After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America

282 Pages·2012·1.139 MB·English

by  John C. Burnham

After Freud Left

After Freud Left
A Century of Psychoanalysis in America
EDITED BY JOHN BURNHAM
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2012 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2012.
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08137-3 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-08137-0 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
After Freud left: a century of psychoanalysis in America / edited by John
Burnham.
pages; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-08137-3 (cloth: alkaline paper)—ISBN 0-226-08137-0
(cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Psychoanalysis—United States—History.
2. Psychiatry—United States—History—20th century. 3. Freud, Sigmund,
1856–1939—Infl uence. 4. Psychoanalysts—United States. I. Burnham,
John C. (John Chynoweth), 1929–
RC503.A38 2012
616.89’17—dc23 2011050712
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Introduction / 1
PART I : 1909 TO THE 1940S: FREUD AND THE
PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT CROSS THE ATLANTIC
Introduction to Part I: Transnationalizing / 25
SONU SHAMDASANI
ONE / Psychotherapy, 1909: Notes on a Vintage / 31
RICHARD SKUES
TWO / Clark Revisited: Reappraising Freud in America / 49
ERNST FALZEDER
THREE / “A Fat Wad of Dirty Pieces of Paper”: Freud on America,
Freud in America, Freud and America / 85
GEORGE MAKARI
FOUR / Mitteleuropa on the Hudson: On the Struggle for American
Psychoanalysis after the Anschluß / 111
HALE USAK-SAHIN
FIVE / Another Dimension of the Émigré Experience:
From Central Europe to the United States via Turkey / 125
PART II : AFTER WORLD WAR II: THE FATE OF
FREUD’S LEGACY IN AMERICAN CULTURE
Introduction to Part II: A Shift in Perspective / 157
DOROTHY ROSS
SIX / Freud and the Vicissitudes of Modernism
in the United States, 1940–1980 / 163
LOUIS MENAND
SEVEN / Freud, Anxiety, and the Cold War / 189
ELIZABETH LUNBECK
EIGHT / Heinz Kohut’s Americanization of Freud / 209
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE AGNEW
NINE / The Walking Man and the Talking Cure / 233
Conclusion / 247
Acknowledgments / 255
Chronological Guide to Events / 257
List of Contributors / 261
Index / 263
INTRODUCTION
From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud, the Viennese neu-
rologist who devised psychoanalysis, visited the United States, where he
gave fi ve lectures at Clark University. That visit is still mentioned in college-
level American history textbooks as a symbol of sociocultural changes that
began early in the twentieth century and left the United States transformed
for all of the decades afterward.1 Freud, accurately or inaccurately, became
the emblem particularly of that complex historical process that scholars
have often referred to as the “psychologization” of America. Moreover, his
work went beyond psychotherapy into interactions—not always favorable—
with all of the major cultural movements of the twentieth century. In this
book, leading historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture refl ect
on what happened to Freud’s legacy in the United States during the ten de-
cades after Freud departed from North America. They write with awareness
of the persistent attractiveness of the subject of psychoanalysis for both lay
and technical audiences. They also write in the knowledge that psychoanal-
ysis has always been controversial, whether considered in the narrow sense
of a particular type of psychotherapy or as the associated s ystem of under-
standing the world, society, and humans as Freud portrayed them.
1. In U.S. history textbooks, authors began after World War II to recognize that psycho-
analysis was of major signifi cance as part of both intellectual and social history. Freud’s 1909
visit began to become a convenient symbol around 1970, as more detailed discussions of psy-
choanalytic ideas, and indeed intellectual and cultural history material in general, diminished
in proportion in the content of most texts. See, for example, a transitional work, the textbook
that was more widely used than most, or any, John D. Hicks, George E. Mowry, and Robert E.
Burke, The American Nation, 5th ed. (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1971), 512–14, in which there
was a whole section on Sigmund Freud, including the small-group photo of the psychoanalysts
participating in the Clark conference described below by Richard Skues.
2 / Introduction
A centennial offers a special opportunity to refl ect on a landmark event
in history. Usually such refl ections confi rm historical memory or serve
other human purposes.2 The centennial of Freud’s visit invites new per-
spectives that the passage of a century will have created. The authors of this
book take a fresh look at the visit itself and launch an examination of the
transnational movement of Freud’s ideas to the United States. The essayists
also address the dynamic relationship between psychoanalysis and psycho-
analytic thinking, on the one hand, and a changing American culture, on
the other.3 Taken together, these essays suggest a variety of new parameters
in the histories of psychoanalysis and of American society and culture, at
fi rst in 1909 and then in the decades after Freud left.
Freud’s American legacy has to some extent been neglected, even im-
plicitly suppressed, for a generation. There has been a fl ood of scholar-
ship on the biography of Freud and on the European or world history of
psycho analysis. Much of this scholarship focused, directly or indirectly, on
non-historical, anachronistic questions about the contemporary validity of
psychoanalytic psychology and psychotherapy. These controversies of the
late twentieth century have had the effect of obscuring the extent to which
earlier intellectuals and public fi gures in the United States had accepted
psychoanalytic ideas and practice as a fresh and vibrant, if contested, part
of their world. Except for a general history published in 1995 by Nathan G.
Hale Jr. and some specialized research, such as that on psychoanalysis in
fi lms or on the history of local fi gures and organizations, recent histori-
ans have produced relatively little on the past cultural transfer and prolif-
eration of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where, everyone
agrees, Freud’s thinking had far greater intellectual and social impact than
it did elsewhere on the planet.4
2. Leon Hoffman, “One Hundred Years after Sigmund Freud’s Lectures in America: Towards
an Integration of Psychoanalytic Theories and Techniques within Psychiatry,” History of Psychia-
try 21 (2010): 455–70, for example, used this particular centenary as an occasion to assess the
place of psychoanalytic practice and theory in current psychiatry. Or for another example, see
Alexandra Sacks and George Makari, “Freud in the New World,” American Journal of Psychiatry
166 (2009): 662–63.
3. The authors of this book implicitly follow the commonsensical integration of intellec-
tual history into cultural history and general history as described by the writers in “The Current
State of Intellectual History: A Forum,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of The Historical Society,
September 2009, 14–24.
4. Nathan G. Hale Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and
the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Compare Transnational
Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective, c. 1800–2000, ed.
Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2010).
Introduction / 3
With so few reminders from immediately preceding scholars, even well-
informed people of the early twenty-fi rst century may be surprised by evi-
dence of how powerfully psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thinking di-
rectly affected American culture fi fty years earlier. The essays below display
how the best scholars today take seriously the evidence that the impact of
Freud’s ideas in the United States, for good or for ill, was indeed a major
historical event of the twentieth century.
A Rise-and-Fall Narrative, with a Mid-Twentieth-Century Peak
By chance, the invited refl ections in this volume, taken together, comprise
a narrative of a historical phenomenon with a beginning, a rise to a peak,
and a decline. In 1909, hardly any Americans had heard of Freud’s writ-
ings, not even his publications about his innovations in psychotherapeu-
tic technique. By the mid-twentieth century, Freud’s ideas had become a
conspicuous—indeed, unavoidable—part of the American cultural land-
scape. Another half century later, Freud’s name was still familiar, but Amer-
ican cultural leaders had many new ways of looking at the world, and only
infrequently did they make detailed, direct references to any of Freud’s
ideas. The authors in this book therefore offer refl ections on how Freud’s
contentions, originating in Europe, gained such remarkable visibility in
the United States in the middle of the twentieth century and then how his
legacy declined in importance or became relatively invisible at the end of
the century.
If there was a high point and then a decline, there had to be a begin-
ning. Earlier historians explored Freud’s visit in 1909 and then the critical
transfer of psychoanalytic ideas and their carriers and carrier institutions in
the 1930s and 1940s, often portraying events in America as local or subsid-
iary to what happened in Europe.
In the fi rst decades after Freud ended his three-and-a-half-week visit in
1909, up until World War II, psychoanalysis, historians found, spread into
the United States mainly through two routes, medicine and the intellec-
tual and cultural avant-garde.5 As our essays will show, the migration of
European analysts and other intellectuals to the United States in the in-
5. Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United
States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psycho-
analysis; John C. Burnham, Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, 1894–1918: Medicine, Science,
and Culture (New York: International Universities Press, 1967); John C. Burnham, “From Avant-
Garde to Specialism,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 15 (1979): 128–34; George
Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).