Helen Flanders Dunbar

Her father, Francis William Dunbar (1868-1939), was an electrical engineer, mathematician, and patent attorney.

Her mother, Edith Vaughn Flanders (1871-1963), was a professional genealogist and translator.

She also trained with Anton Boisen (1876-1965), a co-founder of the Clinical Pastoral Education Movement, at the Worcester State Hospital in the summer of 1925.

In pursuit of more knowledge in relation to the psychic aspects of healing and disease, she visited Lourdes and a number of other healing shrines in Germany and Austria.

She married her second husband, economist and editor of The New Republic, George Henry Soule Jr. (1887-1970), in 1940.

Helen Flanders Dunbar (May 14, 1902 – August 21, 1959) — later known as H. Flanders Dunbar — is an important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine and psychobiology, as well as being an important advocate of physicians and clergy co-operating in their efforts to care for the sick.

She viewed the patient as a combination of the psyche and soma, body and soul.

Both needed to be treated in order to treat a patient efficiently.

Dunbar received degrees in mathematics, psychology, theology, philosophy, and medicine.

Helen Flanders Dunbar, the eldest child of a well-to-do family, born in Chicago, Illinois on May 14, 1902.

She married her first husband, Theodor Peter Wolfensberger (1902-1954), in 1932 — he was eventually known in the U.S. as Theodore P. Wolfe — and they were divorced in 1939.

Her brother, Francis, was born in 1906.

As a child she suffered from malnutrition; and despite Dunbar's later misleading claims that she had suffered poliomyelitis, and a childhood pediatrician's diagnosis of a muscular form of rickets ("rachitic pseudo-paralysis").

Due to her illness, Dunbar was described as an intense and nervous child.

It is possible that the suffered a form of melancholia at age 15.

At age twelve, Dunbar and her family moved to Manchester, Vermont as a result of her father's involvement in a serious patient litigation.

Dunbar was strongly influenced by her mother, her grandmother and her aunt.

Her mother was the head of household and an ardent feminist.

Dunbar's grandmother, Sarah Ide Flanders, was a widow of an Episcopal priest.

Her aunt, Ellen Ide Flanders, once expressed interest in becoming a medical missionary.

Many of her characteristics; shrewd, manipulative, stubborn, and domineering, were later also used to describe Helen.

Dunbar was also influenced by her father.

She was very introverted and highly gifted, mirroring her father's shy and semi-reclusive nature.

Dunbar was a lifelong Episcopalian with high church inclinations even though she was largely non-practicing in her later years.

A diminutive adult — she was 4'11" (150 cm) — she always wore platform shoes. While at Yale, her classmates dubbed her with the nickname "Pocket Minerva", due to her small stature and large accomplishments.

She graduated from Bryn Mawr with a B.A. (dual major in mathematics and psychology) in 1923.

She received a Med.

In 1927, Dunbar graduated from Union Theological Seminary, with a degree in theology, and completed her first year at Yale University's Medical School.

At Columbia University, Dunbar was an acknowledged intellectual leader of her class.

At Columbia University, she was instrumental in the beginning of consultation-liaison psychiatry.

While at Union Theological Seminary, Dunbar was awarded the Travelling Fellowship for the outstanding student and used this opportunity to travel to Europe in 1929 and visit with both Helene Deutsch and Felix Deutsch in Vienna, and with Carl Jung at the Burghölzli, the psychiatric clinic of Zurich University.

Sci D degree from Columbia University in 1935.

Dunbar focused on medieval literature and Dante, which impacted her medical practice and therapeutic approaches.

While at Columbia University, Dunbar was simultaneously enrolled at Union Theological Seminary.

(Wolfe arranged for the immigration of Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich in 1939, and was the translator of most of Reich's books and articles.)

Dunbar founded the American Psychosomatic Society in 1942 and was the first editor of its journal.

In addition to running several other committees committed to treating the whole patient, Dunbar wrote and distributed information for public health, involving child development and advocating for mental health care after World War II.

A daughter, Marcia was born in 1942.

Dunbar was taught by private tutors and at private schools.

Her education began at Laboratory School in Chicago.