1
Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism
Although The Interpretation of Dreams was published over a century ago, the integration of psychoanalysis into the broad matrix of modern social and cultural history has barely begun. During his lifetime, Freud’s charisma was so powerful that the historical landscape surrounding him remained in shadows. Only decades after his death did light begin to dawn. The earliest significant attempt to historicize psychoanalysis appeared in 1980. Situating Freud in the context of the decline of classical liberalism and the rise of mass politics and mass culture, Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was an inspired beginning.1
Schorske was right to situate psychoanalysis in a broad historical frame. The brilliant debut of psychoanalysis in 1899, its spectacular entry into American-style mass culture, the widespread fascination it inspired among youth, flappers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as among advertising writers and industrial psychologists, its critical contribution to the post–World War II welfare states, the revival of its utopian dimensions during the 1960s, the central place it occupied in the history of second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and Latin American Marxism—all this attests to the depth and pervasiveness of the connections between psychoanalysis and twentieth-century culture. In psychoanalysis, it is possible to say, one encounters the spirit of twentieth-century culture, at least until the mid 1970s.
If so, then the problem of situating psychoanalysis historically may have an affinity with the problem Max Weber faced when he made the phrase “the spirit of capitalism” famous in 1905. Whereas Adam Smith and the British school of political economy tended to take the psychology and culture of capitalism for granted, Weber and his contemporaries, faced with the late development of the German economy, viewed psychology and culture as problems requiring explanation.2 Distinguishing the “form” of capitalism, especially exchange relations, from its spirit (Geist), and describing the modern economic order as a “tremendous cosmos” of meanings, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism isolated one crucial moment in the evolution of the spirit of capitalism, namely the origins of such bourgeois virtues as thrift, discipline, and self-denial in the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 According to Weber, the Calvinist idea of a rationalized, methodical life plan devoted to worldly affairs—a “calling” (Beruf)—was crucial in precipitating the spirit of capitalism. Originating in aspirations for salvation, Weber reasoned, rational, goal-directed, methodical self-organization remained integral to the emerging commercial and industrial order even after it had left its religious connotations behind.4
When he wrote The Protestant Ethic, Weber believed that capitalism no longer needed a transcendental justification, i.e., a Geist or spirit. “This-worldly asceticism” or Calvinism, he remarked, having successfully remodeled the world, had flown from the iron cage. In its place stood “victorious capitalism” resting on “mechanical foundations,” meaning that economic necessity and cause-and-effect relations drove the capitalism that had left the reformation behind. The truth is, however, that capitalism always requires a “spirit”; it never justifies itself purely instrumentally but the spirit changes. In this chapter, accordingly, I will show that psychoanalysis played a crucial role in bringing about the changes in the spirit of capitalism that we associate with the second industrial revolution—the rise of mass production and mass consumption—a process that was just beginning when Weber wrote his famous book.
To make this argument, I will draw on another of Weber’s ideas, one that barely appears in The Protestant Ethic, the idea of charisma.5 According to Weber, even social transformations as vast as the rise of capitalism cannot be explained by objective factors alone. They also involve reorientations to meaning sparked by charismatic individuals, individuals who motivate their followers by giving personal expression to new or innovative goals or ideas.6 Such reorientations to meaning neither reflect nor cause objective social change; having rather an “elective affinity” with such change, they serve as catalysts for them.7 Whether encountered still warm in individuals and sects or routinized in institutions, charisma guarantees that the aspirations and legitimations that accompany social change will be rooted at an inward and personal level, rather than remaining at the level of material interests or coercion. For Weber, then, early Calvinist or Puritan charisma helped spark the crucial inward transformations without which capitalism would not have taken off, or at least would have taken a very different form.8
Charisma played an important role in the rise of capitalism especially because of its effects on the family. Normally, Weber believed, charisma was directed against everyday, mundane economic life and therefore against the family. Thus Jesus and Buddha—early charismatic figures—urged their followers to leave their families to create an authentic spiritual community. By contrast, the Puritan “Saints” of the seventeenth century redefined the family as a locus of charismatic meanings, sanctifying its everyday labor and giving it a religio-ethical character. During the early centuries of capitalism, when the family was the engine of economic development, this redefinition fostered such family-based virtues as thrift, industry, and discipline. Several centuries later, Methodist revivals and awakenings served related ends. Embraced by the English and American industrial working classes, Methodism served not only as an “opiate” but also as a vehicle of personal transformation encouraging the sobriety and familial responsibility that enabled the first industrial revolution. In both cases, then, the infusion of everyday familial and economic life with charismatic or sacred meaning was crucial in precipitating a socioeconomic transformation.
The second industrial revolution—the rise of the vertically integrated, bureaucratically organized corporation with its orientation toward mass consumption—also involved a charismatic reorientation toward work and the family, one comparable to, if not as intense as, the Reformation.9 Just as men and women did not embark on the transition from agrarian society to industrial capitalism for merely instrumental or economic reasons, so in the twentieth century they did not become consumers in order to supply markets. Rather, they separated from traditional familial and communal morality, gave up their orientation to self-denial and thrift, and entered into the sexualized “dreamworlds” of mass consumption on behalf of a new orientation to what I will call personal life. Psychoanalysis—I will argue—was the “Calvinism” of this shift. But whereas Calvinism sanctified mundane labor in the family, Freud urged his followers to leave behind their “families”—the archaic images of early childhood—not to preach but to develop more genuine, that is, more personal, relations.10
I will make this argument in four parts, each of which focuses on a phase in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first phase, which runs from the 1890s until World War I, and which encompasses the early years of mass production, psychoanalysis was effectively a sect expressing, in an intensely charismatic form, then new aspirations for “personal life.” In a second phase, which encompasses the interwar period (1919–1939), psychoanalysis became a mass cultural phenomenon, integral to and diffused by the new mass media, such as film and radio. It thereby helped generate the utopian ideology of individuality that accompanied mass consumption. In a third phase, which runs from World War II to the mid-1960s, psychoanalysis was integrated into the Keynesian welfare states, becoming, in Weber’s phrase, a “this-worldly program of ethical rationalization,” and supplying what I will call the maturity ethic for post–World War II domesticity. Finally, in a fourth phase, running roughly from 1965–1974, the New Left and women’s movement attacked the maturity ethic and the welfare state, ushering in the post-Fordist network or communication-based spirit of capitalism that characterizes the present. In half a century, then, psychoanalysis ran through the familiar Weberian cycle of charisma, routinization, and diffusion, although even in its long period of decline it continued to spark new if transitory upheavals.
1.
Let me begin by quoting Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello’s description of the nineteenth–century bourgeoisie: “owning land, factories and women, rooted in possessions, obsessed with preserving their goods, endlessly concerned about reproducing, exploiting and increasing them…thereby condemned to meticulous forethought…and a quasi-obsessive pursuit of production for production’s sake.”11 The essence of the description is the attempt to deepen authority by extending control and enforcing restraint. Since most property was either rooted in land or small-scale, and since the family was the center of small-scale property, the family was at the center of this system of authority. It organized not just daily life but lineage, inheritance, and marriage. Its patriarchal or paternal relations were reproduced in shops and trades as well as being at the center of communal life. The depressing devotion to duty that resulted was what Weber—who grew up among burghers—referred to when he wrote that the Puritans wore their economic responsibilities “like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment,” while for his generation the cloak “had become an iron cage”
When he wrote The Protestant Ethic, Weber believed that duty, restraint, and savings had lost the association with charismatic meaning they originally had. Writing the book during his own psychic crisis, he never abandoned hope that a new asceticism, a new turn inward, might emerge and challenge or modify capitalist rationalization. In fact, his sense of the exhaustion of the Protestant ethic and his desire to escape from the iron cage were widely shared. The coming of the market, the railroad, the steamship, new forms of communication such as mass newspapers and popular lectures, and especially wage labor, allowed “the young to emancipate themselves from local communities, from being enslaved to the land and rooted in the family, [and thus] to escape the village, the ghetto, and traditional forms of personal dependence.”12 It was within the consciousness that resulted, which we often call modernism or modernity, that psychoanalysis—the new asceticism for which Weber longed—attained its special place. The charisma of analysis arose, I believe, because it gave voice to the aspiration to be free from the spirit of nineteenth-century capitalism. In Secrets of the Soul I called this aspiration “personal life.”13
By personal life I mean the experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor. In one sense, the possibility of having a personal life is a universal aspect of human life, but that is not the sense I have in mind. Rather, I mean a historically specific experience of singularity and interiority sociologically grounded in industrialization and urbanization. The separation (both physical and emotional) of paid work from the household, which is to say the rise of industrial capitalism, gave rise to new forms of privacy, domesticity, and intimacy. At first—in the Victorian era—these were experienced as the gendered familial counterparts to the impersonal world of the market. Later, they became associated with the possibility and goal of a personal life distinct from and even outside of the family. Expressions of this possibility include the “new” (or independent) woman, the emergence of public homosexual identities, and the turning of young people away from a preoccupation with business and toward sexual experimentation, bohemia, and artistic modernism. Personal identity became a problem and a project for individuals as opposed to something given to them by their place in the family or the community. Psychoanalysis was a theory and practice of this new aspiration for a personal life. Its original historical telos was defamilialization, the freeing of individuals from unconscious images of authority originally rooted in the family.
That psychoanalysis was a theory and practice of personal life can be seen in the signature concepts of its formative years—the unconscious and sexuality. Neither concept was new, of course, but Freud gave them both radically innovative meanings. In the case of the unconscious, he articulated the new experience—also evoked by such figures as Baudelaire, for example, in the figures of the poet or the flaneur—of no longer being defined by one’s social relations, such as parentage, religion, nationality, or even gender. Thus, the subject of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, is a sleeping individual, someone who is completely separated from the real social world. With the external world at a distance, all stimuli arise from within. No thought that comes to the individual—whether it originated in childhood or comes from the “day residues,” everyday impressions—is directly registered; rather it is first dissolved and internally reconstituted in such a way as to give it a unique and contingent meaning. The result was a new conception of the relations between the individual and the surrounding community. Traditional healers were effective because they mobilized symbols that were both internal and communal. In psychoanalysis, by contrast, there is no direct relation—no isomorphism or complementarity—between the community and the intrapsychic world. Whereas the communal world is composed of collective symbols, such as God or la République, in the intrapsychic world, symptoms replace symbols: a nervous cough, a tic, the washing of hands. In learning to interpret their private worlds, modern men and women distanced themselves from collectivities. Psychoanalysis taught individuals to withdraw from the painful tensions involved in their relation to society while encouraging them to relate “more affirmatively to their depths.”14
The same reorientation toward a uniquely personal, intrapsychic world characterized the psychoanalytic approach toward sexuality. Whereas, in the nineteenth-century world described by Boltanski and Chiapello, sexuality was largely organized through familial relations, psychoanalysis emerged in a world in which many circles were repudiating the family-centered morality of the bourgeoisie.15 These included the Männerbunden (male sects centered on a charismatic leader, such as Klimt or Marinetti); artistic bohemias, in which free love was common, and Marxist currents such as the one centered around Trotsky, who covertly supported Russian psychoanalysis until his exile. Most important, male homosexuals, such as the London gay society exemplified by Edward Carpenter, pioneered the idea of sexual life outside the family and not defined by reproduction, while “new women” promulgated Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s wish to move beyond the “incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter” to focus instead on what she called the “individuality of each human soul.”16
In that context Freud, who began with an inherited schema that stressed gender difference aimed at reproduction, soon dropped it. Instead, he argued that the distinction necessary to understand psychic life was not between male and female but between libido and repression. Distinguishing the sexual object or target from the sexual aim, meaning the libidinal impulse the sexual act aimed at satisfying, Freud restricted the question of gender to the question of object choice. In contrast to the gender-based Victorian theories of psychology and sexology, he claimed that psychoanalysis recognized that every person had a “special individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love—that is, in the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it.”17 In spite of the masculine pronoun, psychoanalysis had implications for both sexes. Whereas earlier debates over women’s roles had pivoted on whether men and women were fundamentally the same or fundamentally different, psychoanalysis gave voice to a new sensibility whose governing norm was neither sameness nor difference, but individuality.
In its early years, then, Freudian analysis seemed to codify a set of post-Victorian intuitions that until then had been the preserve of artists, sexual and ethnic minorities, and philosophers. The result was a far-flung charisma stretching before World War I from Los Angeles to Russia (which published the largest number of Freud translations of any country) and that by the twenties extended to India, Mexico, China, and Japan. Psychoanalysis appealed to women as well as men and to homosexuals as well as heterosexuals; indeed, arguably women comprised the largest number of readers.18 Above all, its charisma was deeply felt and experienced. The emotional tone with which Freud was read and discussed in the pre–World War I period is nicely captured in Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography. In 1911 Walter Lippmann, Steffens wrote, “first introduced us to the idea that the minds of men were distorted by unconscious suppressions…. There were no warmer, quieter, more intensely thoughtful conversations at Mabel Dodge’s [a Greenwich Village salon] than those on Freud and his implications.” In this first phase of its history, then, psychoanalysis seemed to offer a way out of the iron cage by putting sexuality at the center of psychology. As Max Weber wrote, evoking the dead “skeletal grasp” of corporate-led rationalization, sexuality was the “gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life…eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavour.”
In sum, then, even as capitalism was becoming more comprehensively organized, more systematic, and more integrated, it was simultaneously loosening the economic vise, making possible greater ease in the relations between the sexes and enhancing the sense of individual subjectivity, if at first primarily for certain strata. As a charismatic sect, psychoanalysis expressed the new sense of subjectivity in its most immediate, because most personal, form. As Freud admitted, its key ideas, such as instincts and the unconscious, were not original to it. What distinguished psychoanalysis, he wrote, was not the content of its ideas but its insistence that they “touch every individual personally and force him [or her] to take up some attitude” toward them.19 Precisely because psychoanalysis reoriented individuals away from the compulsions and demands of the family-based community and toward those that arose from the self, it was to play a central role in the emergence of the new spirit of capitalism.
2.
Let me turn now to the second epoch in the history of analysis, 1919–1945. In this period, sometimes called Fordism for its most famous exemplar, one encounters a very different spirit of capitalism. The key figure is no longer the property-owning bourgeois, but rather the manager. Heading up a large, hierarchical, bureaucratized firm, corporation, or cartel, the manager was often an engineer or at least worked closely with engineers and was generally more interested in scientific planning and efficiency aimed at cheap, mass consumption goods than at immediate short-term profits. The rise of the large, managerially organized corporation entailed changes comparable to those that characterized the rise of capitalism. Whereas earlier, the expansion of production depended on increasing the labor time spent in production, now it resulted from technology, new forms of workplace organization, and the scientific mind. While the common school was indispensable to the first industrial revolution, the research university was the key to the second. Even on the assembly line, after the initial wave of scientific management, workers began to gain flexibility and control.20 Above all, the age of the large corporation was the age of mass consumption. Until the twentieth century, consumer goods were produced mostly in quantities sufficient to reproduce the labor force; the goal now became to expand, not restrict, consumption.21
These changes were accompanied by a psychological revolution that had psychoanalysis at its heart. Turned into a global phenomenon by the World War I shellshock incident, struck by the difficulty in gaining cures, and developing in the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazism—the so-called general crisis of the twentieth century—psychoanalysis shed much of its early utopianism.22 It became a theory of aggression, the death instinct, and resistance, all of which complemented and complicated its earlier emphasis on sexuality. At the same time, like Calvinism in its relation to early family-and market-based societies, it had an elective affinity to the age of the large corporation. The basis for this affinity laid in the fact that psychoanalysis constituted an immanent critique of Calvinism in a period during which the Protestant ethic—the older spirit of capitalism—had become not only obsolete but also dysfunctional.
Recall that in Weber’s account Calvinism had made three contributions to the spirit of capitalism. First, it contributed to the latter’s ascetic spirit. What is “natural,” Weber reasoned, is to work in order to satisfy needs. Capitalism reversed this relationship: it called for the postponement of need satisfaction in order to increase capital. The Calvinist idea of the calling helped justify this reversal. The religious roots of the calling also explains Weber’s second attribute of the spirit of capitalism, namely its compulsive character. If men and women were to persist at unsatisfying and onerous occupations, they had to believe that they were called to do so by some transcendental and unfathomable authority. This was God, who the Calvinists also made present and immediate in a new way. Finally, Weber argued that Calvinism was crucial to releasing what Weber called the acquisitive instinct. “What the great religious epoch of the seventeenth century bequeathed to its utilitarian successor,” Weber wrote, “was…an amazingly good…even a pharisaically good, conscience in the acquisition of money, so long as it took place legally.”
As an immanent critique of Calvinism, psychoanalysis modified or transformed each of these characteristics in a way that helped to crystallize the new spirit of capitalism. Thus it qualified and complicated asceticism by making the ubiquity of the instinctual life—orality, anality, exhibitionism, narcissism, phallic pride, sexual pleasure in looking, sadism, masochism—manifest and natural. Second, in contrast to the spirit that Weber described as compulsive and inexorable, it called attention to a new question: how much repression is necessary and how much is not? Third, and perhaps most important, psychoanalysis helped liberate not merely the acquisitive but the aggressive instinct, often struggling to redeem it from the superego, especially from guilt, from moral masochism and moral hypocrisy. Thus, whereas Calvinism inspired a vicious circle, whereby each moral exertion produced a deeper sense of inadequacy, thereby generating guilt, which in turn generated aggression and further moral exertion and further guilt, psychoanalysis was, at root, an attempt to break out of that circle.
Freudianism’s challenge to self-denial, compulsivity, and hypocrisy help explain its mass appeal during the epoch in which the large corporation became the dominant economic form. During the 1920s, psychoanalysis helped shape the powerful new media of the second industrial revolution such as radio, photojournalism, and film. Even from prison, Antonio Gramsci noted that psychoanalysis had provided “a new myth of the [noble] ‘savage’ on a sexual basis.”23 The novelist Nathaniel West called Freud the “modern Bulfinch,” meaning that he had collected and published the imaginative fables used by radio narrators, film writers, and other storytellers. W. H. Hearst published the first public account of an analysis, a key moment in the evolution of a culture of personal revelation. In 1925 Sam Goldwyn sailed for Europe, announcing that he would offer Freud $100,000 to assist in devising “a really great love story” or, failing that, would get Freud to “come to America and help in a ‘drive’ on the hearts of this nation.” Who better than Freud? queried Goldwyn, Freud with his insight into “emotional motivations and suppressed desires.”24
The mass diffusion of psychoanalysis simultaneously democratized and banalized a newly psychological way of thinking. Increasingly the term by which psychological thinking in general was designated, Freudianism not only reflected but also helped construct a new object: personal experience. It introduced into English, or profoundly redefined, such words as oral, anal, phallic, genital, unconscious, psyche, drives, conflict, neurosis, hysterical, father complex, ego-ideal, narcissist, inhibition, ego, id, and superego. Similar lists can be developed for other modern languages. In the age of the large corporation, then, an age obsessed with standardization and mass reproducibility, it encouraged people to regard much of what they experienced as arising within themselves, thereby contributing to the process of inward development that is the only secure basis for progress.
Psychoanalysis influenced the new spirit of twentieth-century capitalism deeply because of its intimate, even subterranean, connections to the Protestant ethic, and broadly because it rested on a new mass basis, namely personal life. Thus situated, psychoanalysis helped change the promise of modernity that had arisen with the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions. To begin with, it helped provide a new conception of autonomy. If one considers earlier conceptions of autonomy, one can see that they were not personal in the twentieth-century sense. For Kant, autonomy meant the freedom to exercise one’s reason in order to discover universally valid moral rules. For Freud, in contrast, autonomy meant the freedom to discover what one wants to do with one’s life. This shift resonated deeply with the second industrial revolution. In the age of the large corporation, everyone feared conformity, a fear marked in such iconic works as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), which opened with a herd of sheep entering a subway, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), a dystopic society manipulated by a leader variously called “Our Ford” or “our Freud.” The pervasiveness of this discourse demonstrated the esteem in which the new ideal of personal rather than moral autonomy was held. Huxley’s quip notwithstanding, psychoanalysis spoke for this ideal.
In addition, psychoanalysis helped reorient individuals to a more personalized ideal of family life, one that incorporated a heightened level of intimacy, including sexual intimacy, between men and women. Some have called this the new heterosexuality.25 This change too was associated with the second industrial revolution. As the family fully lost its earlier identity as a productive unit based on the ownership of property, psychoanalysis infused it with new meaning as the arena of personal life. When individuals lost their sense of being part of an integrated system of property and hierarchy, psychoanalysis offered them a new sense, according to which individuality was rooted in one’s childhood and expressed in marriage and parenthood. In this period, accordingly, psychoanalysis itself underwent a shift. Originally an agent of defamilialization, it began to acquire a refamilializing role.
Finally, psychoanalysis helped pave the way for a new sense of identity, ultimately rooted in the experience of personal life, one that helped render problematic the older emphasis on social class. This is not to say that psychoanalysis did not influence the psychology of work, directly in such areas as “human relations” and indirectly through its expansive notion of the mind. Nevertheless, its most intense impact was felt in life outside production. Premised on the view of the individual as infinitely desiring rather than capable of satisfaction, psychoanalysis was indispensable to an epoch that sought to expand consumption. It revolutionized advertising, which shifted from addressing perceived needs to addressing unconscious wishes and it had a profound influence on the visual media including photography, which saw itself, like psychoanalysis, as a way of revealing what people were like when they were least aware of themselves. Overall, psychoanalysis helped change the way in which capitalism was understood, from a mode of production to a mode of distribution and consumption.
Throughout all of these changes, the most important were those that occurred in the realm of personal experience or introspection. Weber singled out Calvinism from all the other sects and churches of the Reformation because it alone encouraged what Weber called “deep spiritual isolation.” Referring to predestination, Weber wrote: “In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him.” Psychoanalysis, at its core, reproduced this spiritual isolation. No less than Calvinism, only one thing mattered for interwar psychoanalysis: not worldly success, not sensory satisfaction, not “self-esteem,” but the state of one’s soul. This gave it a privileged place among the critical currents of the day.
As an immanent critique of Calvinism, in conclusion, psychoanalysis subverted traditional, religiously based assumptions concerning family life, sexuality, and the work ethic. Just as seventeenth-century capitalism rested on the sacralization of family life, and just as nineteenth-century industrialization rested on a new work discipline, so the rise of mass consumption society rested on analogous vehicles for the transformation of subjectivity. Psychoanalysis was one of the most effective of these vehicles, triggering internal, charismatically originated motivations, helping to transform the family from a tradition-bound and production-oriented unit into a carrier of expressive individuality.
3.
So far I have been writing about the impact of psychoanalysis on the spirit of capitalism; now I want to switch gears and describe the impact of capitalism on psychoanalysis. From its inception, psychoanalysis was divided between two impulses: one pushed toward absorption into mainstream institutions integral to twentieth-century capitalism, especially the research university, the “social control” professions such as social work, therapy, and testing, and the new mass culture; the other pulled toward sectarianism, that is, the wish to guard a Freud-centered, proto-Calvinist, ultimately Hebraic or Mosaic core. Both impulses had dangers. Absorption would destroy the unique character of psychoanalysis; sectarianism would preserve its identity, but at the cost of keeping it marginal and schismatic. Until the 1930s, psychoanalysis maintained a precarious balance. Beginning in the thirties, however, when psychoanalysis was destroyed in continental Europe and its refugees fled to England and the United States, the balance tipped. Psychoanalysis became, in Weber’s term, a “this-worldly program of ethical rationalization,” one with strong links to such normalizing agencies as the social service professions, medicine, and the welfare state.
This third phase had its roots in the New Deal and the Popular Front. During World War II, especially in England, the relation to the mother came to dominate analytic theory. Ego, sexuality, and individual gave way to object, mother, and group. Analysts developed a new “relational” view of the ego as ethically responsible. Ethical responsibility was less a matter of observing universal moral norms than of meeting concrete obligations to particular others. Not incidentally, Bloomsbury, with its ethic of transfamilial sociality, played an important role in the evolution of object-relational thinking. Under the impress of the terrible war, the older metapsychology—id, ego, superego—was replaced by clinical and theoretical concerns with attachment, loss, and mourning.
In the United States, postwar psychoanalysis spoke with a somewhat different accent. The New Deal and the war experience encouraged a revolution in American society, from forms of status and traditional authority to new ideas of internalized self-control. Freudian ego psychology, with its stress on the power that the ego has to guide and control unconscious processes, was institutionalized in the epoch of the postwar welfare state. During the war, the United States Surgeon General’s Office had ordered that every doctor in the military be taught the basic principles of psychoanalysis.26 When doctors could not meet the demand for treatment, the newly founded professions of clinical psychology and psychiatric social work stepped into the breach. After the war, psychiatry shed its custodial image by turning to analysis. As department heads in hospitals, analysts helped transform counseling, testing, welfare, education, personnel, and law, especially new branches such as juvenile and domestic relations and criminology.27 Religion became a center for psychological, not just spiritual, counseling; the schools were transformed by their concern for psychology.28 Medicine itself turned from the focused treatment of specific diseases to the management of the social and interpersonal dimensions of illness.29 As a “psychodynamic” discipline, aimed at strengthening what Michel Foucault called “productive power,” power that works “not from the outside but from within,” analysis became integral to the so-called golden age of capitalism, that is, the flourishing of the Keynesian welfare states—large-scale, organized, state-led capitalism—between 1945 and 1975.
The maturity ethic was the public face of this new era. From its place in the established order, psychoanalysis stood for a new ethic of “responsibility,” and “adulthood,” supposedly linked to a new maturity in America’s global role, but also geared to the family-based, mass consumption societies then created in England, France, and Germany. The most important component of the maturity ethic was the rejection of radical politics and the insistence that freedom resided primarily in the private realm. Bruno Bettelheim’s “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” argued that what made the first concentration camps so terrible was that there was no retreat from the guards. Stanley Elkins’s Slavery portrayed the absence of private space for slaves, such as a garden, as the root of the special virulence of American racism. Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism distinguished the “totalitarian” subversion of the private sphere from “tyranny,” which was supposedly restricted to the public realm. The private sphere supplied the terrain on which the maturity ethic flourished, but “maturity” also underlay a changing conception of the public realm. During World War II, Talcott Parsons urged Franklin Roosevelt not to react to antiwar protests “hysterically,” but rather to model himself on the psychoanalyst who “de-confirms” neurotic perceptions by refusing to respond to them. George Kennan argued that, if the U.S. remained firm and did not respond impulsively, Soviet paranoia would disintegrate from within. In the 1956 Man with the Grey Flannel Suit, the heroine overcomes her wounded narcissism and accepts her husband’s war baby, thus symbolizing the Marshall Plan’s postwar responsibility for Europe. In the words of Erik Erikson, the mature person was “tolerant of differences, cautious and methodical in evaluation, just in judgment, circumspect in action, and capable of faith and indignation.”30
Postwar psychoanalysis, then, exemplified the dialectic of absorption and marginality or sectarianism. Central to cold war ideology through its stress on private life, integral to the normalizing project of the Keynesian welfare state, analysts propounded the new emphasis on productive power, power that worked from inside the individual and not from above or outside. Thus absorbed, ego psychology functioned as a form of social control. Challenging the definition of homosexuality as a crime, psychoanalysts redefined it as an “illness,” thereby intensifying the shame that too many homosexuals felt. Validating women’s sexuality in theory, some analysts, though by no means all, wielded terms like femininity, the mother, and vaginal orgasm as weapons against assertive women. Claiming the high ground “above” politics, some, perhaps many, analysts cooperated enthusiastically with Defense Department and CIA initiatives that funded analytic research for cold war ends.31 To be sure, the experience of fascism and militarism produced profound self-reflections to which analytic thought contributed. Among these were Masao Murayama’s theory of the “modern ego” in Japan, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s account of “the inability to mourn” in postwar Germany, and Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in the U.S.32 Still, this mode of thought was not pursued among American analysts. Far from lending themselves to such projects, analysts facilitated the recruitment of Germany and Japan into the cold war order and explicitly condoned McCarthyism.33
Nevertheless, even as postwar American psychoanalysis—ego psychology—was absorbed into the cold war welfare state, it retained its link to its charismatic, anti-institutional origins, partly through “the aura of close association with the founding fathers,” partly through its relations to art and religious experience, but especially through its associations with sexual love, that “gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life.”34 During the 1950s, analysts drew on these associations to resanctify the heterosexual family, investing domesticity with deep personal, ethical, and sexual meanings previously attached to extrafamilial forms of personal life. In so doing, however, they were invoking charismatic forces they could not always contain. By the 1960s, antinomian upsurges inspired by a Freudian spirit would overflow the boundaries of the analytic profession, the heterosexual family, and the welfare state. Simultaneously normalizing and fueled by charismatic sources, then, analysis was at the center of both the growing rationalization of personal life unfolding in the 1950s and the looming critique of rationalization, the charismatic rejection of the mundane that came to the fore in the 1960s.
4.
By its nature, a period of self-exploration, such as the one spawned by psychoanalysis, will be short-lived. The normal direction of the mind is outward. Hence, it is no surprise that new scientific theories, therapies, and folk psychologies emerged to challenge the analytic focus on self-reflection, nor that the New Left and the women’s movement rejected “the maturity ethic,” effectively destroying analysis’s institutional charisma. A fuller account of the “postanalytic” world that emerged in the sixties is given in chapter 5, but there is one last point to be made in this chapter: the way the attacks on analysis contributed to a final mutation in the spirit of capitalism.
The last stage in the relations of psychoanalysis and capitalism saw the transformation of restraint into release and the accompanying “obsolescence” of psychoanalysis. This stage reflected “The Keynesian Revolution,” the triumph of a consumer economy during the “thirty glorious years” (1940s–1970s) as well as the shift toward a new “post-Fordist” spirit of decentralized, service-oriented, credit-based, network and globally organized neoliberal capitalism, which followed the demise of the Keynesian model in the 1970s. Like the rise of mass production, post-Fordist neoliberalism entailed a change in the nature of the family: the shift toward the two-earner family, the valorization of married women’s and mother’s employment, and the destigmatization of “atypical” forms of family life, such as homosexuality in both sexes, divorced couples, and the female-headed Black family. As much cultural and psychological as sociological, this shift involved the crumbling of traditional restraints on both sexuality and aggression. Because psychoanalysis had been integral to the Keynesian-era family system, and because any successor system had to incorporate new understandings of personal life, a challenge to the authority of analysts proved central. In fact, the ascent of a full-blown consumerist spirit of capitalism coincided with the decline of psychoanalysis.
The deepest grounds for Freud’s mass appeal had always rested on his insistence that civilization made excessive demands upon the individual. At the same time, Freud did not advocate releasing the instincts from civilized demands, but rather sublimating them, which required “abstinence” or delayed gratification in order to transform sexual energies into desexualized insight or rationality. There were individuals in the analytic movement who advocated freedom of the instincts as an end in itself, but they were few. In 1907 Max Weber, using language that might have been used by Freud himself, rejected for publication an article by one of these, Otto Gross—a forerunner of Wilhelm Reich. According to Weber, Gross believed that “every suppression of emotion-laden desires and drives leads to ‘repression’” and therefore calls for revolution. But ethical life invariably entails repression. Gross, Weber complained, espoused a “psychiatric ethic”: “admit to yourself what you are like and what you desire.”35
Marginal during the early years of psychoanalysis, Gross’s approach came into its own as the twentieth century wore on. With the growth of a mass production economy, capitalism’s potential to generate a surplus, and therefore to lessen the need for self-restraint and savings, was unmistakable. During the “thirty glorious years” of Keynesian prosperity, this potential was expressed in such terms as affluence, automation, and the triple revolution. Prosperity also coincided with a demographic revolution, the baby boom. Advertisers tapped the vast purchasing power of the new cohort, beginning with the Davy Crockett fad, followed by blue jeans, rock, and recreational drugs. Student enrollments expanded exponentially. Technological change deepened the “generation gap.” The youth-centered explosions of rock music and soul projected an imagined eros of instinctual release. New Age psychologies, the New Left, and the women’s movement all expressed the new possibilities for release, and all sought to bend psychoanalysis to that purpose.
Three moments, each containing a sharp challenge to psychoanalysis, stand out. First, psychoanalysis purported to study “the durable, unique individual personality,” whereas a host of new “intersubjective” theories and practices insisted that no such thing had ever existed.36 The analytic focus on the individual led to the stigmatization of madness, deviance, and femininity, but in the 1960s stigmatization was rejected as the product of authoritarian labeling. Furthermore, a “relational revolution” insisted that psychotherapy should involve an authentic exchange between “open,” socially aware individuals, not the subordination of the individual to a supposedly objective authority. Along with their sometimes salutary therapeutic implications, the new “relational” theories helped advance the new post-Fordist, finance and information-based capitalism, whose imaginary centered on open, indeterminate, shifting networks, rhizomorphic contexts, and deterritorialized flows. The idea of a personal life interior to the individual was repudiated in favor of an emphasis on flexibility, sociality, and sensitivity to difference.
Second, psychoanalysts held a critical attitude toward narcissism, which was regularly contrasted to autonomy, viewed as an obstacle to analysis and as an “optimistic denial…of inferiority, real or imaginary,” in the words of Karl Abraham.37 By contrast, thinkers and movements of the sixties embraced a new culture of expressiveness, which validated narcissism. Even within psychoanalysis, Heinz Kohut contemptuously rejected Freud’s view that narcissism was a mere “stage” in the development of the ego, castigating analysts’ “courageously facing the truth” and “health-and-maturity-morality” and arguing that narcissism had replaced sexuality as the defining issue of the age. Here, too, however, the effects of the critique were not always intended. As it turned out, the validation of narcissism helped facilitate the shift to the “dense interpersonal environment” of postindustrial society, an environment that produces relationships (“networks”), not things, and in which image, personality, and interpersonal skills, not autonomy or knowledge, have the highest commercial value.
Finally, and most importantly, the 1960s marked the culmination in the revolution in the nature of the family that had begun with the second industrial revolution. Benjamin Spock stopped practicing analysis in the 1940s because of his disquiet over an “intensely feministic” female patient who “argued fiercely against every interpretation for over two years.”38 However, Spock’s reaction was hardly typical of a time when the family system still presumed a full-time mother. By the sixties, however, life outside the traditional family context, for example, as a single person, as a homosexual, or in a two-earner family, was becoming both feasible and desirable. In that context, a New York analyst told Betty Friedan that for twenty years he had repeatedly found himself “having to superimpose Freud’s theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients” in a way that he was no longer willing to do. He treated one woman for two years before facing “her real problem—that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife’s dream as penis envy…. I told her: ‘I can’t analyze this dream away. You must do something about it.’”39
Anticipated by the New Left’s rejection of psychologization, second-wave feminism translated Freud’s intrapsychic theory into a theory of societal oppression. As the women’s movement turned to consciousness-raising, “individual explanations” were officially discouraged. What had been forbidden or suspended within psychoanalysis—“acting out”—became privileged. The Oedipus complex was reinterpreted as a “power psychology.” Penis envy was actually “power envy.”40 Because she had supposedly seized control of her destiny and rejected psychoanalysis, Dora became a feminist icon.41 Gayle Rubin redefined psychoanalysis as “feminist theory manqué,” meaning that feminism supplied the social perspective (the patriarchal organization of kinship) that Freudianism merely reflected.42 The rebuff of Erica Jong’s heroine to her analyst in Jong’s 1973 Fear of Flying was emblematic: “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?…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…. I was free!”43
Taken together, these three changes—the birth of an ideology of intersubjectivity, the validation of narcissism, and the emergence of feminism as what might be called the Calvinism, or “the psychoanalysis,” of the third industrial revolution—helped give birth to a new post-Fordist spirit of capitalism. If we contrast the original spirit of capitalism described by Weber to the new spirit that emerged in the last third of the twentieth century, we might think of psychoanalysis as having supplied a crucial but temporary mediation: asceticism—challenged by the analytic emphasis on the instincts and against repression—had become narcissism; compulsivity—challenged by the Freudian analysis of Puritanical guilt—had become flexibility; finally, hypocrisy—challenged by the Freudian ethic of directness and honesty—had become empowerment. Psychoanalysis, in a sense, had accomplished its historical task as the era in which it had dominated popular consciousness came to an end.
Let me conclude. Psychoanalysis, I have argued, served as the Calvinism of the second industrial revolution. By this I mean it gave individuals the chance to assign personal meaning to a vast social transformation that would otherwise have been merely pragmatic, sociological, or economic. In the last decade of his life, Freud tried to develop a new approach to history, one that emphasized the role of profound upheavals, moments full of emotional intensity with long-lasting effects on tradition, character, and culture. Psychoanalysis itself was such a moment, one in which, to use Weber’s language, history “switched tracks.” In some ways, it is still too early to understand the long-term implications of that moment. Does it portend, like Calvinism, a higher form of social organization or does it portend increasing antinomianism, anomie, and the decline of leadership? Much depends on the evolution of the new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation, which supplanted psychoanalysis. In any event, we can now appreciate one of the most striking features in the history of analysis: its paradoxical character. Almost instantly recognized as a great force for human emancipation, it eventually became a degraded “pseudoscience” whose survival is today in doubt. This paradox can be explained when we realize that, on the one hand, it gave voice to emancipatory aspirations that served as a critique of the first industrial revolution while, on the other, those aspirations were recuperated within a revised spirit of capitalism corresponding to the second.