Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was born on March 3, 1946 in Elkton, Maryland where she grew up as the middle of three children and the eldest of two daughters in an Episcopalian family. Her maternal English ancestry dates back to the Mayflower and her paternal family traces its origins to the Jamestown settlement in Virginia. Her mother was a homemaker with a junior college degree while her father, a college graduate, was a teaching golf professional who became a real estate broker. After beginning college at Sarah Lawrence, she completed her BA at the New School for Social Research in New York. There she went on to complete her MA and PhD in philosophy under Hannah Arendt’s supervision (1975). Dr. Young-Bruehl then taught at Wesleyan University and later at Haverford College. She did postgraduate coursework in psychoanalytic theory at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis in New Haven, graduated in 1999 from the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, and has been certified by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her seminars on the history of psychoanalysis have been offered at the Graduate Faculty’s Program in Psychoanalytic Studies, the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Currently, Dr. Young-Bruehl is on the faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is or has been on the editorial boards of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, American Imago, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the new journals Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society.
Judith Harris (Sat,) studied this question.