Freud went to America only once, in 1909, invited to Clark University for a series of lectures. These were the point of departure for the rise of psychoanalysis in America.
In An Autobiographical Study1, Freud describes his stay in America and his relations with his American colleagues in enthusiastic terms, even if he shows himself critical of the future of psychoanalysis in America: “In 1909 Jung and I were summoned to America by G. Stanley Hall, to give a week of lectures in German at Clark University… Hall was justly an eminent psychologist and educator who, for years, had brought psychoanalysis into his teaching; he had something of the ‘Kingmaker’ about him. There we met J. Putnam, the Harvard neurologist, who despite his age grew enthusiastic about psychoanalysis and championed its cultural value and the purity of its intentions… I was then 53, I felt young and in good health… When I mounted the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis2, it seemed to me that an incredible daydream was coming true. Psychoanalysis was thus no longer a delusional production; it had become a precious part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it enjoys an uncommon popularity with the public and is recognized by many official psychiatrists as an important part of medical teaching. Unfortunately, there too, much water has been mixed in with it. More than one abuse, with which it has nothing to do, borrows its name; there the possibility is lacking of training analysts thoroughly in technique and theory. In America it also runs up against ‘behaviorism,’ which boasts in its naïveté of having entirely eliminated the psychological problem.”
Freud’s relations with America were always highly ambivalent and reticent. And if the rise of psychoanalysis there was “meteoric,” psychoanalytic discourse gradually coming to occupy a preponderant place among professionals but also with the general public, it was at the cost of an eclecticism and a mixing of models and references whose effects are still felt today.
Freud and the Americans
Freud’s journey to America, to which he also invited Ferenczi, was marked by numerous reservations, and these persisted throughout his life3. His lectures marked a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis in the United States. Yet he accepted this invitation with perplexity and mistrust, and these did not dissipate, even after he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa, with Jung invited at the same time as he.
As Mady Jeannet-Hasler recalls, Freud’s family had emigrated to Austria for economic reasons, and part of it lived in England. In the years 1885–90, Freud had considered emigrating to the United States. He gave up this project because “alas, things went so well in Vienna that I decided to stay”4.
Freud hesitated to accept Stanley Hall’s invitation, and at first he refused it “because the proposed date would have occasioned a great material loss”5. On January 10, 1909, he wrote to Ferenczi: “I find that the demand to sacrifice so much money on this occasion to give lectures is altogether too ‘American.’ America must bring in money, not cost money. Besides, we should very soon be blacklisted there, as soon as they hit upon the sexual underpinnings of our psychology”6. The postponement of the proposed date for the lectures and the increase in the financial contribution for these lectures and this journey7 allowed Freud finally to accept the invitation. The Freud-Ferenczi Correspondence teems with details about the practical organization of the journey. Ferenczi learned English and ordered books about America. He would later receive many American patients in analysis, whether during his journey in 1926 or in Hungary, and these would help, as for Freud, to secure him a certain financial footing, over which both men would congratulate themselves.
Freud’s ambivalence with respect to this journey was also reflected in the fact that only the traces of the European presence and of Greek antiquity in that country seemed to interest him. He wrote to Ferenczi in August 1909: “I declare myself definitively unfit for the preparations for America. I have read nothing other than a work of archaeology on Cyprus; this connects to New York insofar as the largest collection of Cypriot antiquities is currently located in that city, where I do indeed hope to admire it. You see, it is a good illustration of the profound words of the Magic Flute: ‘I cannot compel you to love me.’ America means nothing to me, but I rejoice greatly in our journey together.”8. He prepared no lecture, saying that he would see to it on the boat9. In fact, he seems to have prepared them during his morning walks10, and he improvised them. After much hesitation, he presented an overview of his theories, the first metapsychology. This would for a long time remain the major reference in the United States, despite the evolutions of Freudian theory.
At the conferral of the honoris causa degrees on September 10, 1909, Freud seemed, according to certain accounts, out of step with his interlocutors. Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist and campaigner for sexual rights, was there, in the front row. She describes him thus:
Dressed without pretension, almost hunched in on himself… in that spectacular row of professors in full regalia, as stiff as they were presumptuous beneath the requisite robe and cap, Freud looked like a giant lost among pygmies11.
Freud’s mistrust of and prejudices against the Americans did not dissipate, despite the welcome reserved for him and the impact of his lectures in professional circles and in society, the strong personal and professional ties he forged with Stanley Hall and J. J. Putnam, among others, his admiration for William James’s attitude in the face of an illness the latter knew to be fatal, and his keen interest in the development of psychoanalysis in the United States. Putnam, a professor of neurology at Harvard, became one of the pillars of psychoanalysis in the United States. Since 1895 he had been working on the functional disorders of the nervous system (the illnesses of the nervous system that could not be attributed to an organic cause and that seemed rather to be of psychological origin). When he met Freud, he became an ardent defender of psychoanalysis in the United States. Although he “often addressed to Freud objections close to those of Jung, Adler, or other neo-Freudians,” he remained always faithful to him and to what they both called “The Cause.” This term brings out the share of ideology, of ideal, and of militant commitment invested in psychoanalysis. During Freud’s stay in the United States, Putnam invited him to spend a few days at his ranch in the Adirondack Mountains. William James, a central figure of American psychology, received the lectures given at Clark University with more reserve.
Concerning Freud’s reservations with respect to America, Ernest Jones writes, in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: “Despite his gratitude for the friendly reception given to him (…) Freud did not retain a very favorable impression of America. To soften it even a little, long years of intimacy with the Americans who came to see him in Vienna were necessary… Freud himself attributed his aversion to the United States to persistent intestinal troubles caused, he asserted in a manner that was certainly hardly convincing, by American cooking…” In fact, during his stay Freud had abdominal pains that prevented him from fully enjoying his journey and his stay at Putnam’s ranch. He also had prostate problems that he attributed to the “American conveniences” (the difficulty of finding easily accessible toilets during his stay). “For long years,” writes Jones, “it was to this journey to America that Freud continued to attribute these ailments. He even went so far as to assure me that his handwriting had deteriorated there…” And Jones continues: “Freud, in a moment of high spirits, predicted the extinction of the white race in a few millennia in favor of the black race. He added, jokingly: ‘America is already threatened by the Blacks, and it serves it right. There aren’t even any wild strawberries!…’”12. Freud had difficulty adapting to the style and manners of the Americans, whom he judged “casual and brazen”13.
Freud’s prejudices against America were tied, among other things, to the pessimistic view he took of his Jewish origins, on account of the antisemitism reigning in Austria and more broadly in Europe, and of his career, and to the fear — often justified, especially during the economic crisis that ravaged Germany and Central Europe in the 1920s — of being confronted with financial problems. Thus, in February 1910, after announcing to Ferenczi the publication in the United States of his lectures, he wrote: “A few finds and ideas have now led me to seek to exhume treasures that are not of the kind found at D.(una) P.(entele). Science and morbid rumination draw close to one another and to their equivalents. All in all, I am still only a money-making machine, and I am exhausting myself with work these last weeks. A rich young Russian14 whom I took on because of a compulsive amorous passion confessed to me, after the first session, the following transferences: Jew, swindler, he would like to take me from behind and shit on my head”15.
In 1926, in the midst of the debate over lay analysis (or Laienanalyse)16, but also in the midst of the economic crisis, Freud wrote to Ferenczi, who was preparing his journey to the United States: “That cursed America! So you’re off there…”17. And a few days later: “For America you have put together a heavy program. Don’t let yourself be exhausted. You know about American-style exploitation, the Taylor system”18. And on September 19, 1926: “Before entrusting yourself to the sea to go and visit the land of the barbarous dollars…”19.
The Development of Psychoanalysis in the United States
Beyond his personal problematic, did Freud have reasons to doubt America?
His coming to America coincided with a moment of crisis and a desire for change in society, in the culture, in the professional milieus — a moment when psychoanalysis could appear as a response to this crisis, which concerned, on the one hand, sexual morality, the puritan values, and the moral order that existed in society, and, on the other hand, the somatic approach to the treatment of neurological illnesses (which at the time included hysteria) and psychiatric ones, which had shown its dead ends.
After the lectures at Clark University, and although the remarks of the fourth lecture, which bore on the sexuality of children, had scandalized many of those attending and had been trivialized by the newspapers that reported on them, psychoanalysis spread like a “wildfire without equivalent in the diffusion of new ideas in the United States”20 among the professional milieus and the general public.
This diffusion was complex and ambiguous. Indeed, psychiatry and the general public — the links were numerous between professional culture and popular culture — seized not upon psychoanalysis but upon the psychoanalytic theories that interested them. They thus sought to respond to the dead ends and crises with which they were confronted, to improve psychiatric or psychotherapeutic practice, but without renouncing the eclecticism and pragmatism that characterized them. The Americans were interested in the applications of psychoanalysis to psychiatry and to social problems. Revisited psychoanalytic theories thus had a major impact on the mental hygiene that was beginning to develop in the USA, on social work, criminology, psychotherapeutic approaches, and the Americans’ attitude toward morality and sexual behaviors. Within the very associations of psychoanalysts, leading figures such as Hall, Meyer, or Oberndorf never renounced their eclecticism.
How is one to explain the forms taken by the development of psychoanalysis in the United States?
Psychiatrists (and neurologists) were confronted with multiple therapeutic dead ends in using an organic approach to functional neurological disorders and to mental disorders, but also with psychotherapeutic techniques, rest, massage, kind words. They were in search of new theories. From an evolutionist perspective, they had taken an interest in the psychology of the child in order better to understand human nature. The formula “the first years decide everything” already had the air of a commonplace in the USA in the 1900s21. Doctors had, well before Freud’s arrival, attempted to define what the subconscious and the unconscious were. They were receptive to the pre-Freudian ideas developed in Europe by Janet, for example, who had made two journeys to America in 1904 and 1906. Given the therapeutic dead ends of the somatic approach to nervous and psychic disorders, some neurologists practiced psychotherapy. They were concerned, like their European counterparts and even before Freud’s elaborations were known, with traumas, buried memories, the subconscious, “complexes.”
At the start of the twentieth century, the founders of American psychology had moreover become involved in the struggle against “the puritan repression of joy and pleasure”22. In a society in crisis with respect to its moral, family, and sexual values, the psychiatrists and psychologists, broadening the field of their practice, set themselves to the renovation of the sexual and moral hygiene that ought to be developed in society, with a view to the prophylaxis of mental disorders and neuroses. The commitment of psychoanalysis to the struggle for the prophylaxis of neuroses and for the creation of a “new man” was also advocated by Freud, as several of his texts show23. The Freudian theory of the unconscious, of sexuality, of repression would crystallize the movements, the reflections, the often scattered intuitions that existed among the professionals of mental health and in American society. It was not a matter of breaking with psychiatry and neurology, but rather of creating a new neuropsychiatric model with the help of psychoanalysis24. Laienanalyse, or lay analysis — that is, the possibility that non-doctors might become analysts — met with lively opposition in America. The New York Psychoanalytic Society, like the American Association, admitted into its ranks only doctors, with no obligation, in the case of the American Association, of having “undergone a satisfactory psychoanalysis”25. Accusations of mistreatment against Theodor Reik, who was not a doctor, brought by an American, gave rise to the debate over the practice of psychoanalysis by non-doctors. Freud defended Theodor Reik, and his positions found much of an echo in Ferenczi, who waged a very harsh debate with the Americans during his second journey to the United States. The New York Psychoanalytic Society insisted on the fact that the training of non-doctors through analysis was to allow them to practice solely in non-therapeutic fields such as anthropology or theology. It lent its support to the bills that made the practice of psychotherapies and of psychoanalysis by non-doctors illegal.
In this context, questions about the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the possibilities of confirming it by experimental methods, of having reproducible cases — questions still current both in the USA and in Europe26, and which also existed in Europe from the very birth of psychoanalysis27 — took on here a particular acuteness. Hence the importance of Jung and of the association tests he proposed with his Swiss colleagues in the introduction of psychoanalysis to the USA around 1905, and the impact of his theories after his break with Freud. The latter, indeed, claimed to be scientific and without rupture from medical practice. This was not the case with Freudian psychoanalysis, which situated itself in a logic of rupture from its neurological origins, even if Freud was not free of ambivalence and contradictory positions regarding the scientific status of psychoanalysis.
Involved in the crisis of moral and family values, campaigning for a new morality and a new sexual hygiene, caught up in the implicit assumptions of American culture, witnessing the reworking of family models, the psychiatrists and neurologists focused rather, in their interpretation of psychoanalysis, on the relations of love and hate within the family and on the influence of the environment. They left aside the drives (among others, the sexual drive and the death drive). They used above all the adaptive and pedagogical elements present in certain of Freud’s texts.
With the First World War, the importance of the traumatic neuroses and the theoretical and clinical questions they posed gave weight to the Freudian conceptions. The therapeutic dead ends with which the psychiatrists were confronted in dealing with the soldiers allowed a confirmation of the Freudian theories, but always with the same eclectic approach.
Moreover, after the war of 1914–18, “the new American psychiatry, an eclectic blend of A. Meyer’s psychobiological approach and of various psychoanalytic schools, found a powerful supporting force in the psychiatric social workers, for whom, on account of the war, important training programs had been created”28. These social workers, very present in the struggles for mental hygiene and the new sexual morality that ran through American society in the 1920s, contributed to the diffusion of psychoanalytic discourse in education, pedagogy, and criminology. This diffusion of concepts, rather of the folk psychology type, was accompanied by an extension of the demands addressed not to psychoanalysis, but to a new psychoanalytic psychology and pedagogy. In child guidance clinics, mothers now consulted out of worry, the children’s poor school results, the feeling of being unhappy, and they sought help and advice. The extension of the field of psychoanalysis was no doubt tied both to the psychoanalytic model, which introduced a continuum between normality and mental illness, and to the development of mental hygiene in the years 1917–1940 in the USA.
The impact that the psychoanalytic theories took on in society after Freud’s coming to the United States was also due to the very great success, between 1904 and 1910, of a popular current borne along by groups of religious psychotherapy, such as the Emmanuel movement, Christian Science, or New Thought. These associations mingled hypnosis, suggestion, and healing by the spirit. The same popular fervor that had allowed the development of these movements seized upon the psychoanalytic theories. The mass-circulation press played a not inconsiderable role in this phenomenon. It sought to make Freud into a new “charismatic leader”29. A journalist describes Freud thus:
From the outset, one sees that he is a refined being, whose intellectual vigor has made the most of an eclectic education. His kind and limpid eyes carry the piercing gaze of the doctor; his lofty brow, the bump of observation. One cannot but admire his hands, overflowing with energy30.
Freud nonetheless publicly condemned popular psychotherapy and the Emmanuel movement when he was interviewed. Answering a journalist’s questions, he said: “When I think of the many doctors who, after years of initiation into the techniques of modern psychotherapy, still practice it only with the most extreme caution, I tell myself that this initiative by individuals whose medical training is nonexistent or nearly so is questionable to say the least. I understand that this sort of psychotherapeutic Church should appeal to the public, always avid for mystery and the supernatural. No doubt it is this zone of shadow that the public senses behind psychotherapy. But our science, for our part, has nothing, absolutely nothing mysterious about it”31. In 1909, when he opposes the movements of popular and religious psychotherapy, psychoanalysis is for Freud a scientific and medical discipline. The debate over Laienanalyse, or psychoanalysis practiced by non-doctors, would take place fourteen years later.
The popular, even religious, psychotherapy that seized upon psychoanalysis gave a central place to the environment in the genesis of distress and of mental disorders. The Emmanuel movement also wished to address the most destitute, who had deserted the Church, and it opened a medico-social service with lodging in 1907. The treatments proposed combined psychotherapy, prayers, hymns, and meditations32.
Popular psychoanalysis supplanted all the other methods of psychotherapy in the mass-circulation newspapers within a few years. By 1911, the Emmanuel movement was no longer spoken of. Psychoanalysis had nonetheless not broken with what had promoted it: “the cult of healing by the spirit” and the belief in a “miraculous dimension” of psychotherapy. The Freudian unconscious was “assimilated to the ‘mysterious entity’ of the Emmanuel movement, so as to make of it the site of all strangeness — dreams, buried memories, mediumistic relations, telepathies, splittings of personality…”33.
The movement of emancipation from the moral and puritan order that reigned in the USA also seized upon psychoanalysis. The latter modified a certain number of popular representations: the environment and the consequences of modern life were, above all in their repressive aspects, one of the causes of the neuroses, but there were others: psychic trauma in early childhood and repressed desires. After 1915, the opinion press invoked the Freudian sexual theories in all the debates over American values and culture34. At the same time, psychoanalysis served to develop what Nathan Hale has called “an ethic of happiness.” It became the support of all the popular quests, a “moral guide, a new type of morality, even an ersatz religion”35. This tidal wave and the confusions of popular psychoanalysis plunged Freud into consternation.
In the face of the perversion of his theory, he confided one day to Jones: “America is a mistake. A gigantic mistake, but a mistake”36.
Notes
S. Freud, An Autobiographical Study (French ed.: Ma vie et la psychanalyse, Paris, Gallimard, 1950), pp. 64–66.↩︎
S. Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (French ed.: Cinq leçons sur la psychanalyse, Paris, Payot, 2001).↩︎
On Freud’s relations with America and on the development of psychoanalysis in the USA from its origins to our own day, one may consult: Nathan Hale, Freud and the Americans (French ed.: Freud et les Américains, Paris, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002), and The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995 (only the first volume has been translated into French); Correspondance Freud, Ferenczi, vols. 1 and 3, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1992 and 2000; E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (French ed.: La vie et l’œuvre de Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, Paris, PUF, 1979); M. Jeannet-Hasler, “Freud, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi et l’Amérique,” Topique, 2002/3, 80, pp. 23–32; Nathan Hale (ed.), L’introduction de la psychanalyse aux Etats-Unis, Paris, Gallimard, 1978 (correspondence of Putnam with Freud, Jones, Ferenczi, William James, and Morton Prince).↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Jung, Gallimard, 1992. In 1920, Ferenczi considered emigrating on account of the economic crisis and the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Hungary: he had lost his post — the University Chair of Psychoanalysis — and had been excluded from the Association of Hungarian Physicians. See Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. III, pp. 11–13 (Ferenczi’s letter of March 20, 1920).↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. I, p. 55.↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. I, p. 40. As we shall see further on, the sexual underpinning of the psychoanalytic theories was one of the reasons for the triumphal reception of psychoanalysis in the United States, where there existed a crisis of the moral references that had hitherto prevailed.↩︎
Three thousand marks.↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. I, p. 81.↩︎
Ibid., July 25, 1909.↩︎
Freud et les Américains, p. 21.↩︎
Emma Goldman, Living My Life, New York, Knopf ed., 1931, vol. I, p. 455, cited by Nathan Hale, Freud et les Américains, op. cit., p. 41.↩︎
Jones, op. cit., p. 63.↩︎
Jones, ibid.↩︎
The Wolf Man. After the Russian Revolution, the Wolf Man, ruined, received money from Freud and then from the psychoanalytic movement to provide for his needs. See The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (French ed.: L’homme aux loups par ses psychanalystes et par lui-même, texts collected and presented by Muriel Gardiner, Paris, Gallimard, 1981) and Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later: Conversations with Freud’s Controversial Patient (French ed.: Entretiens avec l’homme aux loups, Paris, Gallimard, 1981).↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. I, op. cit., pp. 148–49.↩︎
On the stakes of this debate in Europe and the United States, see the second part of this article.↩︎
Correspondance Freud-Ferenczi, vol. III, op. cit., p. 293.↩︎
Ibid., p. 298.↩︎
Ibid., p. 307.↩︎
N. Hale, op. cit., p. 35.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 196–97.↩︎
Ibid., p. 40.↩︎
“The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1910) and “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1918).↩︎
The creation of a new psychiatric model thanks to psychoanalysis was also a preoccupation of Freud’s with which he never really broke, despite his positions on Laienanalyse (see “Psycho-Analysis and the Theory of the Libido,” in Résultats, idées, problèmes II, Paris, PUF, 1985, pp. 51–77, written in 1923, three years before the text on lay analysis).↩︎
Ibid., p. 365.↩︎
Cf. the constitution of neuropsychoanalysis, the works of Fonagy and Widlöcher, the methodological critiques addressed to psychoanalysis.↩︎
Cf., among others, Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the Book, New York, Other Press, 2003.↩︎
Nathan Hale, Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, op. cit., p. 23. The translation is my own.↩︎
Nathan Hale, Freud et les Américains, op. cit., p. 269.↩︎
Nathan Hale, op. cit., p. 261. Cf. also the importance of the notion of eclecticism for the Americans, a quality here attributed to Freud.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
From 1910 on, psychoanalysis, under Freud’s impetus, was caught up in a militant ideal: to spread through society, to be the principal reference of psychiatry and medicine, thanks to the treatment and the prophylaxis of neuroses, to allow the improvement of the individual and of society, even of civilization. These stances motivated, among other things, the necessity of extending the indications of the standard cure and of adapting the modalities of treatment. Freud, like other analysts, was caught up in the ideals running through the European societies of the time (“The New Man”). Was he also influenced by his contacts with the Americans, who used psychoanalysis to transform social practices and to develop a policy of mental hygiene?↩︎
Nathan Hale, op. cit., pp. 444–55. It should be noted that Freud took an interest in telepathy, as did Ferenczi, and that part of their correspondence in the years around 1909 broaches this question. But psychoanalysis was created in rupture from hypnosis, one of its origins. Very early on (1909), Ferenczi, in “Introjection and Transference,” elaborated a theory of the mechanisms of alienation underlying the hypnotic practices from which he wished to distance himself.↩︎
Nathan Hale, op. cit.↩︎
Op. cit.↩︎
Jones, in The Life and Work of Freud, cites this sentence, but out of all temporal context. That context is made explicit by Nathan Hale, op. cit.↩︎