CHAPTER 9 The Great Sex Symphony

Everything in the world is for the most part a repetition of something else. We have the same sorts of bodies with our neighbors, learn the same things with them … and in general seem striving to make the poor old world go on repeating itself year by year. I have a well-written French book, lent me years ago by Miss Blow that tells all about it.… In the reason, the imagination, the will (one of them trained through Philosophy) alone is bliss.

Putnam in an undated letter to a cousin around 1909

THERE’S A PERVASIVE sense that Freud somehow imported sex to America. He arrived on these shores with panting lust in a little hairy black box and opened the lid, whereupon it went crawling off on a billion pink, wriggly legs to conquer the U.S. In truth, despite the prevailing “civilized morality” documented by Nathan Hale with all its anti-sexual ethos, from the latter half of the nineteenth century up to the time of Freud’s visit and beyond, a considerable swath of the American medical and reformist elite was to some measure aware of the inevitable vicissitudes of human desire, and of the fact that sex could not simply be ignored or extinguished. Hysteria and neurasthenia both were often traced to sexual frustration. George Beard assigned to neurasthenia an etiology grounded in the detrimental habits of contemporary existence. One of the most flagrant of these was the disruption of domestic intimacy caused by the industrialized, accelerated pace of urban life. Freud was hardly the first to declare that the origins of hysteria lay in the marriage bed. His theoretical decision to fix the wellsprings of hysteria in unrequited sexual longing complicates his special interest in male hysteria, as well as the implications of his own hysterical episodes. If women’s pleasure in his schema was a factor of synchronizing desire with anatomical structure, what did the male inability to find pleasure even in heterosexual genital sexuality indicate? With regard to the male, fantasy and the failure of fantasy operated on something closer to a blank slate than the female body. Indeed, the stubborn challenge of trying to define what exactly hysteria was reflected to some extent the question of what sexual dissatisfaction signified. Did it, for example, mean, in regard to the female, that she was nymphomaniac, or did it suggest a problem with respect to the spouse?

The broad American recognition that unconsummated erotic need played into a host of nervous diseases raised endless questions. Many of these boiled down to the conundrum of how much release was too much release? Along with the moral religious framework that people were often squeamish about transgressing there was, once again, the field of energy dynamics to consider. Orgasms represented an expenditure of a finite energy stock. Even if the Christian code was faltering in places, there remained the grave danger of exhausting one’s energy supply. In numerous cases, men counted on female sexual reticence to safeguard them from their own profligate tendencies. Debates about how to negotiate the balance between excessive sexual tension and wastefulness in both a physiological and religious-ethical sense were raging in America long before Freud had developed his theories of sexual psychology.

(Today’s women’s magazines with articles such as “7 Secrets of Highly Orgasmic Women,” suggest that in classic American fashion we’ve simply flip-sided the problem faced a hundred years ago. Along with empowering and giving control, we’ve created at least as much pressure on women to hypersexualize themselves as existed in Putnam’s day to contain and neutralize female desire. The silken fetters are surely a more pleasurable form of bondage than were the hard chastity devices of earlier days, but they are not necessarily for that reason a form of liberation. The debate about balance has been eliminated, but only in favor of the glutted mentality of consumer culture.)

Many American doctors did not need Freud in order to believe that the subject of sex was of vital importance and that the current dynamics were pernicious, in spite of the fundamental sexual powerlessness of women in fin de siècle social structure. Medical figures were making their respective benighted and relatively enlightened cases in every imaginable context. They were also treating the problems of unfulfilled and unfelt desire with surprisingly direct tactics.

Doctors of the mind like Putnam couldn’t help confronting the importance of sexuality in neurosis as they regularly saw patients who complained of sexual problems. Near the outset of his career, Putnam received a letter from a man who pleaded that he be “fitted for marriage” because his “generative powers” had been devastated by “self-abuse.” The model of chastity, Susan Blow herself, eventually told Putnam about the crippling incestual overtones to her relationship with her father.

Putnam’s therapeutic practice in the early years relied primarily on electrotherapy and hydrotherapy. Rachel Maines’ book, The Technology of Orgasm, which traces the astonishingly suppressed history of women’s medically supervised, technological sexual stimulation, implies that both Putnam’s shock therapeutics and “water cure” methodologies would almost certainly have included therapy specifically aimed at bringing patients to orgasm. Maines has collected a set of illustrations and firsthand accounts indicating the extent to which a portfolio of douches (especially “douches upon the loins”) and water jets were employed at spas and clinics to produce in women “the most extraordinary effects, as weeping, laughing, trembling, &tc,” as one practitioner put it. Electrotherapy used a variety of devices (from the full-size “jolting chair” to hand-held vibrators) to generate mild shocks for the purpose of tonic, usually genitally focused massage. These devices had long been seen as an excellent means of relieving “pelvic congestion” and its accompanying neurasthenic symptoms. John Harvey Kellogg, cereal magnate of Battle Creek, was a great enthusiast of the effects of contractions in treating neurosis. In an address he gave in 1904, he describes how, in his own latest experiments, “with one electrode placed in the rectum or the vagina, and the other upon the abdomen, strong contractions of the abdominal muscles may be produced, and even of the muscles of the upper thigh, without any sensation other than of motion.” In the year of Freud’s visit, Maines notes, Kellogg’s Good Health catalog dangled before doctors “a vibratory chair, a vibrating bar, a trunk-shaking apparatus … apparatus for percussion and mechanical kneading, and a very impressive electromechanical ‘centrifugal vibrator.’ ” Some of these sorts of tools, such as the luxury “Chattanooga Vibrator,” honed for both rectal and vaginal penetration, were also applied to male neurasthenics.

Putnam’s work at MGH employing such instruments was then the typical first line of defense treatment for a variety of neurasthenic complaints. No one, however hidebound by the conventions of the age, could have mistaken this welter of penetrating nozzles and nodes as anything but forms of sexual treatment. Some physicians argued that the generation of pelvic contractions, instead of releasing tension, could spark a proliferating desire (with all the consequent access of neurosis), but these naysayers did not bring about a reduction in such forms of treatment. Despite the pathologization of sex implicit in all this, matters become more ambiguous in the early 1900s, still before Freud’s visit, with the increasing sales of consumer vibrators for home usage. The American Vibrator Company, based in Blow’s hometown of St. Louis, produced a home vibrator in 1906 that was promoted on the basis of its depth of access and spectrum of untiring motions. The ultimate selling point was the fact that the “American Vibrator” could be administered alone, “in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth.” Even had Freud sought to bring a legitimization of sexual energy and ecstasy to America, it would appear that in households furnished with a device like the American Vibrator, he would have been bringing coals to Newcastle.

At the least, the question of what Freud did bring America becomes more—congested. As Freud himself noted, the Yankees were acutely conscious of childhood sexuality. Indeed, Putnam was so concerned with the reality of children’s sexuality that, as Molly stated as an adult, he had adjusted his daughters’ bicycle seats out of concern that the friction might be unduly stimulating. He was so scared of triggering any kind of father–daughter sexual response that he forbade his daughters to sit on his lap. This is a notion of children’s erotic potential that seems even to out-Freud Freud himself. (Jones reports that Freud was physically warm with his children.)

For all of Putnam’s extreme caution when it came to his own female offspring at home, he did not consider sex an omnipresent evil to be avoided. In 1898, in an essay entitled “Neurasthenia,” Putnam insisted that a physician ought first to discuss with patients both the “difficulties and possibilities” of “self-restraint” for the phobias and impotence that could accompany sexual neurasthenia. However, in advocating that the physician act as a counselor who would then turn over to the patient the decision about which course to pursue, Putnam was a long way from mandating a course of chastity. Indeed, by pointing out both potential advantages and the hardships of self-restraint, the physician was working equally with “a view to the stimulation of the will” in those who could fortify themselves for the moral struggle and “the counteraction of morbid self-reproach” among those for whom the high road was too strenuous. Even if what was taking place in these counseling sessions was a far cry from the “talking cure,” it’s apparent that a reasonably candid conversation about sexuality was part of treatment. As Hale points out, there was a growing cognizance in the last years of the nineteenth century that an inability to speak about sex could itself have debilitating consequences.

In the 1870s, Putnam was willing to take the advice of a colleague in treating symptoms of neurotic “cerebro-spinal exhaustion” in prescribing “the fat of beef and mutton to be eaten freely; butter and cream likewise. Sexual intercourse to be absolutely abstained from. Mental labor to be made as regular and unemotional as possible and sufficient sleep to be obtained: nerve tonics; phosphorus or zinc phosphate, oxide of iron, arsenic, strychnia, for relief of spinal pains, electricity and the emplastrum, belladonna, etc.” By 1898, these sorts of pacifying somatic regimes were insufficient. Although he made the point in the essay “Neurasthenia” that patients need to understand that “sexual intercourse is not the main object of marriage,” he also stresses that “an unnatural struggle for extreme abstinence is not good for the neurasthenic patient, and the physician can often bring material aid to the patient in arriving at a wise conclusion as to the detail.” Couched in qualifiers and abstractions, Putnam was saying that one sensible prescription for sexual neurasthenia was sex.

In another essay on neurasthenia, published in 1908, Putnam expressed a progressive—in the sense of being anti-hereditary—theory of sexual perversion. He suggested that environment and social causes were at the root of tendencies that many doctors attributed to degeneracy and “manifestations of an implacable destiny.” By this point, Putnam was fully cognizant of the link between adult neurosis and youthful sexuality: “The sexual instincts, though not consciously recognized as such, are the basis of much of the emotional instability of early puberty and middle life,” he wrote in 1908.

It may have been inconceivable to posit having good sex as a life goal, as we do today, but sexuality as such had to be given its due.

THE MAGNUM OPUS of G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, published in 1904, was largely concerned with the constitutive role of sexuality in human psychology. Whereas Hall had obviously read Freud and alludes to him directly with regard to the dominant etiology of sexual trauma in neurosis, Freud is primarily invoked to buttress Hall’s own homegrown interpretation of the importance of sexuality, not the other way around.

Hall can hardly be considered a feminist, and he was taken to task by leaders of the women’s rights movement. Of his concept of woman as a transcendent mother figure, Kate Gorden of Mount Holyoke College wrote in 1905, “To adore this naïve being, passionately to worship an unconscious divinity (the roots of whose being are so penetrating), is it not a very apotheosis of the vegetable?” However, for all Hall’s undoubted sentimentality and refusal to countenance women’s capacity for certain vocations, he nonetheless devoted a great deal of space to arguing in support of women’s higher education (albeit in the humanities). What’s more, much of the fifty-page chapter “Adolescent Girls and Their Education” in the book Adolesence, consisted of a call for a greater recognition of female sexuality. In an exhaustive review of contemporary writing on the subject he made clear his condemnation of the lingering view of menstruation “as a disagreeable function or a badge of inferiority.” He cited approvingly the work of Dr. F. C. Taylor in the American Journal of Obstetricians in the 1880s who had stated that “if the sexual life [in women] is lowered or suppressed, a tonic needed for vigor in all directions is lost.” Hall implicitly supports Taylor’s position that when women are kept “in a suppressed semi-erotic state with never-culminating feeling” they lose their ability for concentrated work or affections of any kind.

Hall argued that happy marriage can’t be purely sentimental and “should be bulwarked by mental affinity” between husband and wife. Whereas “women are weaker in body and mind than men” they can nonetheless “achieve great things even intellectually, and might take courage from examples like that of Darwin, who did much of his best work in years of such weakness that he could apply himself for only an hour or two a day.” Along with the need to grant women greater intellectual relevance in marriage, Hall alluded to another author who promotes the importance of recognizing the “animal basis” in its pure and wholesome capacity. If American women are not nurtured in that regard, Hall writes, startlingly, “there will have to be a ‘new rape of the Sabines,’ and if women do not improve, men will have recourse to emigrant wives.”

Part of the blame for the lack of stamina necessary to preserve the animal basis is laid on ignorance. Great suffering and unhappy marriages can result from teachers’ ignorance on the subjects of puberty and sex. Hall cites a German physician as his source for the crucial idea that “definite instruction in sexual hygiene” should be provided to middle school pupils. This education was to be, in some fashion, egalitarian, or at least responsive to the separate integrity of female erotic concerns. “Neither sex should copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex symphony.” He criticized the agendas of women’s colleges to date and remarked that in conferences on the subject of how to better the state of female education, despite “rare, striking exceptions,” the “proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman’s life.” The reason for this is, at least partially, that “public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring that pertains to sex in countenance.”

Though Hall was neither a champion of modern women or of sexual liberation, he clearly understood that a crisis was afoot and that the crisis was due in large measure to near total inhibition of female sexuality along with general ignorance about the erotic domain. The question of sexuality in turn-of-the-century America came down, like so much else, to a question of education. What was it that men and women needed to be taught about their bodies as a way of safeguarding and nurturing both their physiologies and minds?

Despite Hall’s belief in the merits of learned “sexual hygiene,” the problems he experienced actually acting on his faith revealed the lingering sway over him, like so many of Putnam’s circle, of the pent-up New England past. In 1904, Hall tried to teach a weekly course on sex psychology at Clark. However he soon abandoned the effort for two reasons: “First, because it was difficult to exclude those I deemed unfit since too many outsiders got in and even listened surreptitiously at the door, and second, because two or three of my students developed an interest in the subject which I deemed hardly less than morbid.” A third reason, never quite acknowledged as such, was tendered at the end of this autobiographical passage: “It is, of course, impossible to treat such a theme scientifically without at least some plain speaking upon perversions … and this I found it most unexpectedly hard to do although all women were excluded.” In other words, one’s own recognition of the centrality of sex did not translate into instant acquisition of an appropriate vernacular for communicating the subject to others.

PUTNAM WOULD HAVE read Hall’s book on Adolescence with acute interest given his overweening sense of responsibility for his daughters’ development, along with his preoccupation with the question of their sexuality (the older ones were just then entering puberty). But he would also have been annoyed with Hall’s pugnacious materialism—his contention that, once the social fuss had been pooh-poohed away, the whole business came down to particulars of a purely biological nature.

Freud’s lecture on sexuality, for all its insistence on a strict materialist approach, clearly presented a different field of questions and a more honest response to the ones Hall had raised. In fact, Freud seemed to be calling for adults to step in at the right moment and help complete the “childish investigation” into sex that has such a “determinative significance in the building of the child’s character, and in the content of his later neuroses.” At the end of Freud’s fourth lecture, he issued an explicit plea for pedagogical reform on these matters that would have appealed to Putnam: “great problems,” in the matter of promoting a healthy sexuality, “fall to the work of education, which at present certainly does not always solve them in the most intelligent and economic way.”

And still, Putnam would have left the lecture hungry, uncertain exactly what a healthy sexuality meant in the larger scheme of the universe. Of course it was important to do all one could to lessen human misery. Freud’s noble words on the importance of ridding the field of hypocrisy may have explained how to draw one’s fellows out of the pit, but how did one fulfill the ultimate pedagogical mandate of helping them draw nearer to the heavens? And each night after hearing Freud he returned to 106 Marlborough, and to Molly’s prostrate 16-year-old body, her convalescence under his sole care.

By the time Freud delivered his fifth and final lecture he’d already received his honorary degree from Clark, and cabled home to Martha in Vienna a one-word telegram: “Success!”

His reception in the U.S. was very different from that in Vienna. There has been, in recent years, a reappraisal of Freud’s assertions of having been ignored in Austria. Challenges to his account are largely based on the reviews (mixed in nature) that his studies did in fact garner, sometimes in prominent publications. However, given that professional Viennese society, at least up until the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, established value through institutional hierarchies, Freud’s demonstrable marginality in that official labyrinth lends legitimacy to his claims.

Freud’s frustration with his slow rise in the university did not reflect any structural disapproval of the system itself, but was due rather to the fact that his advancement was supposed to take place through the operation of the uniform mechanism that dictated life in the empire, and yet his Semitism had somehow impeded the action of the cogs.

The American idea of infinite stores of energy hidden within the self, only awaiting the right touch to be released and so revolutionize the individual’s place in society and the universe, made little sense to Freud. Indeed, it wasn’t long after he received his honorary degree that the absence of obvious hierarchies in American society—ones based anyway on a principle other than wealth—began to aggravate him. He didn’t like the free-for-all character of a democratic exchange in which social distinctions fell by the wayside. What was the point of having received a degree or social rank of any standing if those things counted for nothing in society? If anything other than money did give standing in America it was youth, and Jones mentions an incident underscoring Freud’s age as exemplary for him of the distasteful “free and easy manners of the New World.”

In between giving his lectures at Clark and visiting Putnam in the Adirondacks, Freud took a trip to visit Niagara Falls, a tour he’d been looking forward to even before leaving Europe. The sublimity of the sight impressed him even more than he’d anticipated. In the midst of his marveling, however, as his tour group entered the Cave of Winds, the guide abruptly held the other visitors back with a condescending gesture to Freud. “Let the old fellow go first,” he prompted.

This is the context for Freud’s climactic lecture at Clark. The idea of sublimation that he introduced there with singular emphasis must be looked at through the lens of Viennese social hierarchy, not the system of advancement Americans favored: a market-based, Darwinian “jungle” or ideal meritocracy (depending on one’s perspective).

Habsburg imperial rule was based, in part, on the legal guarantee of equal rights to all the empire’s multifarious nationalities. This particular model of enfranchisement was also dependent on the idea of holding all Austro-Hungarian peoples at saber’s length from the inner sanctum of authority. As Joseph Roth wrote in The Radetzsky March, “Our Kaiser is a secular brother of the Pope, he is his Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty; no other is as apostolic, no other majesty in Europe is as dependent on the grace of God and on the faith of the nations in the grace of God.” The last bitter line of the passage underscored the nontransmittable essence of the Kaiser’s power: “But God has abandoned the world.”

In the Freudian model, sublimation of one’s desires didn’t involve only an exercise of willpower; the achievement also signaled possession of an elite mental endowment. In this sense, there are echoes in Freud’s belief system of the Calvinist notion of a predestined elect. Though Freud might have challenged the license accorded the aristocracy in the Hofburg (hence his daydreams of overthrowing imperial authority [Roman and monarchial]), he did so in favor of empowering an eternal aristocracy of the mind, the ranks of which could not be broached by dull petitioners. Threats to the power of this elite arose primarily from within the individual. Freud’s model of tragic heroics was, thus, both classical, based on an inscrutable system of fatal dispensation, and Shakespearean, in the sense of being set in motion by a fatal character flaw. In the expanded later introductory lectures to psychoanalysis (published with an introduction by Hall in 1920), Freud employed martial metaphors to describe the state of sublimation. “[But] the structure thus built up [through sublimation] is insecure, for the sexual impulses are with difficulty controlled; in each individual who takes up his part in the work of civilization there is a danger that a rebellion of the sexual impulses may occur, against this diversion of their energy. Society can conceive of no more powerful menace to its culture than would arise from the liberation of the sexual impulses and a return of them to their original goal.” By the time Freud published this statement, with psychoanalysis booming in the New World, he’d conceived of a paradigm in which the psychoanalyst served as general, ensuring the containment of a perpetual erotic insurgency. By now, the potential for sublimation was the political capital of the analysts.

When Freud talked about sublimation in America, he was not describing a common goal toward which any random neurotic could work; he was defining a process which, through a purge of complexes, analysts could prepare the minds of the chosen to undertake. One suspects that Freud’s real concern in the talk was to sugarcoat the pill of sexuality by suggesting that the same energy that went into lust also, on occasion, found civilized applications. Fear of mass American squeamishness about the erotic was his greatest motivation for introducing sublimation.

Putnam, however, took something very different from the lecture and in doing so forecast the deeper American interest in psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory of sublimation completed a circuit. On the one hand there was sex, very much present for him as for many of his peers and present very much as a problem. On the other hand there was a set of transsexual, Blowian, Bergsonian, Royceian ideals to which every individual ought to aspire, though there was no formula for doing so. How did one harness the power in the individual toward worthy Platonic ends? Unlike some, Putnam did not believe that it was enough to say that there were two ways forking out from each person and it was up to the individual to simply “choose life.” He’d seen too many cases in his clinic of patients who wanted to choose the good, but didn’t have sufficient strength or understanding of their better instincts to know how to act on them.

At the beginning of the lecture, Freud made a blunt statement about the role of sex in the neuroses. The individual becomes ill, he said, “when in consequence of outer hindrances or inner lack of adaptability the satisfaction of the erotic needs in the sphere of reality is denied.” The flight into sickness is a quest for “surrogate satisfaction for that denied him.” Putnam knew in his own person the ways in which, when life failed to bring the fulfillment for which he longed, he could turn up a side of himself that was antithetical to all the values he cherished. Freud’s summary of this phenomenon introduced the idea of repetition—backsliding to an earlier stage in the patient’s own psychology and to a more savage collective anthropological moment. “The flight from the unsatisfying reality into what we call, on account of its biologically injurious nature, disease, but which is never without an individual gain in pleasure for the patient, takes place over the path of regression, the return to earlier phases of the sexual life,” wrote Freud. Given Putnam’s heartfelt philosophy of progress, this would have had to have been the most frightening of all scenarios.

Freud then shifted from the dark abyss of regression toward Purgatory. He pointed out that, in fact, “the deeper you penetrate into the pathogenic of neurotic diseases” the more you find that there are connections between the neuroses and other aspects of mental life including “even the most valuable.” Because Freud had just carefully equated disease with the thwarting of erotic desire, and his audience was being guided to follow the implications of this fact for an understanding of the neurotic personality, it must have appeared a surprising, bold twist when he said, in effect: But gentlemen you know yourselves in your own persons the phenomenon I’m describing. “You will be reminded that we men, with the high claims of our civilization and under the pressure of our repressions, find reality generally quite unsatisfactory.” It’s not just the neurotic who finds life disappointing, Freud said; we all do. Hence our tendency to fantasize. Because of this frustration every one of us is prey to, we all “keep up a life of fancy in which we love to compensate for what is lacking in the sphere of reality by the production of wish-fulfillments.” It is “these phantasies” that in fact define our psychological constitution, “repressed in real life.” But this production of fantasies is not by definition neurotic. In a statement with parallels to the thought of James, Freud went on: “The energetic and successful man is he who succeeds by dint of labor in transforming his wish fancies into reality.” Fantasizing is universal—is, indeed, the inevitable response to reality—the proof of a fantasy’s value is in the individual’s capacity to make it real.

PUTNAM MIGHT HAVE heard these lines of Freud and thought not just of the larger American Protestant ethic but of his own relentless labors and the question of what fruit they bore. Along with publishing volumes of papers every year, teaching, taking part in innumerable professional associations, and handling a full case load, he remained ever active in the lives of his children and engaged with the family’s vast social circle. He could not have found it easy to maintain the delusion of still holding anything back in the way of will to work. “It is a great thing,” he wrote Marian a few months before the Clark Conference, “to learn to give up, gracefully and quickly, the attempt to reach goals that can’t be reached, and to go in for goals that can be reached.” This is something, he said, that he himself still must learn “painfully to do.” There are, he reminds himself, “many sensitive people” who “teach themselves to do it, but I don’t think it is quite fair. It is rather a ‘war-measure.’ ”

It wasn’t, then, more of the same garden-variety energy that Putnam needed, but access to energy of an altogether different nature.

FREUD AVOWED THAT analysis would never be guilty of “a disturbance of the cultural character by the impulse which has been freed from repression.” The whole purpose of the practice he advocated was in fact to weaken those revolutionary impulses within the self, a type of urge “which is incomparably stronger when it is unconscious than when it is conscious.… The work of psychoanalysis accordingly presents a better substitute, in the service of the highest and most valuable cultural strivings, for the repression which has failed.”

This opened the door to Putnam’s revelation. “Now what is the fate of the wishes which have become free by psychoanalysis, by what means shall they be made harmless for the life of the individual?” For the most part, Freud said, “repression is supplanted by a condemnation” carried through in an economic manner. So far from letting the dark side of the self out into the society, one learns how to vilify it openly. This condemnation, according to Freud, is less psychologically costly than repression.

There is, however, a further service psychoanalysis offers society. Unconscious impulses once exposed can be redirected toward the meaningful goals that they should have been abetting all along. Rather than trying to eliminate these sources of energy, analysis supports “a far more purposive process of development … so called sublimation, by which the energy of infantile wish-excitation” enables “a higher, eventually no longer sexual, goal” to be established. Putnam’s Eureka moment came as Freud proclaimed that “the components of the sexual instinct are especially distinguished by such a capacity for the sublimation and exchange of their sexual goal for one more remote and socially more valuable.”

With these words Freud had unknowingly created an ideal ecology. For years, Putnam had wrestled with the fact that repressed sexual impulses caused mental disturbance. Yet the expenditure of these impulses willy-nilly was wasteful of energy—or worse, morally corrosive of the community. At the same time there was a grander unsolved puzzle: Where did individuals find the energy to rise above their own foibles of character and so fulfill their supernal responsibilities to society and the universe? Freud’s idea of sublimation suggested that the solution to one enigma also resolved the other.

By learning to sublimate erotic desire, humanity would be able to expel the sexual energy which, when jailed inside, ate away at the individual’s sanity. But so far from just going into exile, the libido could serve as the missing catalytic converter to fuel the individual’s ascent toward labor of a higher purpose.

For Putnam, Freud wasn’t the one who brought sex to America, he was the one who took sex away. By an alchemic reaction, sex through sublimation became spirituality. Thus, Putnam’s embrace of Freud signified no less than his investment in the future of psychology, a desperate effort to save the American transcendental nineteenth-century religious past.