One Hundred Years of Freud in America
Sigmund Freud hated America. He couldn’t stand being called “Sigmund” by
his informal hosts. He believed that Americans had channeled their sexuality
into an unhealthy obsession with money. And he seethed at his own need for the
dollars that we had in such unseemly abundance. “Is it not sad,” he wrote to a
German friend after World War I, “that we are materially dependent on these
savages, who are not a better class of human beings?”
But while Freud loathed
all things American (except its currency), the feeling was anything but mutual.
“No nation outside of Germany and Austria was more hospitable to psychoanalysis
than America,” notes Mark Edmundson in “The Death of Sigmund Freud” (2007).
Freud may even have anticipated the eagerness with which Americans would embrace
his theories. “We are bringing them the plague,” he reportedly told colleagues
when disembarking in New York. “And they don’t even know it.”
Freud made that fateful trip to the New World he so thoroughly despised 100
years ago this month, carrying with him the intellectual equivalent of an alien
species that would run riot in the wildly favorable climate of opinion in its
new home. He traveled from Europe by steamship with Carl Jung and Sándor
Ferenczi, the three of them psychoanalyzing one another en route. When they
arrived, they spent several days touring Chinatown, Coney Island and other New
York sights.
Then Freud went on to Worcester, Mass., where on the morning of
Sept. 7 he gave the first of his famous “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” at
Clark University. At first Freud had been unwilling to accept Clark’s
invitation—the impetus for the whole journey—because it would have meant losing
patient fees in Vienna. “America should bring in money, not cost money,” he
wrote to an acquaintance. But Clark’s president, the psychologist G. Stanley
Hall, rescheduled Freud’s appearance to suit the analyst’s calendar, promised
him an honorary degree—and raised his fee.
The impact of Freud’s talks was
enormous—and enduring. Listeners included the great psychologist William James,
who told an associate of Freud’s that “the future of psychology belongs to your
work.” The anarchist Emma Goldman was at Clark, too, and was smitten. “Only
people of depraved minds,” she said later, “could impugn the motives or find
‘impure’ so great and fine a personality as Freud.”
Freud claimed to dislike
the popularization of his ideas, but he aimed for it with his Clark
lectures—composed for a “lay” audience rather than a specialized one—and scored
a clean bull’s-eye. The lectures sold well in book form, and psychoanalysis was
soon a topic in general-interest magazines. During the 1924 murder trial of
Leopold and Loeb, Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormack cabled Freud
with an offer of $25,000 or, as he put it in telegraphese, “anything he name,”
to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze the killers. Later that year the movie
producer Samuel Goldwyn (who called Freud “the greatest love specialist in the
world”) offered him $100,000 to write for the screen or work as a consultant in
Hollywood. Freud accepted neither offer, but playing hard to get probably
amplified his renown. “By the mid-1920s,” Peter Gay tells us in “Freud: A Life
for Our Time” (1988), “Freud had become a household name.”
In the decades to
come, Freud’s ideas would grow into a kind of orthodoxy in America, becoming a
staple of medical training in psychiatry and permeating the larger culture. By
the 1950s Freudian therapy was almost commonplace for those who could afford it,
and its basic doctrines were familiar even to those who had never reclined on an
analyst’s couch. For literary critics, the encounter with Freud was practically
“transference” at first sight; classics such as “Moby-Dick” were subjected to
psychoanalytic review, and psychobiography became a trendy approach to writing
lives. Popular culture was perhaps more ambivalent, offering layman’s
explanations in paperback but mocking Freud and his ilk in films such as Billy
Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” (1955) and in songs such as the Chad Mitchell
Trio’s “Ballad of Sigmund Freud.”
Since that high-water mark, Freud’s ideas
have gradually receded from American culture. In the humanities, rival
theories—including feminism, structuralism, postcolonialism—have seized the
attention of scholars and critics. More important, Freud’s methods and ideas,
not to mention the mythology that surrounded him, have come under assault from
such skeptics as Adolph Grünbaum, Frank Sulloway and Frederick Crews.
These
attacks have been fueled by decades of clinical and scholarly research. There is
scant evidence, for example, that repressed impulses produce tell-tale symptoms,
as Freud insisted. There is considerable evidence, though, that Freud claimed
success for treatments that failed. In the famous case of “Dora,” he accused a
young girl of lusting for her own molester—and, incidentally, of wanting a kiss
from her therapist. In the case of the admiring Horace Frink, in whom Freud
instantly and erroneously diagnosed latent homosexual tendencies, Freud
aggressively intervened to blow up two marriages. Freud’s clinical record is
riddled with dangerous meddling, ludicrous interpretations tailored to fit his
theories and skewed accounts fashioned to justify himself and his ideas. In the
judgment of the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer, writing in “Freud: Inventor of the
Modern Mind” (2006), Freud “was more devious and less original than he made
himself out to be, and where he pioneered, he was often wrong. Freud displayed
bad character in the service of bad science.”
It would be easy to blame
Freud’s American housecall for the culture of therapy and victimization so
widely decried today. But in fact he landed in a nation that was already well on
its way to throwing over the stoic legacy of Puritan restraint. The rise of
Swedenborgianism, Christian Science and the “mind cure” movement all helped
to cultivate the public’s fascination with a “subconscious” mind long before
Freud got here. “By the middle of the nineteenth century,” Eli Zaretsky writes
in “Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis”
(2004), “American receptivity to the idea of mental healing was unparalleled in
the world.”
It may be still. A Harris poll last year found that nearly one in
three American adults had “received treatment or therapy from a psychologist or
other mental health professional.” Orthodox Freudians are relatively rare
nowadays, and drugs are replacing psychotherapy as a treatment for many mental
ills. (A study out this week from Columbia University says that one in 10
Americans is now on antidepressants.) Yet some version of Freud’s talking
cure—with or without the dogma—is an accepted feature of American middle-class
life.
Before his visit, Freud predicted to his circle of followers that
presumably strait-laced Americans would never embrace his ideas “once they
discover the sexual core of our psychological theories.” But of course in
America sex sells; indeed, it is probably one of the biggest reasons that
Freud’s theories gained such currency here. As with so much else, he was wrong
about that, too.
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