Review
“With the end of the “Freudian Century,” psychoanalysis is now a cultural study rather thana a medical treatment. Eli Zaretsky not only makes this claim but charts its complex history. The placing of psychoanalysis in its historical and social context and teasing out the relationship behind its enormous importance and its continuous marginality, is what we have been waiting for. An important book.”
–Juliet Mitchell
About the Author
Eli Zaretsky was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. His book, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, has been translated into fourteen languages. His articles on the history of the family, psychoanalysis, and modern cultural history have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. He is currently Professor of History at the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, New School University in New York City.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From The Washington Post
I was a callow lad of 19 when I encountered Freud in an introductory psychology class in college. I read The Interpretation of Dreams and was swept away by Freud's hypnotic language and fascinating exploration of the inner self. I began waking up cloaked in dreamy images until I was having so many dreams, as Yogi Berra might have said, that I couldn't sleep at all. That initial fascination with Freud ended when I realized he wasn't helping my sputtering social life, which was why I'd taken the course. America's flirtation lasted much longer than mine, about half a century. Yet Freud and his followers, who dominated American psychiatry after World War II, fell out of fashion in the 1970s, and the nation, too, moved on. What happened? How could a man whose writings and personal magnetism "permanently transformed the ways in which ordinary men and women throughout the world understand themselves" have left behind "a pseudoscience whose survival is now very much in doubt?"
That is the question the historian Eli Zaretsky asks in Secrets of the Soul. Many psychiatrists and therapists would argue that Freud has not sunk quite as low as Zaretsky suggests, that psychodynamic therapy, derived from psychoanalysis, helps many people. (If you're quiet, you can hear the therapists bristling at "pseudoscience.") But while Einstein, Edison and Henry Ford, to name a few of his contemporaries, have endured as iconic figures, Freud has fallen far from the intellectual pinnacle on which he stood a hundred years ago.
Zaretsky's explanation has to do with the way Freud's ideas became intertwined in society, culture and, most important, economics. As society changed during the economic upheavals of the past century, Freud's place in it changed, too. If, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, Shakespeare invented what it means to be human, Freud invented what it means to be an individual in an industrialized, mass-produced world. Before Freud, life and work centered on the family. But the industrial revolution took work out of the family and, for the first time, gave people an identity separate from that of their families. Freud helped us understand those new identities, Zaretsky says, in a way that both eased the transition and sowed the seeds of revolt.
Freud's ideas were crucial for the success of what Zaretsky calls the second industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was the transition from factory to farm. The second was from factory to vertically integrated corporation, typified by the Ford Motor Company, which forged its own steel, grew its own rubber trees and controlled the whole chain of production, right down to the dealers who sold Fords in any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
Ford and his imitators had to create demand for the products they could now produce so efficiently, and Freud's consumer was exactly what they needed: The individual was seen as "infinitely desiring, rather than capable of satisfaction," Zaretsky writes, "an image that was indispensable to the growth of mass consumption."
But Freud and his utopian followers, including Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, also helped spark the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, with its challenge to industrial society. As Zaretsky points out, psychoanalysis rejected the "suffocating conformity" of the family, encouraged "authenticity, expressive freedom, and play" and led student activists to conclude that work should be satisfying, not merely a way to make a living. Eventually, when that movement collapsed, Freud was taken down, too. A more experimental, drug-oriented approach to therapy began to displace psychoanalysis, and managed care's restrictions on treatment delivered the fatal blow.
This is only a sampling of the issues that Zaretsky discusses in this expansive, authoritative work. He charts the many shifts in Freud's thinking over the course of his long creative life. He recounts the ways in which psychoanalysis spread from Vienna, across Europe, to the United States and around the world. Zaretsky also sorts out the complex web of friendships, schisms and rivalries that enveloped Freud and his disciples, continuing after Freud's death in 1939.
Perhaps because it is so ambitious, Zaretsky's book is also challenging and difficult at times. Dedicated readers will find their efforts rewarded; those who don't already have some familiarity with the basic tenets of psychoanalysis might have more trouble.
But then, as Zaretsky demonstrates, we all have some familiarity with Freud, whether we've read him or not. Freud and his followers "introduced or redefined such words as 'oral,' 'anal,' 'phallic,' 'genital,' 'unconscious,' 'psyche,' 'drives,' 'conflict,' 'neurosis,' 'hysterical,' 'father complex,' 'inferiority complex,' 'ego-ideal,' 'narcissist,' 'exhibitionist,' 'inhibition,' 'ego,' 'id,' and 'superego.' " Freud left us with the indelible understanding that we each have an inner world, and that it binds us to the social and political world in which we live. Zaretsky does an admirable job of showing us how he did it.
Reviewed by Paul Raeburn
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
THE PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS
In the modern West there have been two episodes of genuine, widespread introspection: Calvinism and Freudianism. In both cases the turn inward accompanied a great social revolution: the rise of capitalism in the first, and its transformation into an engine of mass consumption in the second. In both cases, too, the results were ironic. Calvinism urged people to look inside themselves to determine whether they had been saved, but it wound up contributing to a new discipline of work, savings, and family life. Freudian introspection aimed to foster the individual's capacity to live an authentically personal life, yet it wound up helping to consolidate consumer society. In both cases, finally, the turn toward self-examination generated a new language. In the case of Calvinism, the language centered on the Protestant idea of the soul, an idea that helped shape such later concepts as character, integrity, and autonomy. The new Freudian lexicon, by contrast, centered on the idea of the unconscious, the distinctive analytic contribution to twentieth-century personal life.
Of course, the idea of the unconscious was well known before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Medieval alchemists, German idealist philosophers, and romantic poets had all taught that the ultimate reality was unconscious. The philosopher Schopenhauer, a profound influence on Freud's teacher, Theodor Meynert, maintained that human beings were the playthings of a blind, anonymous will. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of the subconscious was especially widespread. Often termed a "secondary self," larger than the mere ego and accessible through hypnosis or meditation, the subconscious implied the ability to transcend everyday reality. Whether as cosmic force, impersonal will, or subconscious, the unconscious was understood, before Freud, to be anonymous and transpersonal. Frequently likened to the ocean, it aimed to leave the "petty" concerns of the ego behind.
Freud, too, thought of the unconscious as impersonal, anonymous, and radically other to the individual. But harbored within it, generally close to consciousness, he discerned something new: an internal, idiosyncratic source of motivations peculiar to the individual. In his conception, contingent circumstances, especially in childhood, forged links between desires and impulses, on the one hand, and experiences and memories on the other. The result was a personal unconscious, unique, idiosyncratic, and contingent. For Freud, moreover, there was no escaping into a "larger" or transpersonal reality. The goal, rather, was to understand and accept one's own idiosyncratic nature, a task that, in principle, could never be completed. While Freud went on to posit universal mental patterns, such as the supposed stages of sexual development (oral, anal, genital) and the Oedipus complex, his focus remained the concrete and particular ways that individuals lived out these patterns.
As Schorske suggested, Freud formulated the concept of the personal unconscious in response to a crisis in the nineteenth-century liberal worldview. This crisis began with industrialization. Associated with the early factory system, the first industrial revolution seemed to reduce individuals to mere cogs in a cruel and irresistible machine. The Victorians erected the famous "haven in a heartless world"-the nineteenth-century middle-class family-against what they viewed as "the petty spite and brutal tyranny" of the workplace. Heavily gendered, the Victorian worldview was in one sense proto-Freudian: it located the "true self" in a private or familial context.1 Nonetheless, it viewed that context as a counterpart to, or compensation for, the economy-not as a discrete and genuinely personal sphere. The latter understanding emerged only with the crumbling of the Victorian family ideal during the second industrial revolution, amid the beginnings of mass production and mass consumption in the 1890s.
To be sure, mass production deepened the crisis in the liberal worldview, for example, by introducing the assembly line. But it also revealed the emancipatory potential of capitalism in mass culture, leisure, and personal life. By the mid-nineteenth century, cultural modernity, foretold by Baudelaire in Paris, Whitman in Brooklyn, and Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg, had already weakened Victorianism's separate-spheres ideology and fostered an interest in hysteria, decadence, artistic modernism, the "new woman," and the homosexual. Fin de siècle culture exacerbated the crisis. As women entered public life, there emerged polyglot urban spaces and new forms of sensationalist, mass entertainment, such as amusement parks, dance halls, and film. The result was a conflict over the heritage of the Enlightenment. Suddenly, the liberal conception of the human subject seemed problematic to many, as did its highest value: individual autonomy.
For the Enlightenment, autonomy meant the ability to rise above the "merely" private, sensory, and passive or receptive propensities of the mind in order to reach universally valid rational conclusions. Convinced that fin de siècle culture undermined this ability, many observers lamented the new forces of "degeneration," "narcissism," and "decadence." Freud's fellow Viennese Otto Weininger, for example, warned of the threat to autonomy from what he called the "W" factor-passivity or dependency-which tended to be concentrated in women, homosexuals, and Jews. Thus, he joined an extensive chorus calling for a return to self-control, linked to hard work, abstinence, and savings. At the same time, the beginnings of mass consumption also gave rise to a party of "release." Especially among the middle classes, many people found that the conscious effort they had devoted to working hard and saving only made them (in William James's words) "twofold more the children of hell." Contending that modernity required "an anti-moralistic method," James and others commended "mind cure" and hypnosis as methods that allowed individuals to relax their efforts at self-control.2
It was in the context of this division that Freud developed his idea of the personal unconscious. In particular, he was responding to the alternation between "control" and "release" that characterized late-nineteenth-century psychiatry. On one side, the tradition of psychiatry that descended from the Enlightenment sought to restore control by strengthening the will and ordering the reasoning processes of "disordered" individuals. On the other side, a later generation of "dynamic" psychiatrists and neurologists sought to facilitate "release" through hypnotism and meditation. Freud's idea of the personal unconscious represented an alternative to both positions. Treating neither self-control nor release per se as a primary value, it encouraged a new, nonjudgmental or "analytic" attitude toward the self. The result was a major modification of the Enlightenment idea of the human subject. No longer the locus of universal reason and morality, the modern individual would henceforth be a contingent, idiosyncratic, and unique person, one whose highly charged and dynamic interiority would be the object of psychoanalytic thought and practice.
To appreciate Freud's innovation, we need to look briefly at the psychologies that preceded it. From the start, bourgeois society had generated a fresh emphasis on individual psychology. Earlier societies were premised on the model of a great chain of being: the important question was the individual's place in an objective hierarchy. With the rise of capitalism, however, lineage systems receded and ascribed identities ebbed. Increasingly, the important question became not where one stood but who one was. With the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that accompanied it, the conception of the human subject moved to the center of every pursuit, including government, education, and social reform.
Nevertheless, the Enlightenment idea of the subject had little to do with individuality in the twentieth-century sense of that word. Rather, it was linked to the Enlightenment project of a planned, orderly world, a world made up of rational individuals. The key discovery of the Enlightenment was that the manacles that enslaved humanity were, as William Blake wrote, "mind-forged." Progress was not simply a matter of facing up to external obstacles such as despots, priests, and outmoded institutions; it required overcoming internal obstacles as well. If a rational world was to be achieved, the ordering of the individual's internal or mental world would be necessary.
The Enlightenment psychology that described how rational order could prevail was associationism. Derived from John Locke's thought, and closely connected to the seventeenth-century revolution in physics, associationism assumed that the mind was composed of sensations or representations arising in the external environment and "associated" according to whether they were similar to one another, or whether they had entered the mind at the same time. In Britain, France, and the United States, associationism animated the entire Enlightenment project. For one thing, it explained the importance of infancy: in the early years the brain was soft, "almost liquid," so that tracks set down could last a lifetime.3 Associationism also inspired the building of schools, prisons, and asylums. Modeled on the "well-run family," these new institutions manipulated architecture, schedules, and work regimes to reorder the mental associations of the students, criminals, and lunatics housed within them. Even professions that were aimed at everyday life, such as city building and public health, were based on associationist principles. So pervasive was its influence that one philosophe called associationism "the center whence ...
