After Freud Left

A Century of Psychoanalysis in America

John Burnham

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226211862, 9780226081373
• eBook ISBN: 9780226081397
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Psychology

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This volume brings together a stunning gallery of leading historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud's legacy in the United States in the century since his visit.        

There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud's life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud's work had monumental intellectual and social impact. The essays in After Freud Left provide readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans' psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century. After Freud Left will be essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American history, general intellectual and cultural history, and psychology and psychiatry.

 

PART ONE

1909 to the 1940s:
Freud and the Psychoanalytic Movement Cross the Atlantic

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Transnationalizing

Part I starts with Freud’s visit to America in 1909 and then continues to trace how psychoanalytic practices and ideas spread in the four decades that followed. The authors in Part I generally focus on practitioners, those who constituted the front ranks of the formal psychoanalytic movement. Freud dominated the story only briefly, at the very beginning, before other figures carried and spread the ideas and practices in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, as leading psychoanalysts fled the Nazis and ended up on American shores, the transnational movement of psychoanalysis from Central Europe to the United States took on a new dimension and scale.

The essayists in Part I write against the background furnished by many historians who have shown that Freud already by 1909 had in his mind the basic components of a distinctive but formidable intellectual world-view based on the education of a cultivated European and centered around his work as a physician and psychotherapist. He had already revealed parts of this schema in German-language publications. The focus of our authors, however, is not so much on Freud personally as on his role and that of many others as carriers of his ideas, and in this case specifically transnational carriers.

This story of the continuing transatlantic transfer of Freud’s legacy was not ever a simple one. Our Part I authors distinguish two threads that give continuity to the stories. One is indeed the process of transnationalizing, of which the transfer of psychoanalysis to the United States is a spectacular historical example. The other thread is the importance of local settings and events, as is obvious from the events at Clark University in 1909 to the actual transfer of local groups of practitioners from Europe to new localities in the United States in the face of Nazi persecution. Indeed, general historians of psychoanalysis, too, have very often focused on local events, trying on some level to find universals in very specific happenings, typically in communities such as Vienna, Budapest, or Zürich.

Scholars, not least Nathan G. Hale Jr., have traced in detail how, in the United States, cultural and media leaders before 1950 often mentioned or alluded to psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic ideas. As science and technology appeared with special prominence in intellectual and popular media in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, so did psychoanalysis. All were particularly part of the interwar fad of “modernity,” the popular quest for innovation exemplified in the successive models of new cars that now came regularly out of Detroit each year. American writers urged “modern,” educated people to learn about their hidden selves, whether formed from complexes and drives or glandular imbalances or childhood conditioning. By the 1930s, even theatergoers and movie goers could learn about treatment for neurotic symptoms, treatment most often labeled “psychoanalysis.”¹

The greatest direct impact, however, took place among thinkers—leading intellectuals in all fields, including the arts and literature, but especially the American social sciences.² During the 1920s, a number of specific institutions appeared and developed in which the influence of psychoanalytic ideas was explicit. One was the child guidance movement, which originated in Chicago and Boston and spread to the whole world. Another was the Yale Institute of Human Relations. Psychoanalytic ideas were particularly central in the culture and personality studies that dominated much of the social science innovation in the United States from the late 1920s into the 1960s.³

It was in this intellectual and social milieu that a new generation of American analysts came into prominence in the interwar period. A number trained in Europe and helped carry additional and new psychoanalytic ideas from Berlin or Vienna directly back to the United States. Their patients, like those of the older analysts, included major cultural arbiters, often in literature, the media, and the social sciences. Such powerful leading figures as anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and sociologist William Fielding Ogburn thus gained personal knowledge of psychoanalytic practice and theory without leaving the United States. As our authors show, from the beginning the history of psychoanalytic practice and ideas was cultural as well as technical.

For all of the complexity, the initial event itself—of which these papers mark the centennial—unfolded in a straightforward way in 1909. Versions of the story were recounted by historians over many years, and then in 1992, after decades of research, Saul Rosenzweig published an exhaustive reconstruction of the visit:⁴

February 28. Freud finally accepts the invitation of G. Stanley Hall to speak at the meetings that will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Clark University.

August 19. Freud travels from his home in Vienna to Bremen.

August 21. Freud, along with his traveling companions, C. G. Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, boards the North German Lloyd liner, the George Washington, to travel from Bremen to the New World.

August 29. Freud arrives at a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, and travels to his hotel in New York City.

September 7–11. Freud delivers five lectures, in German, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

September 21. Freud embarks for Bremen on the North German Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse.

October 2. Freud finally arrives back at Berggasse 19, his home in Vienna.

The authors of the first papers in this section focus on the historical symbol that Freud and his visit became.⁵ Any time that one looks closely at such historical memories, one gets into revisionism or myth-busting. As is usually the case, the actual historical details of 1909 are far more informative than any symbolic event. So it turns out in the essays of these authors. The story they uncover provides a fresh account of a familiar narrative, as Richard Skues will note explicitly.

But the authors also raise fundamental questions. Of what did psychoanalysis consist that it could be transmitted and understood—or misunderstood? Sonu Shamdasani provides a point of comparison as he re-creates for us the world of psychotherapy in 1909. Skues spells out not only when the visit became iconic but how Freud’s lectures brought a wholly new dimension to what he had to offer to Americans and, indeed, the world, beyond another version of psychotherapy. Ernst Falzeder raises the question of Freud’s personal role as a transmitter not only in 1909 but for the next thirty years. Falzeder joins Shamdasani and Skues in implicitly calling attention to the distorting and misleading assumption that the receivers of intellectual transmission in the United States, even those enthusiastic about psychoanalysis, were passive receptacles of doctrine.⁶

Just as Skues’s paper follows Shamdasani’s inquiries in a natural sequence, so Falzeder next asks about the extent to which Freud was a necessary agent in bringing his ideas to the United States—implicitly, again, the question of Freud’s role, or lack of role, as a popularizer of psychoanalysis. To find out, Falzeder looks closely at Freud’s antipathy toward America and refines the question why Freud’s attitude did so little to slow the transit of his ideas across national cultural boundaries in 1909 and afterward. We already know that Freud’s prejudices did influence at least his close associates, many of whom ended up in the New World in the 1930s. Beyond the usual European stereotyping of uncultured Americans, Freud had substantial concerns.⁷ Americans’ enthusiasm was often just lip service. Many or most Americans were careless of theoretical and technical details. And they were notoriously given to eclecticism, pragmatically taking only parts of psychoanalysis, not the whole, carefully considered edifice. Franz Alexander, who came from Berlin in 1930, blamed the rigid conservatism of later émigré analysts on their knowing “too well” Freud’s own “reservations about dilutions in America.”⁸

In one dimension, George Makari’s tale of the coming of the émigrés to New York involves much personal tragedy. Important historical agents, well established in cultures in which they felt comfortable, respected, and influential, suddenly were thrust into a culture they mostly disdained—but they were without funds and often barred from their accustomed work by technical regulations. To top it off, they were partially disabled by language handicaps and patronized by colleagues of whom they disapproved or whom they considered inferior. Moreover, especially as the dangerous era of the Cold War set in, an important contingent for whom high culture combined with leftist politics fearfully hid their political views, which had been very much a part of their intellectual identity. They thus found themselves falling in with the narrowness they perceived in the medical orientation of organized psychoanalysis in the United States.⁹ As Makari shows, the extent to which what could be assumed in Europe could take root in New York was limited and sculpted by circumstance and by the institutions and personnel already present. In the details, Makari presents remarkable vignettes showing exactly how the transfer of intellectual and professional ideas took place and did not take place in the face of cultural and institutional-political constraints.

Hale Usak-Sahin brings in additional specific examples of the variety of routes and agents through which psychoanalysis came into the United States. Both the everyday and comparative aspects demonstrate the complexities in the transfer process. Usak-Sahin’s story centers around Baltimore, a reminder that transfer from Europe had multiple entrepots and local settings, and in this case, through Adolf Meyer, a direct connector to Freud’s 1909 visit. Some of the agents of cultural transfer from 1909 to the 1940s were absolutely central. Others played much more modest roles. Our authors bring out by example and by historical synthesis the ways in which cultural attributes of professional and general populations within the United States conditioned how, and to what extent, Freud’s influence and legacy affected the institutions of mental healing. They also suggest how disagreements about technique could engage not only theory but the changing cultural environment. Many of the carriers and receivers of psychoanalytic ideas were, as our authors make clear, sensitive indicators of trends and changes in the American cultural environment, beginning in 1909.

ONE

Psychotherapy, 1909: Notes on a Vintage

SONU SHAMDASANI

The year is 1909. Henry Ford commences manufacturing the Model T. Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto, and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes took the stage by storm in Paris. In Rome, Joan of Arc was beatified, and the city of Tel Aviv was founded. Henry James’s Italian Hours appeared, alongside Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the now long-forgotten Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman to have won it). Notable births include Isaiah Berlin, Benny Goodman, and Lester Young, and in psychotherapy, Rollo May and Jerome Frank.¹

In the psychotherapeutic world, iconic significance is attached to Freud’s 1909 visit to America. But did this have anywhere near the importance subsequently attributed to it? The subsequent rise of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic rewriting of history had the effect of obliterating much of the landscape of the world of psychotherapy and dynamic psychiatry that Freud encountered.² Before one can assess the effects of Freud’s trip, then, one needs to salvage and repopulate this landscape. In the following pages, I plan to give a panning shot of the state of psychotherapy and dynamic psychiatry in 1909, restricting myself to publications and events in 1909 itself, as a synchronic view may highlight features that tend to be obscured by the more usual diachronic perspectives. As the topic of this book is “After Freud Left,” my contribution will depict the scene “Before Freud Came.”

In the psychological world, the major conference in 1909 was undoubtedly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: 1909 TO THE 1940S: FREUD AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT CROSS THE ATLANTIC
• PART II: AFTER WORLD WAR II: THE FATE OF FREUD’S LEGACY IN AMERICAN CULTURE
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Chronological Guide to Events
• List of Contributors
• Index