Jews and American popular psychology: Reconsidering the Protestant paradigm of popular thought

Journal of American History

Volumn 88, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 950-978

  Heinze, Andrew R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750872832     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2700394     Document Type: Article

References (212)

1. An excellent starting point is Stephen B. Fried, American Popular Psychology: An Interdisciplinary Research Guide (New York, 1994).
2. For a historical overview, see Andrew R. Heinze, "Popular Psychology," in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (5 vols., Farmington Hills, 2000), IV, 90-92. On "positive psychology" and recent American culture,
3. see Gregg Easterbrook, "I'm OK, You're OK: Psychology Discovers Happiness," New Republic, March 5, 2001, pp. 20-23.
4. On the influence of Martin Buber and Erich Fromm on Protestant pastoral theology, see E. Brooks Holifield, A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Nashville, 1983).
5. On Jewish approaches to American popular psychology, see Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth, and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (New York, 1965), 325-30.
6. On Jewish psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts among the refugee intellectuals who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, see Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930-41 (Chicago, 1968);
7. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969);
8. and Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, 1984).
9. On gestalt's emigration to America, see Michael M. Sokal, "The Gestalt Psychologists in Behaviorist America," American Historical Review, 89 (Dec. 1984), 1240-63.
10. For the pioneering studies of Kurt Lewin, Solomon E. Asch, and Stanley Milgram in the social psychology of evil - examining the corrosive effect of social pressure on individual judgment and responsibility - see Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph K. White, "Patterns of Aggressive Behavior in Experimentally Created 'Social Climates,'" Journal of Social Psychology, 10 (May 1939), 271-99;
11. Solomon E. Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity (Washington, 1956);
12. and Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, 1974).
13. On the historiographical problem of identifying Jewish influences in modern culture, see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, Eng., 1989).
14. On the impact of Jewishness on the thinking of Erik Erikson and Kurt Lewin, see Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York, 1999);
15. and Mitchell G. Ash, "Cultural Contexts and Scientific Change in Psychology: Kurt Lewin in Iowa," American Psychologist, 47 (Feb. 1992), 198-209.
16. On the Jewish identity of popularizers of Freud in the United States, see Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York, 1971).
17. On Judaism and American therapeutic culture after World War II, see Andrew R. Heinze, "Peace of Mind (1946): Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America," Religion and American Culture, 12 (Winter 2002, forthcoming).
18. Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (Urbana, 1988);
19. John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick, 1987), 14-15, 23-24;
20. Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (New York, 1986), 174;
21. John Owen King III, The Iron of Melancholy: Structures of Spiritual Conversion in America from the Puritan Conscience to Victorian Neurosis (Middlerown, 1983), 254.
22. For other historiographical linkages between American psychological theorists and the Puritan or Protestant heritage, see Lucille C. Birnbaum, "Behaviorism in the 1920s," American Quarterly, 7 (Spring 1955), 20, 30;
23. John Chynoweth Burnham, "Psychiatry, Psychology, and the Progressive Movement," American Quarterly, ibid., 12 (Winter 1960), 458, 463;
24. Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972), 138-45;
25. and Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 30-43. The large literature on William James is noted later in this essay.
26. Gender is hardly an incidental characteristic; see Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, 1994);
27. and Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). Biographical detail indicates the Jewish-identity of these figures. Alfred Adler and Hugo Münsterberg, like many other members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Germany and Austria, converted to Christianity for social reasons, never embracing the faith and publicly identifying themselves as universalists. Joseph Jastrow was the son of an eminent Talmudist and the brother-in-law of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah. Abraham Myerson was the son of a rabbi turned socialist. Except for Münsterberg, all spoke at synagogues and Jewish organizational functions or identified publicly with things Jewish. All faced anti-Semitism in their careers and social lives.
28. See Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia, 1980);
29. Edward Hoffman, The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology (Reading, Mass., 1994);
30. Barbara Sicherman, "Isador H. Coriat: The Making of an American Psychoanalyst," in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, 1894-1944, ed. George E. Gifford Jr. (New York, 1978), 163-80;
31. Paul G. Myerson, "Abraham Myerson," Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, 1894-1944, ibid., 242-50;
32. and Arthur L. Blumenthal, "The Intrepid Joseph Jastrow," in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, ed. Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer, and Charlotte White (Washington, 1991), 75-87.
33. On Boris Sidis, see an unfortunately sketchy thesis: Cristina Nodar Miller, "A Historical Review of the Life and Writings of Boris Sidis" (Psy.D. diss., Miami Institute of Psychology, 1997).
34. On Sidis, Abraham Brill, and Isador Coriat, see Hale, Freud and the Americans.
35. David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996), 42-54.
36. On Jews and the "de-Christianization" of American thought, see David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture ibid., 17-42.
37. On contests within American social science the essential starting point is Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).
38. On liberal political values and academic psychology, see Katherine Pandora, Rebels within the Ranks: Psychologists' Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America (Cambridge, Eng., 1997).
39. On Jews and social science, see Deborah Dash Moore, "David Emile Durkheim and the Jewish Response to Modernity," Modern Judaism, 6 (Oct. 1986), 287-300;
40. Harvey E. Goldberg, "The Voice of Jacob: Jewish Perspectives on Anthropology and the Study of the Bible," Jewish Social Studies, 2 (Fall 1995), 36-71;
41. Pierre Birnbaum, "French Jewish Sociologists between Reason and Faith: The Impact of the Dreyfus Affair," Jewish Social Studies, ibid., 1-35;
42. Edgar E. Siskin, "The Life and Times of Edward Sapir," Jewish Social Studies, ibid., 48 (Summer-Fall 1986), 283-92;
43. and Ezra Mendelsohn, "Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill?: Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History," Jewish Social Studies, ibid., 1 (Fall 1994), 22-39.
44. On the field of Jewish social statistics, see Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modem Jewish Identity (Stanford, 2000).
45. Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 150.
46. See also Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 66-84.
47. John M. O'Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870-1920 (New York, 1985), 170-75;
48. Duane Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology (New York, 1975), 107.
49. On the connection between exceptionalism and social science in the United States and the darker functionalism of nativists such as Edward A. Ross as well as the cosmopolitan Deweyan model, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science.
50. On eugenicists as Progressive idealists, see Burnham, "Psychiatry, Psychology, and the Progressive Movement," 460.
51. Münsterberg maintained a Kantian detachment about the ultimate validity of psychological knowledge even as he became the nations best-known advocate, until World War I, of deploying psychology in practical affairs. Theoretically he was not a functionalist; actually he was. See Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Life (Boston, 1899), 23;
52. and Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 41, 80-82.
53. Sigmund Freud to A. A. Brill, Jan. 19, 1920, "Freud-Brill Correspondence," box 9, Abraham A. Brill Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.); A. A. Roback, History of American Psychology (New York, 1952), 133-34.
54. For Christian references in popularizations of Freud, see Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, Outwitting Your Nerves (Garden City, 1944), 75;
55. and Frederick Pierce, Our Unconscious Mind: And How to Use It (New York, 1922), 230-31.
56. See also Alexander B. MacLeod, Mental Hygiene As Taught by Jesus (New York, 1925);
57. and Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 138-45.
58. For a more apocalyptic message that ominously blended Christianity and racialist eugenics, see William L. Stidger, Finding God in Books (New York, 1925), 162-71.
59. Hugh Black, The Practice of Self-Culture (New York, 1904), 210;
60. Boris Sidis, The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (Boston, 1914), 187, 196.
61. Morton Prince, The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality Normal and Abnormal (New York, 1914), 217-19.
62. For these and other Jewish references, see A. A. Brill, Psychanalysis: Its Theories and Practical Application (Philadelphia, 1913), 31, 71-72, 85-112, 120-44, 230-31, 263-64, 315.
63. A. A. Brill, Psychanalysis: Its Theories and Practical Application Ibid., 96-112.
64. See also Isador H. Coriat, The Meaning of Dreams (1915; Boston, 1920), 13-42. Nearly a third of this book is devoted to the analysis of a dream of a Jewish doctor "friend" of Coriat's. The dream involves the subject's fear that his Jewishness might lead friends to keep him at a distance.
65. On the disproportionate number of nervous disorders among Jews, see pp. 963-64 below. Brill noted that many foreigners were institutionalized in the early 1900s simply because psychiatric personnel could not understand them. See his lecture to the staff of the New Jersey State Hospitals of Marlboro, Trenton, and Skillman: A. A. Brill, "The Broader Aspects of Psychiatry," Oct. 15, 1946, folder "Lectures, 1946," box 11, Brill Papers. Sidis described a young man suffering from nervous spasms whose psychotherapy depended on the analyst's ability to understand Yiddish, the language to which the patient spontaneously reverted under hypnosis. See Boris Sidis, Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure (Boston, 1922), 220-29.
66. Boris Sidis, "The Psychotherapeutic Value of the Hypnoidal State," in Psychotherapeutics: A Symposium, Morton Prince et al. (Boston, 1910), 121-44.
67. Joseph Jastrow, Piloting Your Life: The Psychologist as Helmsman (New York, 1930), 356-57.
68. Abraham Myerson, The Nervous Housewife (Boston, 1920), 6-7; Alfred Adler, "The Science of the Individual Personality," May 11, 1936, folder "Lectures, 1935-1936," box 2, Alfred Adler Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress).
69. A. A. Brill, "The Psychopathology of the Cripple," Jan. 25, 1937, folder "Lectures, 1937," box 11, Brill Papers; Abraham Myerson and Isaac Goldberg, The German Jew: His Share in Modern Culture (New York, 1933),
70. This apologia harked back to nineteenth-century Germany, where proponents of Reform Judaism postulated a moral genius carried by the Jewish people, whose mission was to disseminate it among the nations. See Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, 1983), 19-20.
71. Louis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (Boston, 1916), 91-92.
72. On the history of mental testing, see Zenderland, Measuring Minds;
73. and Michael M. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (New Brunswick, 1987).
74. On Robert Yerkes' views, see Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (ibid., 88-90.
75. C. James Goodwin, A History of Modern Psychology (New York, 1999), 219-42;
76. Carl C. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, 1923). Brigham recanted his racialist reading in 1930.
77. See Carl C. Brigham, "Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups," Psychological Review, 37 (March 1930), 158-65.
78. Goodwin, History of Modern Psychology, 244.
79. Despite his opposition to nativist hereditarianism, Walter Lippmann favored immigration restriction. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York, 1980), 247-48.
80. "Talks on Mental Hygiene Are Heard by Jewish Women," clipping from a Providence newspaper, n.d., scrapbook 1, Isador Henry Coriat Papers (Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Mass.); Sidis, Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology, v;
81. Joseph Jastrow, "Heredity and Mental Traits," Science, Oct. 16, 1914, p. 556;
82. Maurice B. Hexter and Abraham Myerson, "13.77 versus 12.05; A Study in Probable Error: A Critical Discussion of Brigham's 'American Intelligence,'" Mental Hygiene, 8 (Jan. 1924), 82.
83. Abraham Myerson, The Foundations of 'Personality (Boston, 1921), 31-32. The concept of "social heredity" already existed in American psychology, but Myerson gave it historical and cultural specificity.
84. A Jewish psychologist, Saul Rosenzweig, first raised the issue of the background (gender, ethnic, racial, social) of the subject in psychological experiments. See Saul Rosenzweig, "The Experimental Situation as a Psychological Problem," Psychological Review, 40 (July 1933), 337-54.
85. On this novel line of criticism, see Jill G. Morawski, "Impossible Experiments and Practical Constructions," in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven, 1988), 72-93. In the 1930s Otto Klineberg became a leading critic of racialist interpretations of intelligence and personality tests.
86. See Otto Klineberg, "Mental Testing of Racial and National Groups," in H. S. Jennings et al., Scientific Aspects of the Race Problem (Washington, 1941);
87. and Otto Klineberg, Race Differences (New York, 1935).
88. Jewish critics challenged prejudicial misreadings of Jewish behavior as early as the 1880s, when Francis Galton, the English founder of eugenics, interpreted photographs of East End Jews as revealing "the cold scanning gaze of man, woman, and child . . . [as if] every one of them was coolly appraising me at market-value." See Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity, 178.
89. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986), 288-89;
90. Sander L. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin-de-Siècle (Baltimore, 1993), 20-21.
91. On the rise of Jewish race science as a reaction to anti-Semitism, see John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (New Haven, 1994).
92. For comparison of European and American views of Jews, see Frederic Copie Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
93. On racialist anti-Semitism at the turn of the century, see Robert Singerman, "The Jew as Racial Allen: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism," in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana, 1986), 103-28.
94. On stereotypes of Jews as tubercular and weak, see Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace" (New York, 1994), 145-46, 155-56.
95. Klineberg, "Mental Testing of Racial and National Groups," 254.
96. A. A. Brill and Morris J. Karpas, "Insanity among Jews," Medical Record, 86 (Oct. 1914), 576-79;
97. A. Myerson, "The 'Nervousness' of the Jew," Mental Hygiene, 4 (Jan. 1920), 65, 71.
98. See also Isador H. Coriat, "Some Familial and Hereditary Features of Amaurotic Idiocy," American Journal of Insanity, 75 (July 1918), 130.
99. On the mental hygiene movement, see Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (Princeton, 1983), 144-78.
100. A. A. Brill, "The Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," Mental Hygiene, 2 (April 1918), 220;
101. Myerson, "'Nervousness' of the Jew," 71.
102. Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (New York, 1911), 555, 531.
103. Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud, 20-21;
104. Brill, "Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," 220;
105. Myerson, "'Nervousness' of the Jew," 70;
106. Sidis, Nervous Ills.
107. For his recollection of pogroms, see Boris Sidis, "A Study of the Mob," Atlantic Monthly, 75 (Feb. 1895), 188-97.
108. Isador H. Coriat, "Amaurotic Family Idiocy," Archives of Pediatrics, 30 (June 1913), 413-14.
109. On the persistence of such Lamarckian assumptions in American thought, see George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York, 1968), 234-69;
110. Ronald L. Numbers, Darwin Comes to America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 33-43;
111. and Merle Curti, Human Nature in American Thought (Madison, 1980), 274-90.
112. Brill, "Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," 223.
113. W. Béran Wolfe, How to Be Happy Though Human (New York, 1931), 240.
114. See also Myerson, "'Nervousness' of the Jew," 69. The image of the Jewish family as unusually close-knit appears even in the raucously nativist writings of the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross: "The Jewish immigrants cherish a pure, close-knit family life and the position of the woman in the home is one of dignity. More than any other immigrants they are ready to assume the support of distant needy relatives."
115. See Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York, 1914), 149. Non-Jewish psychiatrists commented on the strong connections between the family members of their Jewish patients;
116. see, for example, Brill, "Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," 224-25.
117. Myerson, "'Nervousness' of the Jew," 72.
118. A. A. Brill, "The Psychology of the Jew," for broadcast on WMCA (New York), Dec. 11, 1932, folder "Radio Scripts, 1932," box 12, Brill Papers; A. A. Brill, "Should Voluntary Mercy Death (Euthanasia) Be Legalized?," for broadcast on WMCA (New York), Feb. 16, 1943, folder "Radio Scripts, 1943," ibid.
119. Sidis, Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology, 223, 225-26.
120. Boris Sidis, Philistine and Genius (New York, 1911), 88.
121. John Cowper Powys, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant (Girard, Kansas, 1928), 24. For another example of the contrast, in a summing up of the prerequisites of "intellectual education,"
122. see Black, Practice of Self-Culture, 125.
123. Jastrow, Piloting Your Life, 316, 318;
124. Wolfe, How to Be Happy Though Human, 241-43.
125. Brill, "Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," 224-25.
126. A. A. Brill to Edmund Brill, [1939], folder "Letter to Edmund R. Brill," box 9, Brill Papers; Joseph Jastrow, Keeping Mentally Fit (New York, 1928), 21.
127. Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Biography (New York, 1939), ix, 40;
128. Alexandra Adler, "Human Values in Psychotherapy," in Alfred Adler: His Influence on Psychology Today, ed. Harold H. Mosak (Park Ridge, 1973), 142-43. Munsterberg's biography paralleled Adler's. Münsterberg grew up in the Jewish bourgeoisie in a Germanic cultural environment. His father and he himself adopted a passionate commitment to an ideal of social usefulness, partly to nullify the stigma of Jews as self-interested materialists.
129. See Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 16. Lev. 19:18 Revised Standard Version; Gen. 4:9 RSV.
130. Psychologists also struggled to distinguish their discipline from parapsychology because in the early 1900s the public did not and because some academic psychologists considered "psychic" phenomena worthy of scientific attention. See Deborah J. Coon, "Testing the Limits of Sense and Science: American Experimental Psychologists Combat Spiritualism, 1880-1920," American Psychologist, 47 (Feb. 1992), 143-51.
131. On the naturalistic orientation of psychologists, see Hamilton Cravens and John C. Burnham, "Psychology and Evolutionary Naturalism in American Thought, 1890-1940," American Quarterly, 23 (Spring 1971), 637;
132. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost, 90-91;
133. and Numbers, Darwin Comes to America, 33-43.
134. Houdini's battles against spiritualism loom large in Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York, 1996). Stanley Hall also combated spiritualism publicly, though not as sensationally or tenaciously as Münsterberg and Jastrow, and in stark contrast to them he sought a reconciliation of Christianity and psychology.
135. See Ross, G. Stanley Hall, 138-45, 162-64.
136. On Münsterberg's highly publicized involvement in unmasking the spiritualist Madame Paladino, see Hugo Münsterberg, American Problems: From the Point of View of a Psychologist (New York, 1910).
137. On the dangers of spiritualism and other irrationalist fashions and folklore, see Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology (Boston, 1900);
138. Joseph Jastrow, "Modern Spiritualism," Dial, Feb. 1, 1903, pp. 79-82;
139. Joseph Jastrow, "Fact and Fable in Animal Psychology," Popular Science Monthly, 69 (Aug. 1906), 138-46;
140. Joseph Jastrow, "The Unmasking of Paladino," Collier's, May 14, 1910, pp. 21-22;
141. Joseph Jastrow, "The Case of Paladino," American Review of Reviews, 42 (July 1910), 74-84;
142. Joseph Jastrow, "Malicious Animal Magnetism," Hampton's Magazine, 25 (Oct. 1910), 447-58;
143. Joseph Jastrow, "The Will to Believe in the Supernatural," Nineteenth Century, 69 (March 1911), 471-86;
144. Joseph Jastrow, "The Psychology of Conviction," Scientific Monthly, 5 (Dec. 1917), 523-44;
145. Joseph Jastrow, "Do the Dead Come Back? A Psychological Interpretation of Human Gullibility," Forum, 63 (Feb. 1920), 145-63;
146. Joseph Jastrow, "The Case of Sir Oliver Lodge," Review, March 6, 1920, pp. 225-27;
147. Joseph Jastrow, "Spiritualism and Science," American Review of Reviews, 61 (May 1920), 504-11;
148. Joseph Jastrow, "Professor Jastrow Replies," Review, Nov. 24, 1920, pp. 498-99;
149. Joseph Jastrow, "Conan Doyle, Spiritualist, on Tour," Independent and the Weekly Review, April 29, 1922, pp. 416-18;
150. Joseph Jastrow, "Metaphysics," Literary Review, Sept. 8, 1923, pp. 17-18. As late as 1940 he was trying to debunk phrenology, physiognomy, palmistry, graphology, fortune telling, divination, malicious animal magnetism, and astrology.
151. See Joseph Jastrow, "This Superstitious World," Science Digest, 8 (Sept. 1940), 56, 58.
152. Joseph Adelson, "Freud in America: Some Observations," American Psychologist, 11 (Sept. 1956), 468-69;
153. Weiss, American Myth of Success, 207-14.
154. On James and spiritualism, see Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York, 1998), 189-211, 287-89, 305-8, 320-21, 342-43.
155. For Jastrow's judgment on James's flirtations with spiritualism, see Jastrow, "Spiritualism and Science," 511;
156. and Joseph Jastrow, "The Modern Occult," Popular Science Monthly, 57 (Sept. 1900), 469.
157. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York, 1961), 299-336, 357-402.
158. See also Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious, 95.
159. Hale, Freud and the Americans, 225-49, esp. 228.
160. As noted below, Coriat assisted the Emmanuel movement but rejected its metaphysics.
161. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious, 129;
162. Theodore Ribot, "Chapter Two," in Hugo Münsterberg et al., Subconscious Phenomena (Boston, 1910), 35.
163. See also R. W. Rieber and Kurt Salzinger, eds., Psychology: Theoretical-Historical Perspectives (New York, 1980), 277.
164. Hugo Münsterberg, "Chapter One," in Münsterberg et al., Subconscious Phenomena, 16-32;
165. Joseph Jastrow, "Chapter Three," Subconscious Phenomena, ibid., 40-52;
166. Myerson, Foundations of Personality, 95, 97;
167. F. H. Matthews, "The Americanization of Sigmund Freud: Adaptations of Psychoanalysis before 1917," Journal of American Studies, 1 (April 1967), 47.
168. On the transcendentalist optimism of James Jackson Putnam, Smith Ely Jelliffe, and William Alanson White, see Hale, Freud and the Americans, 377, 380-82, 394.
169. For Coriat's dissent on the subconscious, see Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, and Isador H. Coriat, Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders (New York, 1908), 14-15;
170. and Isador H. Coriat, "Diseases of the Subconscious," Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders ibid., 199-217.
171. On Carl Jung's Christian metaphysics, see Gerhard Wehr, "C. G. Jung in the Context of Christian Esotericism and Cultural History," in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York, 1995), 381-99.
172. On Liebman, see Heinze, "Peace of Mind."
173. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 1020-26;
174. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York, 1977);
175. Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley, 1973).
176. On Jewish attraction to Christian Science, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), 314-15.
177. Meyer notes that perhaps 50,000 Jews were affiliated with Christian Science in New York City alone during the 1920s. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Ibid., 314.
178. Brill, "Adjustment of the Jew to the American Environment," 227, 229;
179. St. Paul Pioneer Press, Feb. 8, 1909. See also Hugo Münsterberg, "Hypnotism and Crime," McClure's Magazine, 30 (Jan. 1908), 319;
180. and "Cure Mental Diseases," newspaper clipping, [1908], scrapbook 3, Coriat Papers.
181. Jastrow summed up his attitude: "All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells." See Joseph Jastrow, "Manners and Morals: An Unconventional Dialogue," Unpopular Review, 8 (Oct. 1917), 330.
182. Jastrow, "Modern Occult," 471.
183. See also Jastrow, "Psychology of Conviction," 542-43;
184. and Joseph Jastrow, "Christian Science," Popular Science Monthly, 58 (March 1901), 551.
185. Jastrow, Piloting Your Life, 76;
186. Sidis, Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology, 396;
187. Myerson, "'Nervousness' of the Jew," 66;
188. Joseph Jastrow, The Subconscious (Boston, 1905), 543.
189. See also Joseph Jastrow, "On the Trail of the Subconscious: The Byways of the Mind," Scientific American, Supplement, June 22, 1912, p. 395;
190. and W. Béran Wolfe, "Introduction," in Alfred Adler, The Pattern of Life (New York, 1930), 9-10.
191. Joseph Jastrow, The House That Freud Built (New York, 1932), 291.
192. On the utopian dimensions of behaviorism, see J[ill] G. Morawski, "Not Quite New Worlds: Psychologists' Conceptions of the Ideal Family in the Twenties," in In the Shadow of the Past: Psychology Portrays the Sexes, ed. Miriam Lewin (New York, 1984), 97-125.
193. For Jastrows 1917 statement, see Hale, Freud and the Americans, 430.
194. On American resistance to pessimistic European theories of "the crowd," see Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880's (New Haven, 1950), 333-35.
195. Joseph Jastrow, "Delusion, Mass Suggestion, and the War: A Dream and the Awakening," Scientific Monthly, 8 (May 1919), 430.
196. See also Joseph Jastrow, "Mania Teutonica: A Psychological Study of the War," Outlook, Jan. 9, 1918, pp. 58-60;
197. and Joseph Jastrow, "A Pacifist Defense of America's War," North American Review, 206 (Aug. 1917), 199-208.
198. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime (Garden City, 1912), 73-74, 115;
199. John Cowper Powys, The War and Culture: A Reply to Professor Münsterberg (New York, 1914), 79; Hugo Münsterberg to Nicholas Murray Butler, Nov. 29, 1905, Hugo Münsterberg Papers (Rare Books, Manuscript and Special Collections, Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass.).
200. Jastrow, Keeping Mentally Fit, 178-79, 42;
201. Myerson and Goldberg, German Jew, 11. As a prelude to this critique of anti-Semitism, Myerson had attacked Henry Ford's infamous anti-Semitic publications in the 1920s.
202. See Abraham Myerson, The Terrible Jews, by One of Them (Boston, 1922). Brill in 1938 offered a universal Freudian explanation of Nazism: "The existence of a Hitler does not prove that the ideals preached by religion, ethics and philosophy are false. It does show that human or rather animal nature cannot be annihilated."
203. See A. A. Brill, "Personal Adjustment," typescript for broadcast on WEVD, April 15, 1938,
204. folder "Radio Scripts, 1938," box 12, Brill Papers.
205. Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (1898; New York, 1916), 364;
206. Sidis, Philistine and Genius, 38, 40;
207. Sidis, "Study of the Mob," 188.
208. For classic psychological portraits of the Jewish immigrant, see Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1917);
209. and Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (New York, 1896).
210. For the famous characterization of the divided personality of the American Negro, see W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York, 1989), 3.
211. Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, Drama in Four Acts (New York, 1909). (This play about love between a Jew and a Christian opened in 1908.)
212. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, 1956), 9.