Rise+crisis of Psychoanal.in America

Although Freud made only one visit to the United States, the spectacularrise and equally precipitous decline of his theories on human behavior continueto make headlines. In 1956, celebrating the centennial of Freud's birth, popularmagazines reported that this "Darwin of the Mind" had fathered modernpsychiatry, psychology, child raising, education, and sexual attitudes. But by1975, Sir Peter Medawar, a medical research scientist and a Nobel Prize winner,announced in the New York Review of Books that "doctrinaire psychoanalytictheory" was the "most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentiethcentury." In 1984, a headline in Ms. Magazine--"The Hundred Year Cover Up: HowFreud Betrayed Women"--neatly summed up two decades of scathing feministcriticism. How much of this extraordinary sea change in Freud's Americanreputation is due to the nature of psychoanalysis itself, and how much to shiftsin American society? And what, if anything, of the Freudian legacy will survivethe current crisis of psychoanalysis?The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis, the long awaited conclusion to Nathan G.Hale's pathbreaking history of the American psychoanalytic movement, Freud andthe Americans, offers a brilliant analysis of Freud's continuing impact on theAmerican cultural landscape. With skill and insight, Hale traces theextraordinary popularization of Freud's ideas through magazines, books, and evennovels and Hollywood movies, and reveals how the vast human laboratory of WorldWar I seemed to confirm Freud's theories about the irrational and brutalelements of human nature. Not only did psychoanalysis prove effective fortreating the frightful nightmares and other symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers,its promise of helping individuals fulfill their potential fit neatly into theuniquely American pattern of self-improvement and upward mobility. Weighing therecurrent controversies that raged over the scientific validity of Freud'stheories with the arguments of influential intellectuals who saw inpsychoanalysis a sweeping criticism of traditional sexual mores, Hale shows howand why psychoanalysis came to have such a pervasive influence on the fabric ofAmerican life, from child care to criminology. The twenties and thirties sawpsychoanalysis transform itself from the calling of a self-chosen group ofavant-garde psychiatrists and neurologists to a profession with its owninstitutions for training and certification. Hale documents how the Americaninsistence on medical training, while greatly annoying to Freud himself, wasessential to U.S. acceptance of the psychoanalytic profession. He recreates theenormous vogue enjoyed by psychoanalysis in the years after the Second WorldWar, and the inevitable backlash leading up to the current crisis. As feministsrebelled against Freud's rigid gender roles, new psychotherapies and new drugsnarrowed the problems for which psychoanalysis seemed appropriate, and evenorthodox analysts began to question the effectiveness of the therapy whenanalyses lengthened from one or two to five, ten, or more years.In its final chapters, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis offers acomprehensive and authoritative assessment of the psychoanalytic movement as itcontinues to respond to these challenges. Illuminating both the boldness andsweep of Freud's analytic vision and its limitations, it is destined to become adefinitive work.Hale, Nathan G., Jr. is the author of 'Rise+crisis of Psychoanal.in America' with ISBN 9780195046373 and ISBN 0195046374.