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

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

While at Yale, her classmates dubbed her with the nickname "Pocket Minerva", due to her small stature and large accomplishments.

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

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.

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.

While there, Dunbar observed that of the patients vising the shrine, those overcome by hysterical excitement as well as those waiting for a cure were not the ones to leave feeling well.

While at Union Theological Seminary, she met Anton Boisen, who introduced her to a training program at Worcester.

Her friendship with Boisen led to her helping him through his second psychiatric hospitalization and to her instrumental support in his interests in the formal structuring of the movement into the Council for Clinical Training.

She also wrote of her extensive and evangelical efforts to spread the word about the virtues and values of mental health care following the conclusion of World War II.

Dunbar believed that the psyche and soma, body and soul, were intimately connected and the physician must attend to both if the patient is to be fully healed.

She drew upon the foundational work of John Dewey and William James, who saw the patients as human beings who were dynamically involved in an environment that formed and transformed them.

She was unable to put her substantial learning together in service of the rapidly expanding dialogue between religion and psychiatry.

The first law stated psychological energy seeks an outlet through physical symptoms due to its inability to be expressed mentally.

The second law states that permanent faults in personality can lead to dissipation of energy and eventually somatic dysfunction.

One of Dunbar's case studies was of a man named James Roe, who had impressions of God that contributed to an emotional breakdown.

James continued to lose one job after another, causing him to face God and memories of his father with a sense of failure.

Dunbar was convinced that a Freudian analysis of a pregnant patient's dreams could prevent miscarriage and stillbirth.

Dunbar believed that psychiatry and medicine could work together to isolate pathogenic factors in disease and be able to prevent them.