it be reduced to coursework? How could it be appropriately tested and thus certified? Given these difficulties, we can understand why Reik retreated from the ideal, grounding his expertise and that of his institution rather in his personal connection to Freud. The society would often tout its “direct descent from the founder of the psychoanalytic movement through Dr. Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s most gifted disciplines.”11 Lest anyone forget his pedigree, Reik grew a beard, smoked a pipe, cultivated his Viennese accent, and plastered his office with portraits of the great man (fifty in total).12 If his form of expertise, Bildung, could not be institutionalized, at least it could be performed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Mirror and the Mind

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-09-21 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awarenessSince the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects-humans, infants, animals, and robots-in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines-psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience-came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity.The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because researchers could not rely on language to determine what their nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience.The Mirror and the Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a century

  PublisherDOI

• Intelligent love: The story of Clara Park, her autistic daughter, and the myth of the refrigerator mother

  Psychology of Women Quarterly · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Psychoanalysis
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lori Brown

  Syracuse University

  81 shared

• Hélène Frichot

  81 shared

• Gerald Adler

  81 shared

• Bülent Batuman

  Bilkent University

  81 shared

• Rana Habibi

  KU Leuven

  81 shared

• Ruth Schwartz Cowan

  81 shared

• Gender

  81 shared

• Igea Troiani

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• John C. Burnham Early Career Award from the Forum of the His…
• Shortlisted for the John Pickstone Prize for the best schola…