My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement - Hardcover

Cobbs M.D., Price

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743496191 ISBN 13: 9780743496193

Publisher: Atria Books, 2005

Synopsis

Price M. Cobbs, M.D., coauthor, with William H. Grier, of Black Rage -- one of the twentieth century's most profound examinations of black life in America -- has been a witness to some of the most important events in American history.
Now, thirty years later, for the first time he reconsiders his extraordinary life and career, offering a moving account of his journey -- as one of the nation's foremost authorities in the field of psychiatry -- from rage to entitlement.
An African American pioneer in the field of psychiatry, Dr. Cobbs in his lifetime has grown up during the Great Depression, felt the dramatic effects of World War II, and witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow laws and the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education. He watched the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. and the heroism of Rosa Parks in the civil rights movement. He followed the life of Malcolm X and "searched avidly for what animated the ideas beneath his fiery rhetoric." Every experience of his early life and education led to an auspicious partnership with a colleague, William H. Grier, who shared his convictions and the work involved in producing what the New York Times would call "one of the most important books on [blacks]."
Written at the height of the black power movement, Black Rage has sold over one million copies and remains a relevant study of race relations. Dr. Cobbs has lived through decades of profound social, political, and cultural transformation in America. A second-generation doctor, Cobbs has at once written a classic portrait of an amazing family and the making of a healer and community and business leader. As a psychiatrist, he has pioneered methods for studying the psychology of race and gender. So, while My American Life is a heartfelt memoir of a loving father and husband, it is also a chronicle of the black experience in America.

About this title

About the Author

Price Cobbs, MD, is one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the field of psychiatry, specializing in African American issues. Cobbs is also a corporate management consultant who owns and runs his own consulting firm. He is a highly sought lecturer on issues of psychiatry and corporate management. Cobbs received his BA from UC Berkeley and his MD from MeHarry Medical College. He is a member of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the NAACP, and the Urban League. Cobbs is the author of five books and numerous articles.

Reviews

Coauthor of Black Rage, the seminal 1968 work that identified the syndrome and coined the phrase, psychiatrist Cobbs here sketches the influences and experiences that shaped him and his work. The result is a nuanced portrait of mid–20th-century racial consciousness, one that insists on claiming "entitlement" (a sense of belonging and of worth) as proper rechanneling of rage. Born in Los Angeles in 1928, Cobbs grew up in an upper-middle-class family that faced regular discrimination, behavior that caused his father's "subtle undercurrent of anger." Service in a segregated army unit reinforced Cobbs's recognition of American ideals unmet. Moving to the South to enter medical school in Nashville in 1954 added further to his store of experiences—and his own responses to them. Studying psychiatry, Cobbs vowed to understand people's feelings and behavior in the broadest context, including feelings about race, a factor previously underacknowledged; this approach was the precursor to what he calls Ethnotherapy. An instance of race-based vandalism led Cobbs to George Leonard of the Esalen Institute; together they developed an innovative cross-racial confrontation group, in which, yes, black rage surfaced from even the better-off. Rage, co-written with William Grier, appeared after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in a country searching for answers. The rest of this book is brief; the bilddung sections, its bulk, illuminate a personal and generational odyssey.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In the mid-1960s, Cobbs, along with a fellow black psychiatrist, wrote Black Rage, a seminal book on race relations as America was in the midst of racial transformation. In this memoir, Cobbs reflects on his life and his own personal rage. Cobbs' father was a black physician who moved his practice from the South to Los Angeles. Cobbs and his sister grew up in the relative security of middle-class life. While his father had left-leaning political sensibilities, his mother was grounded in religion-centered black society. After medical school, Cobbs began his residency and internship, an experience that formed the basis of much of his theory of black rage, the medical impact of anger resulting from racism and the recognition that cultural background is important to medical treatment. Applying his theory to himself, Cobbs recognizes the need to accept the rage but to channel it to secure rightful entitlement rooted in self-worth. He sees this as the challenge for black Americans today, to turn rage into positive action that better addresses historic and continuing obstacles rather than toward self-destructive behavior. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743496191
• ISBN 13: 9780743496193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272