Freud and the psyche, continued

If Freud is dead, the news does not yet seem to have reached the publishing industry. Month after month, more books are added to the already vast literature on the father of psychoanalysis. One must presume they sell or the flood would have subsided by now, but their audience assuredly lies largely outside the ranks of organized psychiatry. In the 21st century, doctors have largely abandoned the search for meaning in madness, preferring instead to embrace speculations about biological defect and difference and treat the mentally ill with the miracles of modern psychopharmacology.

Those who united to promote psychoanalysis, led by Freud himself, saw themselves as an embattled minority. They formed a secret committee to protect their leader and his creation, believing that Freud’s “truths,” and most especially his insistence on the sexual wellspring of human psychology, stirred powerful resistance from the unanalyzed. As lonely members of the ranks of the super-sane, they convinced themselves that the task of converting the unpersuaded masses would necessarily be a fraught and lengthy one.

There is, as Eli Zaretsky points out, another side to this story. For many people, and he certainly counts himself among their number, psychoanalytic doctrines were and are immediately attractive. They promise to reveal new truths about the “secrets of the soul” and in the process liberate us from the tyranny of our unexamined and hitherto unexaminable pasts. Here is a seductive vision of a personal enlightenment that will emancipate the “normal” person quite as much as the neurotic and the narcissistic and will allow, to those initiated into its mysteries, penetrating new insights into the human psyche. The enduring appeal of these notions -- and the idea that with their aid we can make sense of the psychopathology of everyday life -- doubtless has done much to ensure the continuing popularity of explications of Freud’s ideas and histories of the movement he founded, both among the laity and some segments of the professoriate, if no longer among those who treat the mentally ill.

Still, is a new book on psychoanalysis warranted? What on earth remains to be said? Zaretsky’s answer seems to be that we do not yet fully understand the social and cultural sources of psychoanalysis’ appeal and, conversely, that we need a fuller picture than any yet provided of the effect of psychoanalytic ideas on 20th century culture. These are the lacunae he seeks to fill, providing an account of the growth and development of the Freudian movement in Europe and the United States and articulating an ambitious set of claims about the influence of Freudian doctrine on culture. He does so as someone sympathetic to, but not uncritical of, either the movement or its founder, having turned back to psychoanalysis for answers (and a career) after the post-1960s collapse of the New Left deprived him of a role in politics.

Much of Zaretsky’s discussion uneasily combines potted biographical material about Freud and his followers, synopses of “theoretical” developments and conflicts among a squabbling set of prima and seconda donnas, and sweeping assertions about the centrality of Freudian ideas to the history of the 20th century. Freud’s mature psychology, he assures us, “presaged a new way of being human, one that was psychological, interpersonal, and non-judgmental.” His 1909 lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts “deserve to be remembered among the signal moments announcing the advent of the second industrial revolution” (by which Zaretsky means the advent of what he terms “Fordism” and the era of mass consumption). Psychoanalysis, with its “unprecedented understanding of the depth and value of personal life, became central to American culture almost immediately,” he writes. And having already achieved a powerful position in advertising, the movies and the social sciences, analysis by World War II had “moved to the center of a democratic, anti-fascist consciousness.” In the aftermath of the war, he says, a theoretical edifice reconstructed by female analysts to emphasize the centrality of the mother in psychic life became “central to postwar social reorganization” as the feminized welfare state “universalized the basis of entitlement and helped sustain a mother-centered, working-class way of life.”

But the prophets of this “new way of being human” were scarcely a good advertisement for their own wares. Turning viciously on each other, their private and professional lives repeatedly provided a spectacle of crude ambition, savage squabbles and petty spite. Freud dismissed his apostate former disciple Alfred Adler as “a nice little case of paranoia” and attacked the man he had once chosen as his successor-in-waiting as “the brutal, holy Jung and his pious parrots.” In later years, Freud’s daughter Anna became embroiled in an endless dispute with analyst Melanie Klein, their intellectual differences rapidly devolving to interpersonal nastiness. Klein, whose theories celebrated the centrality of the mother, also was daggers-drawn with her daughter, an analyst too, who, according to some accounts, was quite mad. Zaretsky alludes to sexual exploitation by some of Freud’s male disciples. The author notes Jung’s affair with a patient, the then-schizophrenic Sabina Spielrein, while Jung was still in Freud’s good graces, and Freud’s complacent reaction, which classically blamed the victim: “The way these women manage to charm us with every conceivable psychic perfection until they have attained their purpose is one of nature’s greatest spectacles.” But Zaretsky fails to indicate how deeply this sort of behavior permeated analytic circles -- largely omitting, for example, the disgraceful way in which Freud colluded in the even-more-baroque sexual predation of another central member of his magic circle, the Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi.

The Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to Freud’s doctrines sharply slowed the spread of psychoanalysis across much of Europe, and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria had an even more negative effect on its fortunes there. The tragic story of the cancer-ridden Freud fleeing from Vienna to London is well known. What is less known is the political opportunism he and his daughter displayed in the years leading up to his exile, compromising repeatedly with Hitler’s regime to preserve German psychoanalysis, jettisoning Jewish analysts when they thought their betrayal might help the movement survive.

Ultimately, the Anglo American world became the center of the psychoanalytic universe, a development that substantially antedated Nazi persecution then intensified as analysts fled into exile. Not surprisingly, Zaretsky’s main focus is on developments in Britain and the United States, on which he largely rests his claims about psychoanalysis’ all-pervasive effect on 20th century culture. Here his argument is undermined by his substitution of anecdote and assertion for any systematic presentation of evidence, by his unconvincing resort to broadly stereotyped characterizations of 20th century capitalism as “Fordist” and “post-Fordist,” and by his shaky and uncertain grasp of the history of psychiatry in these years -- a history that overlaps, but cannot be limited to, the history of psychoanalysis.

Occasionally, Zaretsky lets slip just how tiny the analytic community was before World War II. In 1919, London’s psychoanalytic society, the largest in the world, had just over 40 members, and the entire United States had only 53 analysts. By 1940, there were 48 active members of the British Psychoanalytic Society, an organization riddled with internal conflict and whose members were desperately short of patients. The United States, where Zaretsky alleges that psychoanalysis had occupied center stage early in the 20th century, had fewer than 400 analysts, nearly half of them recently arrived emigres who had fled fascism. It is possible, of course, that such relatively tiny groups exercised disproportionate cultural influence, but to make the case would require far more evidence than Zaretsky marshals here. He speaks of how “analysis increasingly became integrated into British society,” and he contends that its “reorientation to the mother” drew upon and “flowed into the country’s strong feminist tradition, which encompassed not only women’s suffrage, but also maternal social reform, lesbianism, and cultural experimentation.” As a characterization of British culture in the 1940s and ‘50s, this strikes me as bizarre. More important, mainstream British psychiatry successfully maneuvered to secure the isolation and near-professional irrelevance of psychoanalysis. Zaretsky declares the British Psychoanalytic Society “still vital” at century’s end. Its total membership of only 405, in a population of some 60 million, tells a very different tale.

What of the United States? Zaretsky attributes the immediate appeal of psychoanalysis to “the weakness of traditional authority in the United States and the widespread belief in the power of the individual mind to overcome ‘external’ difficulties.” Some pages later, he suggests that “women were attracted to it for the same reason they were attracted to short hair, Kotex (invented in 1920), and aviation: it promised relief from the material weight of family life.” Why we should accept such wild assertions is left unclear. But if these suggestions don’t suit, Zaretsky is prepared to proffer another: Unlike Europe, he says, America possessed no “established psychiatric profession,” but those few physicians who practiced psychiatry were unusually “open to European ideas.” Not so: American psychiatrists were several hundred strong, belonging to a well-entrenched professional organization founded in 1844, several years before the American Medical Assn. appeared on the scene. And so, far from being open to European ideas, many took special delight in calling Freud “Fraud.” Practitioners of psychoanalysis had little success in attracting converts from their ranks.

But psychoanalysis did enjoy an extraordinary popularity and importance in America from the end of World War II to some time in the late 1960s or early ‘70s. Its adherents chaired virtually all major academic departments of psychiatry and constituted the professional elite, even as most practicing psychiatrists remained resolutely wedded to directive and organic therapies. On a broader scale, both popular and high culture displayed an increasing fascination with Freudian themes, and the public perception of psychiatric therapy was fixated on the analytic couch and the talking cure. Readers of Zaretsky’s book, however, will search in vain for a sustained or systematic analysis of that period of dominance, an explanation of where it came from or a plausible account of the psychoanalytic profession’s precipitous decline in the decades since. Unless, that is, one is persuaded by his assertions that “this explosion” reflected “an epochal change in the character of capitalism” as industrial “dispersal weakened Fordism’s large-scale, impersonal, production-based backdrop, against which the Fordo-Freudian family, and modern personal life, had emerged.” *