Political Freud: A History

When we talk about the role of psychoanalysis in repressive or authoritarian societies, we typically have in mind Nazi Germany and Vichy France, where forms of psychoanalysis were practiced, as well as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where analysis was banned but continued to exert an underground influence. More recently, we have come to think about psychoanalysis in the Latin American dictatorships: its hermeticism, its complicity, and its counterintuitive flourishing. But what is the role of psychoanalysis in nominally democratic societies like the United States? Are questions of authority, authoritarianism, and repression relevant there?

In the 1960s New Leftists answered these questions with a resounding yes. According to them, an ostensibly apolitical or “neutral” psychoanalysis was in fact deeply political, serving the cold war elites. Ego psychology and the maturity ethic, as I will term the predominant psychoanalytic worldview of the time, were integral to what has been called the “administered society” of postwar America, infusing the work of school psychologists, guidance counselors, urban planners, medical doctors, therapists, juvenile court justices, and religious counselors. The maturity ethic stressed the strength and adaptability of the ego in the practical world, while also maintaining that the deeper experiences of life were to be found in the private realm. Its essence was its rejection of “utopian,” i.e., left-wing, politics of the sort that had characterized the United States during the New Deal. In Philip Rieff’s formulation, maturity implied “an attitude of ironic insight on the part of the self toward all that is not self.” Maturity required withdrawing from “the painful tension of assent and dissent” in relation to society in order to relate more affirmatively to one’s depths.¹

In challenging the maturity ethic, New Leftists were effectively insisting that psychoanalysis supported a repressive system of authority in a putatively democratic society. To challenge that system, New Leftists expounded a range of theories, including critiques of objectivity and scientism, the idea of “repressive tolerance,” meaning that dissent was accepted so long as it remained impotent, and the idea of “repressive desublimation,” meaning instinctual release that sustained existing power rather than challenging it. In doing so, they often relied on antiauthoritarian trends within the analytic tradition itself. Drawing especially on Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959), New Leftists rejected the goal of ego autonomy and embraced instead the idea of an “oceanic feeling,” or primal unity, rooted in the infant’s earliest relation to the mother. Associated historically with the mystic’s dissolution of the self, the oceanic feeling resonated with the carnivalesque experiences of the 1960s, such as the fervor of the crowd, the blurring of sexual boundaries and “polymorphous perversity,” the eroticization of the entire body. From the new if unstable ground of a dissolved or boundless self, New Leftists challenged analytic complicity with the cold war, its idealization of the private sphere, and the maturity ethic.

These three episodes—the rise of the maturity ethic, the New Left’s antinomian overturning of that ethic, and radical feminism’s fervent and wholesale rejection of Freud—had an intensity, even ferocity, to them, that reflected the centrality of psychoanalysis to U.S. culture at that time. In chapter 1 I sought to elucidate this centrality by arguing that psychoanalysis played a critical role in mediating between an older Protestant ethic, characterized by savings, compulsivity, and hypocrisy, and the post-Fordist ethic that emerged in the 1970s, characterized by hedonism (or narcissism), flexibility, and empowerment. In the present chapter I want to develop that idea by foregrounding the changes in the nature of traditional authority, and especially the family, that were intrinsic to the changes in the spirit of capitalism.

My argument runs roughly like this: the New Deal and World War II created the economic conditions—Keynesianism—for the shift from restraint to release that led to the new spirit of capitalism. But it simultaneously unleashed a revolution in the structure of familial and societal authority. The result was the demise of an older, status-bound, WASP-dominated America in which immigrants were not recognized as Americans, even after they gained citizenship, Black males were referred to as “boy,” and women worked outside the home only when they were single, Black, or Irish. In place of an obsolescent status hierarchy, reforming elites sought to create a rationalized society based not on traditional authority but on internalized self-control. Psychoanalysis, in the form of ego psychology, was enlisted in this project. Rationalization weakened traditional authority but substituted the adjustment, labeling, and manipulation that the New Left criticized. At the same time, the import of psychoanalysis exceeded the project of social control. As a charismatic source of meaning, analysis embodied powerful sexual and other emancipatory currents that key socializing institutions, above all the family, could not contain. By the 1960s, antinomian upsurges linked to analysis overflowed the boundaries of the new socializing agencies, the heterosexual family, and the welfare state, inspiring both the New Left and the new social movements, especially feminism and gay liberation. The result was ironic and unintended: although these currents viewed themselves as critical of capitalism, they helped to bring about the revolution in family structure and authority relations that converged with the new post-Fordist spirit of capitalism.

To grasp the changes that occurred in the 1960s, along with the changes that did not, it will be helpful to recall the experience of the Puritans, who founded so much of American civilization. Puritanism was itself a cultural revolution aimed at the medieval worldview, in other words against traditional authority. In Freudian terms, the original Puritan moment was also a Geistigkeit moment, in the sense explained in chapter 3. Because of the momentous implications of predestination, the Puritans were forced into a new form of introspection, asking themselves: Am I really saved? Am I really good? However, just as Mosaic monotheism did not last, so the intense self-questioning of the Puritans did not survive the growth of capitalism and of new democratically inclined masses. Instead Puritan overattention to the demands of the superego produced two heresies: antinomianism, which claimed to know God through direct experience, and Arminianism, which claimed to reach salvation through good works. Arminianism, expressed in such ideologies as the self-made man, the can-do spirit, and America’s self-definition as a “land of opportunity,” predominated because it converged with the American preoccupation with economic life. Nevertheless, the country veered regularly into antinomian periods, “Great Awakenings,” radical upsurges, and periods of communal aspiration that renewed and revised the Arminian tradition, feeding it, so to speak, from the well of primary narcissism. The 1960s were just such an antinomian period. Afterward, as in the case of the Puritans, the original tendency toward guilt and self-abasement did not disappear, but emerged, strengthened, in the form of political correctness.

In describing the upheavals of the years from the 1950s to the 1970s in a way that restores psychoanalysis to its important place, I hope also to explain why we need the tradition of political Freud today. There is a different way to tell the story of the long 1960s from mine: the liberal story of how a country based on ideals of freedom and equality unwittingly ignored slavery, patriarchy, and ethnic hatred at the time of its founding, but gradually improved itself, always perfecting its inner convictions, so that the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the other protest movements of the sixties were essentially fulfillments of a foundational dream. There is an important truth to this story, but it is also partial and distorted. It ignores the deep, psychic structure of the individuals who comprise society and the deep structure of capitalist society itself.

As early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracy was double-edged. On the one hand, it tended to erode “social” or “aristocratic” distinctions, such as those of race and sex; on the other hand, it created a new hierarchy based on “manufactures.”² That is what happened in the 1960s and 70s, although finance, not manufacturing, was the agent of change. Tocqueville intuited, to use our terms, that as cultural inequality weakened, structural inequality would strengthen; in other words, that an intrinsically capitalist society such as America could achieve meritocracy but would resist equality. By examining the long 1960s through the lens of structures of authority historically rooted in the family and today exerted through personal life we may approach the deeper understanding toward which Tocqueville’s aperçu points. At root, the conflicts of the 1960s were conflicts over what psychoanalysts called the father imago, over the relations of men and women, and over the place of the unconscious in society, all of which pervade and buttress the class structure that gives America its truest and deepest character. What emerged from these conflicts was a profound mutation in both the structure of capitalism and in the psyche of the individuals comprising it. Tracing the role played by political Freudianism makes this clear.

In August 1945, a few months after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dawning of the atomic age brought to a terrible end World War II’s unprecedented pain and misery. Writing in the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins described “a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown [which] has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”³ At the same time, the tragic fate of the Russian Revolution was politicized through the still little understood outburst of McCarthyism, the largest wave of repression in American history. Ten thousand people suspected of having Communist sympathies lost their jobs with barely a peep of protest.⁴ On the contrary, a new anticommunist ideology, exemplified by Whit-taker Chambers’s Witness, described the West as sick and helped spawn a paranoid mentality based on the themes of suspicion, victimhood, and witnessing. Fifty years later it was possible to recognize Chambers’s influence when conservative spokesperson Ann Coulter wrote that the liberals “have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.”⁵

American liberal elites responded to the traumatic explosion of McCarthyism in two successive waves. To begin with, they created the national security state, a unified pattern of attitudes, policies, and institutions designed to put the United States on a permanent war footing.⁶ Although a postwar conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States was almost inevitable, given the vacuum created by the destruction of the Third Reich, the national security state turned that conflict into a highly ideological global crusade that persists even now, over two decades after the collapse of communism, in the form of the “war on terror.” Eventually, however, liberals condemned McCarthyism as a form of irrational populism, a condemnation classically expressed in Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 essay “The Paranoid Style in American History.” Opposition to what liberal elites regarded as the paranoia and unbridled aggressivity of the right wing confirmed their turn toward a new, technocratic, “growth”-oriented liberalism that supplanted the New Deal and created the context in which the maturity ethic flourished.

The heart of the new, technocratic liberalism was a politics of economic growth centered on familial consumption. Economics, so the theory went, was “transpolitical.” In other words, economic growth would allow the country to bypass the divisiveness and conflict that had characterized the New Deal era and provoked the McCarthyist outbreak.⁷ Political scientists espoused pluralism as the political complement to economic growth. Rejecting the New Deal conception of capitalism as the deep structure of American society, they portrayed “business” as one interest group among others, such as unions, churches, or neighborhood associations. Drawing on the ideologies of both growth and pluralism, liberal thinkers such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. advocated a post–New Deal politics cleansed of “ideology” and “class struggle.” As Schlesinger explained, American reform divides between those “who regard liberalism as a practical program to be put into effect; and those…who use liberalism as an outlet for private grievances and frustrations.”⁸ Both left and right, Schlesinger held, were more concerned with the symbolic aspects of politics than they were with practical results.⁹

The idea that “extremists” translated “private grievances and frustrations” into politics was fertile ground for a debased reading of psychoanalysis. Freud had been a Zionist, and a Social Democrat, who referred in the twenties to the Bolshevik Revolution as a “great experiment.” But, according to political scientist Harold Lasswell, Freud’s work demonstrated that radical politics was driven by irrational needs originating in the private sphere.¹⁰ Psychologizing the “true believer” or “revolutionary personality” stiffened the resolve of a liberal tradition that had lost credibility by enabling McCarthy. Whereas, during the Popular Front, Freud’s emphasis on the difficulty of self-knowledge informed democratic reform, now it infused an antidemocratic technocratic liberalism with curdled fervor. The liberal co-opting of psychoanalysis—the repudiation of political Freud—compromised the maturity ethic from the first.

The cold war liberal turn toward Freud was accompanied by a rediscovery of the Puritans. Perry Miller’s profound interpretations of the Augustinian moment in Puritanism in The New England Mind, published in two volumes in 1939 and 1953, became canonical. What struck readers especially was the high intellectual level of the Puritans, as well as their contempt for shallow “Pelagian” rejections of the ideas of predestination and original sin, their scorn for fatuous conceptions of free will, and their appreciation of the snares of narcissism, which Miller termed “self-hood.” As intellectuals recast American history as American studies, freed from the “populist” bias of progressive historiography, they saw the Puritan moment as an anticipation of their version of Freudianism. Just as the Puritan, Max Weber wrote, “was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity,” so the Freudian was condemned to be alone with his unconscious. How shallow the Popular Front seemed when one understood, in Philip Rieff’s Freudian-inflected words, that social relations no longer defined man. Rooted in the Puritan revolution, remade by modernism, populated by Jewish Americans and ex-Communists, the New York intellectual culture that promoted psychoanalysis in the 1950s placed the highest value on irony, complexity, and ambiguity, while despising the “simple,” “reductionist” materialism of the storybook Marxist.

Moreover, the United States had provided a nurturant soil for psychoanalysts, many of whom immigrated in the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks in part to its Puritan beginnings, in the nineteenth century the country had pioneered the ideas of psychological illness and psychotherapy, identifying the world’s first psychologically defined illness, neurasthenia, in 1869. Freud’s 1909 Clark Lectures, delivered in the original Puritan redoubt of New England, turned him into a world figure at a time when he was still largely ignored in Europe. While the Depression generated such headlines as “Farewell to Freud,” analytic psychiatry actually exploded in the 1930s. But it was above all World War II, the greatest engine of mass rationalization and social control in history, that made psychoanalysis central to the U.S. Every doctor in the military was taught its basic principles and encouraged to use them not only for recruitment and training but to manage the interpersonal dimensions of medicine.¹¹ After the war, when doctors could not meet the demand for psychological treatment, the newly founded professions of clinical psychology and psychiatric social work stepped into the breach. The year 1947, which witnessed an intensification of the cold war, was “something of a gold rush” for analysts, who increasingly ran America’s psychiatric profession, hospitals, and training programs.¹² Six years later, the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association celebrated the fact that his science had “finally become legitimate and respectable” in contrast to its checkered career in Europe.¹³

Just as Puritanism meant a break with medieval communal controls and a shift toward individual responsibility, so the postwar therapeutic revolution was based on the idea of internalized self-control. The traditional psychiatrist embodied what Michel Foucault has called “repressive power,” in other words, paternal authority, the sort that a father imposes on a well-ordered family. By contrast, under the impact of ego psychology, as the émigré analysts termed their project, psychiatry became a “psychodynamic” discipline, aimed at strengthening what Michel Foucault called “productive power,” power that works “not from the outside but from within…not by constraining individuals and their actions but by producing them.”¹⁴ Numerous depictions of psychiatry in films of the period, such as Anatol Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948), contrasted the old-style, ham-handed psychiatrist, still oriented to isolation, electroshock, and other forms of repressive power, to the newer “talking therapies.” Typically, the turning point in these films occurs when analysts refused to retaliate against their patient’s anger, thus working not from the outside of the patient, but from within, giving individuals the “space” in which they could generate the desired self-control or ego autonomy.

Freud’s theory of the ego, formulated during World War I, was ideally situated for the project of internalized self-control. In classical psychoanalytic treatment (as with monotheism in Freud’s interpretation), the powerful instinctual drives of the unconscious were not to be repressed but rather frustrated by the analyst’s refusal to satisfy them. In theory the result would be that patients would learn to sublimate, turning their instinctual energies away from immediate sensual gratifications and toward insight, rational thought, or Geistigkeit. But sublimation was not inevitable. Thus Freud’s approach could inform the new therapeutic modalities as well as the new liberal theories of management and political order. In 1942, for example, Talcott Parsons advised Franklin Roosevelt that in order to avoid the kind of antiwar hysteria that had plagued World War I, the government should decline to respond “to hostile interpretations of government policy—thus defeating them in the manner of a therapist whose non-responsive behavior” undermines the “patient’s neurotic perceptions by withholding confirmation from them.”¹⁵ Five years later, George F. Kennan’s containment policy was based on the same idea, namely that a calm, unintimidating presence on Soviet borders would force the Soviets to change internally, eventually generating rationality, whereas military interventions and “tests” of resolve would deepen Soviet paranoia. As these examples suggest, the maturity ethic was not, in reality, apolitical but rather aimed at a higher level of individual responsibility and autonomy than the imagined leftism against which it was directed. In the words of Erik Erikson, cited in chapter I, a mature person was “tolerant of differences, cautious and methodical in evaluation, just in judgment, circumspect in action, and capable of faith and indignation.”¹⁶

While the maturity ethic linked analysis with liberal ideals of integrity and fairness, it also aimed at keeping emotionally charged or so-called moral issues out of politics. Psychoanalysts, and the many professionals influenced by them, were called upon to help damp down “excessive” outbreaks of public emotion, which was considered especially important in the nuclear age. The Korean War (1950–1953), which killed several million Koreans and tens of thousands of Americans, was accompanied by very few antiwar demonstrations of the sort that exploded with the war in Vietnam. Arthur Miller could “not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was…being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for social activism of any kind.”¹⁷ Analysts policed “excesses” of conscience precipitated by the McCarthy investigations. When the actor Sterling Hayden reported that “the FBI isn’t going to let me off the hook without my implicating people who never did anything wrong,” his analyst advised, “the FBI would probably treat this information confidentially.”¹⁸

The counterpart to the postwar cooling out of protest and rancor was the infusion of private life with intensity and purpose. Christopher Lasch, writing autobiographically, situated the analytically inflected turn toward private life historically. “My generation,” Lasch wrote, “invested personal relations with an intensity they could hardly support, as it turned out; but our passionate interest in each other’s lives cannot very well be described as a form of emotional retreat. We tried to re-create in the circle of our friends the intensity of a common purpose, which could no longer be found in politics or the workplace.”¹⁹ Lasch’s words suggest the transformation of family life that the maturity ethic promoted. The maturity ethic meant the rejection not only of the traditional working-class family based on paternal authority but also of the New Deal era’s male, homosocial, adolescent world of “mates” or “buddies.” It meant reorienting men to the heterosexual dyad, to acceptance of the responsibilities of marriage, and to friendship networks that included both sexes. The maturity ethic also applied to women. As we saw in chapter 1, in the 1956 movie The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, the wife (Jennifer Jones) learns of her husband’s wartime affair with a Roman woman, overcomes her wounded narcissism, recommits to her marriage, and agrees to accept financial responsibility for her husband’s war child, thus symbolizing America’s financial responsibility for Italy in the mid-1950s.

Just as Puritanism was a post-traditional, individualizing ethic that placed high expectations on its followers, so too was psychoanalysis. This, however, was also its Achilles heel. A kind of internalized authoritarianism or identification with the aggressor, perpetuated through the training process itself, often led postwar analysts to despise what they saw as “weakness” in their patients. That, more than anything, explains their much noted “coldness”—sadism, really—toward women such as Annie Parsons who were rejected for analytic training for failure “to come to terms with their basic feminine instincts”; toward male homosexuals, such as Howard Brown, told by his analyst that he “was inherently impaired because of my sexual orientation”; toward victims of sexual discrimination, characterized by at least one analyst as “injustice collectors”; and toward “narcissistic patients,” whose problems analysts blamed for their countless “failed” analyses. The ego psychologists, many of whom were émigré Jews seeking acceptance, identified with powerful male authority in the United States, which put them on the wrong side of the sixties as the decade unfolded.

Ironically, however, other currents of analysis, especially those focused on sexual love, were central to the revolt against the maturity ethic. Sexual love, as Max Weber wrote, was “as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality and generality.” “The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living…freed from the cold, skeleton hands of rational orders.”²⁰ By the late fifties, the explosiveness of sexuality and the unconscious was coinciding with a youth rebellion. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), with its “intense, out-of-focus hurtling across America, the absolute lack of social pretensions, the seeking of something somehow important, somewhere, the experimentation with life and the gobbling of books…showed an American youth different from any before.”²¹ Meanwhile, a work contemporaneous with Kerouac’s, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, dated the growing demotic spirit of youth to the death of Henry Ford in 1947, which symbolically precipitated a shift from inner- to outerdirectedness or, in psychoanalytic terms, from the ego to the self.²² One of the great episodes of antinomian boundlessness in American history was about to begin.

In the early 1960s a new spirit of hope entered Western societies. The context was the epochal transition from traditional or “repressive” authority to new forms of individualizing empowerment, which had begun in the 1950s. This shift was not easily contained. Global tendencies toward relaxation of the cold war as well as growing abundance provided the backdrop for an eruption of vibrancy and sex appeal, racial and sexual subcultures, and a mass consumer culture oriented to youth. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Pop Art, Jimi Hendrix, John F. Kennedy, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Mary Quant, color TV, jet travel, transistors, and the pill set the stage for the democratic surge of the 1960s.

The essence of that surge was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. According to Samuel Huntington, who was by no means happy about the change, “people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents. Within most organizations, discipline eased and differences in status became blurred…. Authority based on hierarchy, expertise, and wealth all, obviously, ran counter to the democratic and egalitarian temper of the times.” A New Left, then called “the movement,” sought to politicize this surge. Previous revolutions, whether “bourgeois” or “socialist,” had been state-building enterprises, but the New Left was critical of statism. As Sabine Von Dirke summarized, “the cultural revolution of late capitalism is more impatient, more generous and less easily satisfied than the economic-political revolution. It includes…a revolution of all relationships in which the human being becomes a commodity.”²³

Like cold war liberalism, the New Left was deeply influenced by the prevailing Freudianism. Reflecting this provenance, the New Left was critical of authority relations within the family. To be sure, a familial critique—the “world turned upside down,” in Christopher Hill’s phrase—had been a subcurrent in previous revolutions. During the French Revolution, for example, the Marquis de Sade insisted that incest provides better cement for a revolutionary society than fraternity, because it frees up libidinal energies for citizens to lavish on their country.²⁴ But such views had remained marginal and provocateur. In the sixties, however, the critique of familial relations moved to the center of leftist politics and was closely linked to the critique of other modes of authority, including those that promoted rationalized self-control or “productive power.” This placed the New Left in confrontation with the maturity ethic and thereby with psychoanalysis in its ego psychology form.

As critics of the maturity ethic, New Leftists felt they had a choice in regard to psychoanalysis: to condemn it wholesale or to locate a critical strain within it. They responded by developing what might be called the theory of the two Freuds. One Freud was an apolitical, sexist medical doctor. The other was a theorist of suppressed longings, utopia and desire, surrealism and the Situationist International, in a word, of revolution. One Freud authorized American world hegemony, the sanctified middle-class family, and the classifying regimes of the welfare state. The other held that reason arose from madness and encouraged the libratory explosions of the 1960s. The fact that neither corresponded to the historical Freud was less important than the uses to which Freud’s powerful imago could be put.

In drawing upon Freud as a warrant for revolution, the New Left rejected the earlier tradition of Freudo-Marxism. In prewar Austria and Germany Wilhelm Reich had traced the “mass psychology of fascism” to the German patriarchal family and called for the construction of sex clinics in working-class neighborhoods as a way of resisting the Nazis. Reich also traced the Stalinist counterrevolution to its reactionary sexual and familial practices. But Reich’s work rested on what he took to be the suppressed genital longings of the industrial working class. Progenitors of the New Left such as Dwight MacDonald, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman followed Reich in tracing the failures of the Popular Front to what Mills called “miscalculation of the psychology of the masses.”²⁵ But they differed in orienting themselves to a youth-centered postindustrial society rather than a tradition- and family-centered working class. Goodman—homosexual, communitarian, anarchist, and a follower of John Dewey––was especially important in the genesis of the New Left. Ego psychology, Goodman complained, fostered a “rationalized sociolatry,” “the smooth running of the social machine as it exists.” Instead of the ego, Goodman urged therapists and educators “to think of the self as a process of structuring the organism-environment field.”²⁶

Goodman’s contrast between the “ego” and the “self” exemplified the change that occurred in psychoanalysis in the 1960s. Like many changes in the history of psychoanalysis, this one can be understood through examining language. Freud’s original term (Ich) had been ambiguous, but deliberately so. On the one hand, Freud’s term referred to a psychic agency, the ego as opposed to the id and superego. On the other hand, it referred to the subject as opposed to the object. Freud’s usage exploited this duality. On the one hand, he described the mind as made up of different agencies (id, ego, superego), each pursuing its own ends. On the other hand, the ego had to have a sense of the interests of the subject as a whole in order to fulfill its task of mediating between the different parts of the mind. The ego began to develop this sense at the stage of narcissism, the initial taking of one’s self as a love object. The ego also derived much of its energies from narcissism but was not reducible to the self. What happened in the sixties was that the idea of the ego became increasingly associated with repression, authoritarianism, or productive power, in Foucault’s sense. The idea of the self replaced it, eventually generating a new, affirmative approach to narcissism.

The antinomian tradition had also shaped American psychotherapy, taking the shape of “mind cure” or suggestion. Mind cure rested on relaxation techniques such as meditation, which allowed for the dissolution and ultimate reconstruction of the self. Mind cure’s conversion-based idea of dying and being reborn lies behind the powerful self-help traditions of American psychology, from Christian Science and mesmerism to Alcoholics Anonymous, EST, Lifespring, and theories of “positive thinking” and “codependency.” As the antinomian version of psychotherapy, mind cure was also the favored therapy among American women. Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science), Clara Barton (a founder of the U.S. nursing profession), Dorothea Dix (a reformer of psychiatric asylums), and Jane Addams (a founder of the U.S. social work profession) all practiced mind cure as positive thinking. All had been sick when young but then discovered their vocations and went on to rich, healthy, and productive lives. Far from constituting a shallow, “affirmative” alternative to psychoanalysis, mind cure was recognized internationally. When William James gave the Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1902, he rejected the sick-minded morbidity of the Puritans for what he called an “anti-moralistic method.” “Healthy mindedness”—as James called mind cure—which held that you already are saved if you only knew it, prepared the way for the American reception of psychoanalysis, even as psychoanalysts condemned mind cure as the terrain of uncredentialed female amateurs.

In the sixties, antinomian and mind cure currents, often taking the form of new age psychologies, provided strong if unacknowledged backing for the shift away from the maturity ethic and to the affirmation of the self. We can trace the unfolding theory behind this shift along two terrains: professional psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, on the one hand, and the New Left, on the other. Among analysts, one witnessed an increasingly affirmative therapeutic approach; analysis became kinder and gentler, but also began to lose its distinctive project, the analysis of the resistance. As early as 1946 Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein had urged analysts to replace the word ego in Freud’s 1914 text on narcissism with the word self. Narcissism, they argued, was not the libidinal investment of the ego as opposed to the id, but of the self as opposed to the world.²⁷ In doing this they lost the depth of Freud’s conception. By the 1960s, analysts like Heinz Kohut were arguing for an affirmative attitude toward narcissism. The ego psychologists who espoused the maturity ethic, Kohut insisted, wielded a brutal “courageously facing the truth morality,” a “health-and maturity-morality” in the service of building up the ego. According to Kohut, the need was not to encourage the strengthening of the ego by practicing analytic restraint or “abstinence” (Freud’s favored term), but rather to reassure injured selves.

New Left Freudianism, exemplified by Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Brown’s Life Against Death, also rejected the maturity ethic’s focus on the ego, but explicitly made this part of an ongoing transformation of authority relations. In other words, they politicized Freud. By distinguishing surplus repression (caused by capitalism, the work ethic, racism, or sexism) from necessary repression (built into our lives as mortal, vulnerable animals), Marcuse diagnosed the maturity ethic as an artifact of postwar American capitalism and not as a logical outcome of Freud’s thought. Brown, too, argued that the “neutrality” and confinement of the maturity ethic were not necessitated by Freud’s theory and that a new way of life was implicit in Freud’s vision of infantile sexuality, which Brown called “polymorphous perversity.” Both thinkers argued that Freud’s writings contained a revolutionary conception of a nonrepressive society rooted in the explosive possibilities of the instinctual life.

What distinguished the New Left approach to narcissism from the therapeutic approach was that therapists and analysts wanted to affirm the self, as they had earlier sought to strengthen the ego, while Marcuse, Brown, and the New Left wished rather to dissolve it. Instead of considering narcissism in the sense of self-esteem, or secondary narcissism, they called attention to primary narcissism, the infantile well of self-love and merger with the mother’s body. Freud had proposed the latter concept to explain what he called the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and Its Discontents, writing, “originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”²⁸ With the oceanic feeling in mind, Marcuse argued that primary narcissism existed prior to the emergence of the “I” or self. Far from producing a psychic investment in the self, primary narcissism characterized intrauterine life and sleep. Because primary narcissism reflected the ego’s original, “inseparable connection with the external world,” Marcuse contrasted it to the ego that underpinned the maturity ethic, which he described as “an essentially aggressive, offensive subject, whose thoughts and actions were designed for mastering objects. It was a subject against an object…. Nature (its own as well as the external world) was ‘given’ to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and even violated.” The maturity ethic ego, Marcuse concluded, was “antagonistic to those faculties and attitudes which are receptive rather than productive, which tend toward gratification rather than transcendence [and] which remain strongly committed to the pleasure principle.”²⁹

Whereas Marcuse wrote in the traditions of critical theory and radical politics, Brown drew on the mystical loss of self to challenge the maturity ethic. Brown’s heroes were Lao-tse, Jakob Boehme, and William Blake and their latter-day descendants like Alan Ginsberg. In his preface, Brown explained that “the superannuation of the political categories, which informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s,” meaning Marxism, as well as his profound antipathy to “the politics of sin, cynicism and despair,” meaning cold war liberalism, compelled him “to re-examine the classic assumptions about the nature of politics and about the political character of human nature.” Brown joined Marcuse in rejecting the genitally based, 1950s-style “ego of mastery” and in equating boundlessness with “feminine” motifs, such as receptivity and gratification. Rejecting the “pseudo-individuation” of ego psychology as “based on hostile trends directed against the mother,” Brown sought to rescue Johann Bachofen’s discovery of the role that matriarchy played in human history from “the Jungian Schwärmerei.”³⁰

Such readings of Freud, which were widespread in the New Left, flourished against a background of “altered states of consciousness” (drugs), be-ins, the blurring of identity, huge crowd formations, and the demotic world of newborn mass consumption, pulsating with the color, vitality, and primal rhythms of the unconscious id. Communes, attacks on monogamy, rock music, the onstage performance of backstage behaviors such as nudity, informal dress, and self-disclosure, an activist culture whose only regulative ideal was “participation”: these constituted a social basis for a new postmaturity ethic based on release of the self. Primary narcissism pointed the way, Marcuse held, “from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy” to eroticization of the entire body, from instrumental rationality to art, play, and narcissistic display. Articulating the utopian element in narcissism, Marcuse identified artists and homosexuals as the vanguard of the forces breaking down the maturity ethic. Both found expression in the poet/musician Orpheus, who now replaced Prometheus, Marx’s hero from the ancient world who had stolen the secret of fire from the gods and thereby become the hero of a productivist culture. Orpheus, by contrast, was a figure of postscarcity society. Like Narcissus, Orpheus rejected “the normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros.” He was not only able to charm all living things with his music; he also introduced homosexuality into human history.

The sixties’ regression to primary narcissism reflected what Lou Andreas-Salomé, in 1921, called narcissism’s potentiality for “conjugation and fusion.”³¹ This was the moment when societal and gender distinctions dissolved, an antinomian moment that abstracts individuals from their social context and brings them face-to-face with God. In psychoanalysis the antinomian moment was preserved in the form of free association, which depended on the suspension of action, but prepared the way for interpretation. By contrast, the New Left lifted individuals out of their social and cultural situations in an effort to spur new forms of action. Kristin Ross has called this New Left capacity “dis-identification,” writing, “May ’68 had little to do with the social group—students or ‘youth’—who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinants, with displacements that took people out of their location in society, with a disjunction that is, between political subjectivity and the social group.” Ross also calls this “a shattering of social identity that allowed politics to take place.”³² Disidentification constituted a form of political antinomianism during which established forms of authority or social distinction dissolved.

The maturity ethic had already begun to erode traditional authority by encouraging a distanced and ironic attitude toward society. The New Left, however, went much further by challenging the antipolitical connotations of the maturity ethic and securing a place for radical or left-wing politics. To grasp the importance of this, it is helpful to recall that the liberal portrayal of Freud as a conservative opponent of utopian and progressive thought was deeply rooted in two centuries of mainstream American antipolitical thinking, which had originated in the effort to keep the slavery issue out of politics. Hence the revolutionary impact of the civil rights movement—for example, the sit-ins over segregation—that exploded the codes of propriety governing and delimiting protest. The antiwar movement built on the civil rights precedent. During its demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches, cold war liberals, university presidents, and social scientists regularly complained that the students would not honor the pluralist expectations, mechanisms, and procedures, such as the formulation of “clear demands,” compromise, and bargaining, that, according to liberals and pluralists, kept society together. In fact, the students recognized that only a continuous, activist challenge to hierarchy, including hierarchy within the radical movement, could lead toward genuine equality.³³ The line that regulated what could be challenged politically and what needed to remain private was the same line that operated within individuals, cutting off the genteel from the crude, the loud from the soft, the manly from the feminine, the acceptable from the truly challenging. Suppression of the instincts, New Left activism in effect demonstrated, was tied to the survival of the older status hierarchies in America, as well as to capitalism itself.

By its nature, an antinomian upheaval such as the sixties cannot last. In fact, much of the antinomian spirit of the sixties was consumed in the flames of Vietnam. Memorialized in quasi-surreal works such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the fiery war reached a turning point with the January 1968 Tet offensive. April brought an uprising in Prague, and May a worker/student general strike in Paris. In Mexico City left-wing students were massacred at the university. In Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, New Left activists were “disappeared,” in some cases thrown alive from military airplanes. Against such a background, and under the saturated light of TV and film cameras (“the whole world is watching”), elements of the New Left began to disintegrate into assorted grouplets and crowd crystals, of which radical feminism was the most enduring. At the same time, any number of new journals, preparty organizations, university reform manifestos, conferences, and other intellectual and political efforts were underway, attempting to turn the largely inchoate upsurge of the New Left into a permanent radical presence.

Meanwhile, too, the neoliberal revolution was germinating. A new form of consumerism, symbolized by the Whole Earth Catalog, and a new model of work, symbolized by Silicon Valley, bridged the utopianism of the sixties with the entrepreneurialism of the seventies. Although the dominant ideology associated with the market was one of rational choice, neoliberalism was also able to capture much of the creativity previously associated with the unconscious and with private life. A new affirmative approach to narcissism was integral to this. As the seventies dawned, journalists labeled the new generation the “me generation,” supposedly marked by widespread fear “of not belonging to the company of the great, rich and powerful, and of belonging instead to the ‘mediocre.’”³⁴ A pivotal work, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978), argued that the New Left had degenerated into “a struggle not for social change but for self-realization.” Lasch quoted Susan Stern, later a Weatherman, describing her state of mind at the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968: “I felt good. I could feel my body supple and strong and slim, and ready to run miles, and my legs moving sure and swift under me…I felt real…I felt I was part of a vast network of intense, exciting and brilliant people.”³⁵ Even as Lasch belittled the phenomenon of narcissism, he unconsciously cited a passage focused on a woman’s experience of her body.

In the first, rejectionist phase, radical feminists argued that “the discoveries of a great pioneer” had been “invoked to sponsor a point of view essentially conservative.” By 1970, when Kate Millet published these words, they had become a New Left commonplace, but radical feminism gave them new meaning. The theory of penis envy, Millett adumbrated, had been a “superbly timed accusation” against “any woman unwilling to ‘stay in her place.’” In Millet’s reading of Freud, “a female’s discovery of her sex is, in and of itself, a catastrophe of such vast proportions that it haunts a woman all through life.”³⁶

The key to the first phase was a credo: “the personal is political.” This notion challenged the very idea of a relatively autonomous intrapsychic life in favor of what would later be called social construction. A direct attack on the maturity ethic, the credo had deep roots in the culture of the period. The cold war ideology of totalitarianism, reflected in the imagery of “brainwashing,” had encouraged the idea that society could be all-powerful, while New Leftists held that even madness was a social construction. Drawing on such precedents, the first wave of radical feminists insisted that anything that affected women negatively must come from outside the female psyche. Naturally, psychoanalysis fell to the axe. Feminists discouraged “individual explanations” in favor of “consciousness-raising” groups. Commenting on this development, the pro-Freudian feminist Juliet Mitchell protested that feminists had gotten “rid of mental life.” For second-wave feminism, Mitchell insisted, “It all actually happens…. There is no other sort of reality than social reality.”³⁷

As Mitchell’s remark suggests, the first feminist attacks were too simple to dispel so complex and imposing a figure as Freud. More promising was a second, reconstructionist phase in which feminists adapted proto-Freudian figures of thought to penetrate more deeply into the personal or familial terrain. Here, however, feminists experienced a fateful ambivalence. On the one hand, the family was the locus of traditional authority, and therefore of women’s subordination, but it was also the main site of love between men and women, of their struggle to establish sexual and parental bonds, and of personal life, beyond the determinations of a rationalized capitalist order. In general, feminists resolved this ambivalence negatively by defining the family as a site of oppression or power simpliciter. Harkening back to Wilhelm Reich, this approach was reinforced in the early seventies by the neo-Marxist-cum-feminist discovery that the family was part of what Marx called the “economic structure” of society—a site of socially necessary but unrecognized because nonmonetized labor. While that discovery might have nudged America in a very different direction than the one it adopted, namely toward social democracy, its chief effect was rather to further the deidealization of sexual and romantic love, which was the key achievement of the second phase of the feminist encounter with Freud.³⁸

Coitus “appears a biological and physical activity,” Millet elucidated, but in fact it is “a charged microcosm” of “power-structured relationships…whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”³⁹ Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) was the locus classicus for this approach. According to Firestone, “the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events” lay in the “biological family,” which gave rise to a father-dominated “power psychology,” a “psychological pattern of dominance-submission.” Penis envy was power envy. “From the beginning,” she wrote, intending to improve on Freud, the infant is “sensitive to the hierarchy of power.”⁴⁰ Firestone offered this as a general approach to history, one that would supplant Marxism. In fact, its main area of application was the family.

Understanding the family as the site of labor and power transformed the meaning of heterosexuality, sometimes to near the point of caricature. Even self-proclaimed socialist feminists like Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon wrote that women’s heterosexual experience involved “ecstasy on the battlefield,” implying that whatever instants of sexual pleasure a woman might glean during intercourse had to be stolen from her unremitting struggle against predation.⁴¹ Radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon was more blunt: “sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.” Heterosexual sex, MacKinnon explained, is “something men do to women.” “Domination, penile penetration, possession, constitute the male definition of sex.”⁴² “A woman is a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else who is socially male.”⁴³ The logical implication was that there is at least a touch of rape in all heterosexuality; even when they appear voluntary, sexual relations between men and women are eroticized forms of dominance and submission.⁴⁴ Not all women agreed with these formulations, but very few failed to be affected by them.

Highlighting sexual ambivalence touched a nerve among women. Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) drew on the same painful strain of feeling, but this time to rescue psychoanalysis for the feminist project. Rejecting the idea that Freud’s work was a sexist account, Mitchell characterized it as a theory of how a psychology of female inferiority is created in early childhood. “In setting out to analyze the operations of ideology and the laws of the human order,” she wrote, “Freud had to realize that that order and ideology are patriarchal.”⁴⁵ Hence psychoanalysis was a description of a patriarchal society, not a prescription for one.

To make this case, Mitchell returned to the debates over the infantile “prehistory” of womanhood that had consumed psychoanalysis in the thirties. Freud’s core preoccupation, she explained, was to explain how a child with an innately bisexual constitution turns into a heterosexual woman. For Freud, the girl faced a problem in changing her sexual object from her mother to her father and, in the process, modifying her drives so that they became less active, more passive. Thus, in Freud’s view, boys and girls had different oedipal experiences. The boy’s Oedipus complex (his early love for his mother) was “smashed,” whereas the girl entered into a difficult and circuitous path, turning herself into an object of desire first for her father and then for men in general. What Freud called “the difficult development toward femininity” in infancy could exhaust a young girl psychologically. For his early feminist critics, such as Karen Horney, this was a nonproblem, since girls developed into women by identifying with their mothers. For Mitchell, however, such critics missed the point, which was the created, precarious, and almost artificial character of what is called femininity.

Although Mitchell was trying to defend Freud, she shared the underlying radical feminist assumption that the family was the site of patriarchal power. She also agreed with her feminist critics that the passive, receptive, “feminine” side of women’s sexuality reflected the structure of domination in the traditional family. Mitchell went beyond radical feminism, however, by situating the patriarchal or traditional family anthropologically, thereby further supplanting the Marxist focus on economic structure with a new focus on kinship, which placed sexual difference at the origin and foundation of society. The existence of the incest taboo, she argued, following Claude Lévi-Strauss, presupposed the distinction between the sexes. That distinction gives us “that smallest of differences” which forces men to leave their biological families and find other men’s sisters and daughters to marry, thus generating the patriarchal kinship ties that underlie all prior social organization.⁴⁶ Mitchell’s interest in the cultural as opposed to biological character of sexual difference converged with Lévi-Strauss’s interest in distinguishing culture from nature. What the girl “learns” in infancy, Mitchell explained, is not the superiority of the penis over the clitoris, but the superiority of culture over biology. As a result of her infantile experience, the girl feels “originally deprived…not, like other deprivations, a culturally demanded necessity.”⁴⁷

In this second phase in their encounter with Freudianism, feminists were trying to remake psychoanalysis so that it could contribute to a feminist theory. However, reciprocal blind spots in feminism and psychoanalysis scuttled this project. Psychoanalysis implied a patriarchal law that stands over both sexes, but did not fully appreciate the way that law subordinated women to men. Feminists saw the rule of men over women, but neither the weight of “the law” in the Kafkaesque sense of command or tradition nor in the sense of the superego, as Freud envisioned the rule of the father. Freud believed that the proper conflict for understanding the logic of domination was “not between masculine and feminine but between libido and repression,” implying that men and women would advance in tandem.⁴⁸ Feminists held that the conflict between men and women was at least as important as sexual repression, and arguably prior, implying that sexual progress presupposed the earlier overthrow of male domination. For Freud, the “repudiation of femininity” explained both misogyny and penis envy. For feminists, the idea of penis envy was already an expression of misogyny. Gayle Rubin called psychoanalysis “feminist theory manqué,” but radical feminism could equally be termed psychoanalysis manqué. In any case, Mitchell’s effort to rescue Freud for feminism failed, as the emotional mistrust and bitterness dividing the two outlooks proved insuperable.

Behind the impasse lay two different conceptions of the family and, ultimately of human evolution. The feminist conception stressed the role of power, as expressed in the idea of patriarchy, understood as male control over women’s sexuality and labor. According to Gerda Lerner, feminists had to explain thirty-five hundred years of “women’s historical ‘complicity’ in upholding the patriarchal system that subordinated them and…in transmitting that system, generation after generation, to their children of both sexes.”⁴⁹ Freud, by contrast, saw both sexes suffering, albeit differently, from the aftereffects of the father complex, which left a legacy of guilt and repression. Whereas feminists like Lerner tended to go back to an originary “world historic defeat of the female sex,” situated, for example, in ancient Mesopotamia, Freud drew on an evolutionary (Lamarckian) conception of the sexes that emphasized the importance of pair-bonding, the prolongation of infancy, and kinship in the long Paleolithic era, especially in its later prehistoric phase. Undoubtedly the two strands of thinking—male power, on the one hand, the father complex, sexuality, and guilt, on the other—were ultimately reconcilable, but the feminists of this period rejected the Freudian strand. The result was a one-sided emphasis on power that facilitated the third phase in the encounter between feminism and Freudianism, ultimately weakening feminism’s critical dimension and facilitating its convergence with the ongoing neoliberal ascendancy.

Two aspects of the feminist concept of patriarchy proved consequential. First, that model focused on one-to-one relations of domination, analogous to those of slavery. Thus it lent itself to the classic liberal solution of the “rights revolution,” i.e., protection of the individual against discrimination as opposed to structural reform. Insofar as feminists moved from immediate domination to social structures, they remained within the liberal paradigm in emphasizing meritocracy (discrimination against women) as opposed to a more robust conception of equality that would require the transformation of the society as a whole. That liberal paradigm lay behind the radical feminist assumption that men as a group sought to maximize their power vis-à-vis women as a group. Examples of this assumption include Mitchell and Rubin’s idea that kinship was a matter of men exchanging women, Heidi Hartmann’s idea that the family wage should be understood as the outcome of men’s struggle against women, and Joan Kelly’s idea that women did not have a Renaissance.⁵⁰ In all these formulations there were elements of truth, but too much was obscured or denied: men and women cooperate in kinship, the family wage was supported by most working-class women as part of the struggle of labor against capital, and women did have a Renaissance, albeit a different one than men. Grasping these complications required a more anthropologically and historically grounded approach to gender relations as rooted in social production and reproduction and especially in the changing role of the family as a unit of production and consumption.

In addition, the patriarchal model misconstrued the problem of authority, which by its nature involves an intrapsychic and unconscious dimension. In fact, the sharp division between paternal authority and maternal nurturance so central to the radical feminist vision was recent, largely originating in the Victorian era, which had spawned the ideology of the “haven in a heartless world” in response to the growing divide between capitalism and personal life. For Freud, who supplied the first overall theory of modern personal life, obedience to the laws of civilization was based on love for the primal figures of childhood, not just on command and fear. Thus the patriarchal father was as much protector as castrator, tucking his children in at night even while threatening them with the loss of their genitals. Hence, to analyze gender inequality, feminists needed a theory encompassing not only domination but also respect, love, and sexual desire.

Most important, the one-sided interpretation of the family as the site of patriarchal power severely circumscribed feminist self-reflection. It encouraged questions that affirmed the paradigm of patriarchal subjection, such as the self-critique of women’s racism or homophobia, but discouraged reflection on feminism’s psychological content itself. Crucial to understanding the cultural revolution consuming America at that time, the unconscious content of the feminist revolution was and was to remain largely unanalyzed. Central here was the new centrality of the maternal imago, or preoedipal mother, precipitated by the eruption of feminism.⁵¹ Potentially revolutionary in its implications, the explosive moment of the early seventies drew on the intensely primitive forms of dependence that underlie all group psychology, the tendency toward splitting and paranoia that periodically animate groups, and the cathexis of narcissism, idealization, and identity, all of which were critical for understanding the neoliberal society then emerging.

Loosening the ties that bound women to men, feminists strengthened the ties that bound women to one another. New Left antinomianism, with its fantasies of primitive merger, its blurring of identity and huge crowd formations, had prepared the way for the explosively growing women’s community, which was based on the idea of the “woman-identified woman,” whether overtly as in lesbianism or in the sublimated form of women’s loyalty to women. The result was a joyful reunion among mothers and daughters, or sisters and sisters, the intense feelings of pleasure released indicating the lifting of a repression. Kathy Amatniek, wrote, “when those meetings began…. suddenly everyone had a story about the negative response of the man she lived with.” For Nancy Hawley, “The flood broke loose gradually and then more swiftly. We talked about our families, our mothers, our fathers, our siblings; we talked about our men; we talked about school; we talked about ‘the movement’ (which meant New Left men). For hours we talked and unburdened our souls and left feeling high.” Joanne Cook, a feminist economist, wrote, “not one woman apologized for complaints about her lot…. Every woman was a sister.”⁵² It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the radical feminist explosion, the euphoria of sisterhood generated struggles over maternal power—so-called trashing—directed against women who “slept with the enemy” or women who were “male-identified” or “unsisterly” in their ambitions. But in the long run the idea of sisterhood became an enduring point of reference in historical writing, social theory, and politics.

Here, then, was the triumph of narcissism in its group-psychological form. Whereas New Left antinomianism promoted a politics of “disidentification,” a “shattering of social identity,” the emotional drive behind seventies’ feminism lay in identification, the earliest tie with another person, the basis for the building up of the self, and the mechanism of group formation. What appeared from one perspective as solidarity across women’s difference was, from another, self-assertion for the members of the group. Cathy Cade, a lesbian documentary photographer, explained, “in the black movement I had been fighting for someone else’s [freedom from] oppression and now there was a way that I could fight for my own freedom.” For Mimi Feingold, “women couldn’t burn draft cards and couldn’t go to jail so all they could do was to relate through their men and that seemed to me the most really demeaning kind of thing.”⁵³ As these statements suggest, the woman-identified woman meant a wrenching break with the New Left, a break that proved crucial in precipitating the convergence of feminism with neoliberalism. But the key to understanding the break is that the “mixed” left was premised less on a general assumption of sacrifice to advance collective goals and more on the assumption that women would sacrifice, an assumption that rested on women’s self-sacrificing role within the family. Women’s liberation was a way of saying that was no longer acceptable, neither on the left nor in the society as a whole.

The break with the left precipitated the third phase in the feminist encounter with psychoanalysis—the feminist revision of psychoanalysis in a relational form that helped consolidate the neoliberal extension of the market. The most important expression of the new relational ideology was Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), which replaced Mitchell’s and Firestone’s works as the leading feminist/psychoanalytic text. The core of Chodorow’s book lay in what Julia Kristeva called “the homosexual facet” of motherhood—the mother-daughter relationship, which feminist psychoanalysts of the 1930s, such as Karen Horney, had counterposed to Freud to explain female development. Like her 1930s predecessors, Chodorow substituted the theme of identification for the theme of sexual object choice that characterized classical psychoanalysis. According to Chodorow, the preoedipal mother identifies with her daughter, but treats her son as different. The important axis of infantile development, then, is the formation of gender identity, not the choice of a sexual object. Through identification with their mothers, girls achieve “an unambiguous and unquestioned gender identity and realistically sexed body-ego,” whereas boys’ gender identity and “relational potential” is less secure. Thus, women value merger and closeness, whereas men insist on separation. From a theory that stressed the difficulty that girls had in finding their way to heterosexual desire, psychoanalysis became a theory that described the difficulty boys had in achieving intimacy. Even as public expressions of sexuality exploded in mass culture, advertising, and pornography, the emerging focus on identification and identity suggested desexualization.⁵⁴

Largely through its transformation of the maturity ethic into a relational ethic, women’s liberation was able to replace Freudianism as the final form of the spirit of capitalism for the era of mass consumption. Like the original Protestant ethic described by Weber, the feminist version of the spirit of capitalism reflected an ongoing transformation of the family. That transformation had begun with the maturity ethic, which drew men and women from their traditional, homosocial worlds into the sexual dyad. It continued with the New Left’s struggles against in loco parentis, chivalry, and the idealization of female virginity. And it culminated in the feminist critique of nepotism and the “old boy’s network.” The effect was to buttress support for the two-earner family, fictive kinship, and gay marriage. In the context of this transformation of the family, the third stage in the feminist encounter with psychoanalysis complemented and enriched American society’s turn toward the market, rational choice, and neuroscience. Like those Americans who, in the 1730s, turned away from the difficult, ascetic doctrine of predestination and toward the common sense of free will, the feminists of the 1970s moved away from Freudian analysis and toward secondary narcissism or self-assertion, thus providing an Arminian resolution to the cultural conflicts of the era.

The first and most important of the changes in the spirit of capitalism occurred when narcissism, as the libidinal face of egoism, replaced asceticism, the first component of the spirit of capitalism as described by Weber. For Weber, capitalism required instinctual renunciation, or asceticism, because of the imperatives of saving. As we saw, when the mantra shifted from saving to spending, the Protestant ethic faded. By the seventies, the new spirit of capitalism assumed the naturalness of egoism or, as it came to be called, rational choice. The legitimation of egoism had a profound effect on psychotherapy. Society, to the neoliberal imagination, should be a “timeless, placeless, self-equilibrating register of individual preferences.”⁵⁵ To achieve this register, neoliberals unleashed a totalizing project meant to remake society by valorizing distancing, objectification, behavioral criteria, quantification, and scientism. Considerations of “the bottom line” were applied to every institution, at the cost of any self-reflection over goals. But a special effort was made to subdue those professions that relied on immeasurable human qualities: medicine, teaching, the arts, and psychotherapy. Here the tendentious and inaccurate feminist labeling of Freud as “sexist” was a gift of inestimable value. Managed care, cost-benefit accounting, the “diagnosis-based” medical model, “effectiveness” measures, and Big Pharma’s well-documented “cooking” of research results, as well as the wave of “Freud-bashing,” followed in its wake. Psychoanalysis did not disappear, but it was increasingly adapted to America’s prevailing psychological culture: mind cure.

As this suggests, the redefinition of the subject in egoistic terms was only the surface of the neoliberal turn. The embrace of egoism rested on the validation of narcissism. Here, again, the radical feminist revolt against the oedipal theory, the redefinition of psychoanalysis as a theory of the self, and the triumph of group narcissism or identity would all prove crucial. Foucault’s theory of productive power, instantiated in the maturity ethic, received a libidinal basis not only in the secondary narcissism of self-assertion but even more deeply in the primary narcissism of identity politics. Once again, there was an element of repetition. In the 1730s Jonathan Edwards had called Arminianism “a lust for selfhood” whose chief doctrine was “I am my own cause.”⁵⁶ Now, nearly three hundred years later, a recognition of the importance of narcissism to capitalist social organization informs Kazuo Ishiguro’s novella Never Let Me Go (2005), in which educators cultivate an artistic sense in children being raised as clones, their organs to be eventually harvested for the benefit of neoliberal, technocratic elites.

The second component of the new spirit of capitalism was the ideology of flexibility, which supplanted the compulsivity of the Protestant ethic in what was sometimes termed the network society, typically linked to globalization, enhanced immigration, and the two-earner family. Here, too, the New Left and feminist rejections of depth psychology set the stage for the new dispensation. On the one hand, intrapsychic life was redescribed in terms of information, cybernetics, and neuroscience. “Gender” was cut off from its roots in sexuality or biology and redefined as a sign or token. On the other hand, the “relational” psychoanalyst, based on the imago of the pre-oedipal Mother, complemented the neoliberal, cybernetic world of neurobiology, her techniques of holding, mirroring, and the so-called real relationship with the patient replacing the “cold,” “withholding,” oedipally oriented Freudian. Drive theory, according to which individuals sought objects primarily to realize their own aims, such as orality (through talking) or genitality (through sexual intercourse), gave way to the idea that individuals sought objects for the intrinsic satisfaction of the relationship. Pragmatic thinkers like George Herbert Mead, who had created a desexualized, infant-based social psychology, were rediscovered. Subjectivity was subordinated to intersubjectivity, especially in the therapeutic context of a “holding,” quasi-maternal relationship. Together these trends supposedly decentered authority and encouraged pluralism, contextualism, and sensitivity to difference. In fact, however, they distracted attention from the unconscious structure of authority, which is rooted in the appeal to amour propre in liberal societies. Just as the emerging language of “networks” and “flat-worldism” obscured economic and political structure, which generates class domination, so the language of “difference” and “recognition” obscured authority, which sustains that domination.

Complementing narcissism and sensitivity to difference, the third component of the new spirit of capitalism was the ideology of empowerment, successor to puritanical hypocrisy. Here, too, there were good reasons to question classical psychoanalysis. Could it be that Freud was so focused on the backward-moving tendencies in the mind that he failed to see the positive, optimistic, outward-directed side of human character? Perhaps he devised an analytic method premised on analyzing the resistance while underestimating the narcissistic and self-interested forces that make men and women want to learn more about themselves? William James, for one, thought so. The “sick soul,” he wrote, goes “grubbing in rat-holes,” manufactures fears, and is preoccupied “with every unwholesome kind of misery.” With the appearance of the healthy-minded, James rejoiced, “the deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind [makes] its entrance into philosophy.”⁵⁷

Certainly empowerment converged with the application of the symptom-oriented medical model to psychotherapy. But it also drew the narcissistic energies released from the traditional family into a new form of political life, “identity politics,” the counterpart to the spread of the market. Although presaged by the Black Power movement, radical feminism, with its valorization of the woman-identified woman, gave the identity paradigm its general character. Sociologists and historians, such as Carol Smith-Rosenberg, evoked the nineteenth-century “female world of love and ritual,” lifelong sisterly friendships, allegedly more important to women than their relations with their husbands, and ultimately based on mother-daughter ties.⁵⁸ The poet Adrienne Rich captured the powerful regressive forces that infused the new politics: “women are talking to each other, recovering an oral culture, telling our life-stories, reading aloud to one another the books that have moved and healed us, analyzing the language that has lied about us, reading our own words aloud and to each other.”⁵⁹ By the 1980s such philosophers as Charles Taylor were insisting that the future of progressive politics rested on the politics of identity,⁶⁰ while Axel Honneth extended identity into a more general politics of recognition, which arose out of, and in turn reinforced, the relational turn.⁶¹

No group embodied the new focus on identity better than homosexuals, meaning both gays and lesbians. In the 1890s, when psychoanalysis was born, homosexuals exemplified the then new idea of personal life, that is, a sexual life not defined by one’s place in the family. At that time, Freudians could understand a homosexual object choice psychologically, but there was no such entity as a “homosexual.”⁶² In the course of the 1970s, however, efforts to understand the psychology of homosexuality began to seem bigoted, like efforts to understand the psychology of races. The last thing homosexuals needed, spokespeople for the community argued, was psychoanalysis; rather, they needed services, community institutions, and political organizations. In time, homosexuals began to understand themselves as persons with a distinct way of life who belonged to a historically specific community. At that point homosexuality became an identity based on membership in a community. Lesbians, explained one theorist, are “women who love women, who choose women to nurture and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently…. Lesbians cannot be defined simply as women who practice certain physical rites together.”⁶³

Radical feminism, then, was the culmination of a great historical transformation, on whose achievements it rested, and which it brought to an end. In its blazing intensity, enormous gains were made but two great resources necessary to understand and advance those gains were lost. The first is the psychoanalytic exploration of what Freud called the “long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence,” an epoch that enhances “the value of the object which can alone protect” the infant, creating “the need to be loved which will accompany the child through the rest of its life.”⁶⁴ A whole world is implicit in this insight. The second, which is closely related, is the socialist vision of a just society, which assumes that human beings can rise above egoism and narcissism to form cooperative relations that are in everyone’s interest. Neither Freudianism nor socialism are rooted in an ahistorical patriarchy but rather in a view of evolution that has a place for the recognition of paternity and for the cooperation between the sexes that made the prolonging of infancy (the growth of the human brain) possible. Both visions underlie an understanding of personal life as a historical development. Not just Freud, but political Freud is crucial to its comprehension.

The loss of the two great critical paradigms generated during the preceding two centuries paved the way for the rise of neoliberalism, the governing philosophy since the seventies. In liberating not only egoism but also narcissism, neoliberals found a new and more effective way to achieve a core objective of the maturity ethic: to contain and restrict the political sphere. The channeling of narcissism into powerful demands for meritocracy, minority cultural rights, and recognition served effectively to transform personal life from a critical to an affirmative development and to blunt any overall opposition to the assault on collective values such as public goods and social solidarity. The understanding of the past in terms of power has left men and women powerless. Here again we see the ambiguous character of political Freudianism. Mounted in the sixties as a banner of revolution, it ended by reflecting the mirror of the self.