Charisma or rationalization? domesticity and psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 328-354

  Zaretsky, Eli ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 5044243112     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448969     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. See Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers, trans, pub., ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago, 1968)
2. See Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, rev. ed. (New York, 1986)
3. Ultimately the analyst was the descendant of the shaman, herself the embodiment of charisma. The French king, who cured scrofula by touching his subjects, as shown by Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London, 1973), is another early instance of charismatic healing. The legendary physicians of the eighteenth century, such as Francis Willis, physician to George III, also elicited confidence through unique personal skills before medicine became rationalized. Thus the charisma of the analyst was the heir to a long history of mental healing, brought into crisis by twentieth-century rationalization
4. See Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building
5. Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, Conn., 1984), p. 20
6. Weber, "Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), pp. 345, 347
7. Erich Heller, "Observations on Psychoanalysis and Modern Literature," in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York, 1983), pp. 72-73
8. America, noted a British commentator in 1926, had "solved the elementary problem ... still convulsing Europe" (Philip Kerr, "Can We Learn from America?" The Nation and Athenaeum, 16 Oct. 1926, pp. 76-77; quoted in
9. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age [Cambridge, Mass., 1998], p. 375). They had created a mass production economy while ameliorating class conflict
10. See Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (1927; Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 4-5
11. see also Fred Matthews, "The Utopia of Human Relations: The Conflict- Free Family in American Social Thought, 1930-1960," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (Oct. 1988): 348
12. Mary Follett, Elton Mayo, and Chester Bernard are examples of post-Taylorist managerial theorists. On the Hawthorne experiments, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, Conn., 1960), and Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York, 1991)
13. See also Elton Mayo, "The Irrational Factor in Human Behavior: The 'Night- Mind' in Industry," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 110 (Nov. 1923): 117-30. Mayo, incidentally, was more influenced by Pierre Janet than by Freud. The management theorist most directly influenced by ego psychology was Chris Argyris
14. In 1964 Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, typical of those who sought to harness analysis to the overall project of social reorganization, wrote that "unfortunately, to regard the ego as devoid of energy and initiative . . . remains the dominant view," arguing that Hartmann had shown not only that the ego was more powerful than Freud realized but also that it could even reshape the underlying drives (Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Social Change and Prejudice, Including "Dynamics of Prejudice" [New York, 1964], p. 50)
15. Quoted in Howard Brick, "Talcott Parsons's 'Shift Away from Economics,' 1937-1946," Journal of American History (forthcoming)
16. Talcott Parsons, "Propaganda and Social Control" (1942), Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. ed. (New York, 1954), p. 176 n. 17
17. See Albert J. Glass, "Army Psychiatry before World War II" and "Lessons Learned," in the publication of the medical department of the United States Army, Neuropsychiatry in World War II: Volume I, Zone of the Interior, ed. Glass and Robert J. Bernucci (Washington, D.C., 1966), pp. 3-23, 735-59
18. Norman Q. Brill, 'Ήospitalization and Disposition" and "Station and Regional Hospitals," in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, pp. 195-253, 255-95
19. Brill and Herbert I. Kupper, "Problems of Adjustment in Return to Civilian Life" and "The Psychiatric Patient after Discharge," in Neuropsychialry in World War II, pp. 721-27, 729-33
20. and Bernard D. Karpinos and Glass, "Appendix A: Disqualifications and Discharges for Neuropsychiatric Reasons, World War I and World War II (A Comparative Evaluation)," in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, pp. 761-73
21. See also Adolf Meyer, "Mental Hygiene in the Emergency: Introduction,"
22. Edward A. Strecker, "Mental Hygiene and Mass Man," and Harry Stack Sullivan, "Psychiatry in the Emergency," Mental Hygiene 25 (Jan. 1941): 1-2, 3-5, 5-10
23. See Social Work and Mental Health, ed. James W. Callicut and Pedro J. Lecca (New York, 1983), and Ego-Oriented Casework: Problems and Perspectives: Papers from the Smith College of Social Work, ed. Howard J. Parad and Roger R. Miller (New York, 1963)
24. In the transformation of medicine after World War II, Janowitz has written, "the formulations of psychoanalysis [were the] guideposts" (Janowitz, The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America [Chicago, 1978], p. 423)
25. See E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture (New York, 1992), p. 165
26. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (New York, 1995), pp. 211-12, 246
27. Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices (New York, 1963)
28. and Gerald N. Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, N.J., 1991), p. 3
29. On homosexuals in the military in World War II, see John Costello, Virtue under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Altitudes (Boston, 1985), and Allan Bé- rubé, Coming Out wider Fire: The History of Cay Men and Women in World War Two (New York, 1990), pp. 150, 158, 131, 259. According to Bérubé, Army and Navy psychiatrists began their efforts to discharge rather than imprison homosexual servicemen in the spring of 1941 By 1945 military officials had broken down the sodomist category into a confusing array of legal, psychiatric, and administrative subcategories. Homosexual personnel were identified as either latent, self-confessed, well-adjusted, habitual, undetected or known, true, confirmed, and male or female In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association, building on the standardized nomenclature developed by the Army in 1945, developed its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I), which firmly established homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disorder. [Ibid., pp. 128, 146, 259] From 1947 to 1955, twenty-one states and the District of Columbia enacted sex psychopath laws. Such terms as child molester, homosexual, sex offender, sex psychopath, sex degenerate, and deviate became interchangeable
30. Bettelheim's account was later challenged by other inmates as well as by Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York, 1976), and Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 1997)
31. Friedan Wrote: "the women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps-and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed.... [Isn't the] house in reality a comfortable concentration camp?" Within it women "have become dependent, passive, childlike" (Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [New York, 1963], pp. 305, 307
32. quoted in Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993], p. 232)
33. also Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959)
34. See Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Fifties (New York, 1983), p. 160
35. Quoted in William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston, 1991), p. 20. Holden Caulfield's obsession with phonies and bullshit detection in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Gunnar Myrdal's insistence in An American Dilemma that "the moral struggle goes on within people and not only between them" were other expressions of the new mood (Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. [1944; New York, 1962], l:lxxii)
36. Quoted in Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977), p. 108
37. Philip RiefF, "Reflections on Psychological Man in America," The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, ed. Jonathan B. Imber (Chicago, 1990), p. 8
38. David Riesman, one of the most subtle observers of the 1950s, discusses Freud's female readership in Abundance for What? (1964; New Brunswick, N.J., 1993). It is also true that women read more than men in general. More broadly, the totalizing rejection of psychoanalysis by 1970s feminists obscured the complexity of women's relations to psychoanalysis. Even in the darkest period of the 1950s, such analysts as Phyllis Greenacre, Grete Bibring, Edith Jacobson and Viola Klein, as well as Benjamin Spock and Roy Schafer, encouraged their female patients to free themselves from subjugation to men. The case of Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham's Modem Woman, the Lost Sex (New York, 1947) is symptomatic of the degree of distortion that has occurred. In 1963 Friedan singled out this work's description of feminism as "at its core a deep illness" as exemplary of the postwar psychiatric worldview (quoted in Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 119). Since then the work has been taken to exemplify the Freudian viewpoint in women's studies programs. In fact, Lundberg and Farnham were not analysts. When Psychoanalytic Quarterly reviewed their text in 1947 the reviewer complained that the author's "constricted vision" was "most disheartening.... [They] turn the clock back to the days prior to the industrial revolution" (Francis S. Arkin, review of Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 16 [Oct. 1947]: 574)
39. Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York, 1963), p. 331
40. see also Rebecca Plant, "Combat Exhaustion, Masculinity, and Democracy: Psychiatrists and Their Subjects during World War II" (unpublished paper)
41. Quoted in Graebner, The Age of Doubt, p. 15
42. See Samuel Z. Klausner, Psychiatry and Religion (New York, 1964), p. 226
43. Theodor Reik, Here Life Goes On (Berlin, n.d.), p. 73
44. See The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sάndor Ferenczi, trans. Peter T. Hoffer, ed. Eva Brabant et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1:130 n. 1; see also p. 311
45. Quoted in Kurt Eissler, Medical Orthodoxy and the Future of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1965), pp. 195, 197-98,232
46. Alfred Kazin, "The Freudian Revolution Analyzed," New York Times Magazine, 6 May 1956, p. 40
47. Hence, 18 percent of the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association were (older) women and 27 percent of the (considerably older) training analysts. Even so, see Bertram David Lewin and Helen Ross, Psychoanalytic Education in the United States (New York, 1960), pp. 53, 245
48. Kurzweil, The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Conn., 1989), p. 208
49. and Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud's Women (New York, 1992), p. 6
50. On the involvements of psychoanalysts with McCarthyism, see David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978), pp. 505-6
51. Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (New York, 1964), pp. 371, 377, 387
52. and Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980), pp. 133-43. On the International Psychoanalytic Association, see especially Lucia Villela, "Cale-se, the Chalice of Silence: The Return of the Oppressed in Brazil" (unpublished paper). On Germany, see Kurzweil, The Freudians, pp. 56, 204, 207
53. Gérard Haddad, "Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan: A Preliminary Study," Yale French Studies, no. 85 (1994): 214-15
54. and Regine Lockot, Die Reinigung der Psychoanalyse: Die Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft im Spiegel von Dokumenten und Zeitzeugen (1933-1951) (Tübingen, 1994)
55. Michael Balint, "On the Psychoanalytic Training System," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 29 (1948): 167. According to Heinz Kohut, the training analysis aimed at a "firmly established identification with an idealized figure" (though it often produced, in reaction formation "rebelliousness against this identification") (Heinz Kohut, "Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology: Reflections on the Self-Analysis of Freud," The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut, 1950-1978, ed. Paul H. Ornstein, 4 vols. [New York, 1978-91], 2:796)
56. Kohut, "Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology," p. 796
57. See Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein, "Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2 (1946): 16
58. Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 1989), p. 68; see also p. 17. Similar acts of censorship characterize other publications of the period, such as Kris's early edition of Freud's letters with Wilhelm Fliess. In many cases what was suppressed reflects well on Freud, for example, concerning his attitude toward infant sexual abuse. On this, see Maria Torok, "Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring an Oscillation," Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986): 391-98
59. An 1960 English translation of an 1883 letter has Freud writing Martha Bernays that he planned to live more "like the gentiles-modestly... not striving after discoveries and delving too deep" (quoted in Josef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable [New Haven, Conn., 1991], p.39). Freud's German, however, refers to Gojim-goyim-not gentiles. Such attempts to protect Freud rendered the whole analytic tradition vulnerable to accusations of dishonesty
60. Thus: "Eine große Halle-viele Gäste, die wir empfangen.-Unter ihnen Irma, die ich sofort beiseite nehme, um gleichsam ihren Brief zu beanworten, ihr Vorwufe zu machen, daß sie die 'Losung' noch nicht akzeptiert. Ich sage ihr ...," which is best translated "a large hall-we are receiving many guests-Irma is among them. Right away I take her aside in order to answer her letter and scold her because she doesn't accept my 'solution.' I say to her ...," became in Strachey's version "a large hall-numerous guests, whom we were receiving. Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my 'solution' yet. I said to her . . ." (Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung [1900], vols. 2-3 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. [Frankfurt am Main, 1961], 2:111
61. The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 4:107)
62. See also Darius Gray Ornston, Jr., "Freud's Conception Is Different from Strachey's,"Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 33, no. 2 (1985): 382, 403-4
63. Ornston, "How Standard Is the 'Standard Edition'?" in Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and Its Vicissitudes, ed. Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (New Haven, Conn., 1988), pp. 204, 208
64. Alex Haider, "Reservations about the Standard Edition," in Freud in Exile, pp. 212-13
65. and Helmut Junker, "On the Difficulties of Retranslating Freud into English: Reading Experiences of a German Analyst," in Freud in Exile, p. 216. In dropping Freud's everyday language, Strachey also lost important ambiguities. For example, Freud used the term Ich, "I," to refer to both a psychic structure and the experienced self, thus preserving an ambiguity. Strachey's translation of Ich as "ego" resolved this ambiguity. In Strachey's translation "good" became "appropriate," "need" became "exigency," "at rest" became "in a state of quiescence." Nonetheless, in spite of these problems, Strachey's translation was a monumental achievement
66. Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Crowing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston, 1992), p. 183
67. Sandor Rádo, "A Critical Examination of the Concept of Bisexuality," Psychosomatic Medicine 2 (Oct. 1940)
68. Quoted in Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diag- . nosis (New York, 1981), p. 30; see also p. 28
69. See also Charles W. Socarides, "The Psychoanalytic Theory of Homosexuality: With Special Reference to Therapy," in Sexual Deviation, ed. Ismond Rosen, 2d ed. (New York, 1979), p. 246
70. See Stephen Farber and Mark Green, Hollywood on the Couch: A Candid Look at the Overheated Love Affair between Psychiatrists and Moviemakers (New York, 1993), pp. 58-61, and Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift (New York, 1978), pp. 203-6, 215-16, 230-33. For another account of a positive experience with analysis in the fifties by a male homosexual, see James Merrill, A Different Person: A Memoir (New York, 1993), p. 229. For the odyssey of a gay psychoanalyst from the late fifties on, see Richard A. Isay, Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance (New York, 1996)
71. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York, 1969), p. 38
72. Quoted in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (Reading, Mass., 1990), p. 167
73. See Richard King, The Parly of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972)
74. James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York, 1968)
75. William Barrett, quoted in Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (New York, 1995), p. 66
76. See Dwight Macdonald, "The Root Is Man: Part Two," Politics 3 (July 1916): 194-214,and Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man (New York, 1961), which contains a translation of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore
77. In addition, some African American intellectuals, such as Horace Cayton, coauthor (with St. Clair Drake) of Black Metropolis, underwent analysis. Cayton chose his analyst, Helen V. McLean of Chicago, because her withered arm and gender made him feel that she would understand his "handicap." According to Cayton, in the early stages of his analysis he came to see that race was a "convenient catchall," a rationalization for personal inadequacy, a "means of preventing deeper probing." Later, however, he realized that race "ran to the core of [his] personality" and that it "formed the central focus for [his] insecurity." "I must have drunk it in with my frightened mother's milk" (Horace R. Cayton, Long Old Road [New- York, 1965], pp. 258, 260)
78. Milton Klonsky, "Greenwich Village: Decline and Fall," Commentary 6 (Nov. 1948): 461; quoted in King, The Party of Eros, p. 44
79. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York, 1987), p. 321
80. Paul Goodman, "The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud," Politics 2 (July 1945): 197, 198, 197, 201
81. Mills and Patricia J. Salter, "The Barricade and the Bedroom," Politics 2 (Oct. 1945): 314. Another New York intellectual whose oeuvre was profoundly shaped by psychoanalysis was Richard Hofstadter
82. Lionel Trilling, "Freud and Literature," The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1953), pp. 32-33; my italics
83. Trilling, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965), p. 113
84. RieΠ", Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago, 1979), pp. x, 5
85. Quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston, 1973), p. 102
86. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, 1974), p. 169; hereafter abbreviated EC
87. See also Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse (New York, 1969), pp. 206-7, 222. Much of Hans Loewald's writings similarly ask whether the relation of ego to reality is "one of defense against an outer force . . . originally unrelated to it" or whether the "relatedness between ego and reality" derives "from a unitary whole that differentiates into distinct parts" (Hans W. Loewald, "Ego and Reality," Papers on Psychoanalysis [New Haven, Conn., 1980], p. 11)
88. Brown argued that "genital organization [was] a formation of the ego not yet strong enough to die" (Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History [Middletown, Conn., 1959], p. 132
89. See also Marcuse, "Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown," Commentary 2 (Feb. 1967): 71-75
90. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying: A Novel (New York, 1973), p. 5
91. See Zaretsky, "Freud's Hatchet Man in an Age of Deidealization, " American Imago 53 (Winter 1996): 385-403
92. Leo Rangell, "Psychoanalysis-A Current Look," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 15 (Apr. 1967): 425
93. Rieff, Freud, p. 359 and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (London, 1966), p. 21
94. quot;It is not as if theoretical winds were lacking to drive it. But the motive to go somewhere is missing" (Mary Douglas, In the Active Voice [London, 1982], p. 14)
95. Kohut, "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," The Search for the Self, 2:618
96. The departure of Jong's heroine from analysis in Fear of Flying is emblematic of this moment. Addressing her analyst, she proclaims: "'Don't you see that men have always defined femininity as a means of keeping women in line? Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn't I listen to myself for once? And to other women?'" And then: "As in a dream (I never would have believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years had I been lying there?), picked up my pocketbook, and walked .. . out. . . . No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free!" (Jong, Fear of Flying, pp. 20, 22)