Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
By Eli Zaretsky
Knopf, 429 pages, $30.
Scarcely more than a century after it first burst onto the scene, what are we to make of psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis has meant profoundly different things to different people at different times. How did we get from the revolutionary science of dreams, sexuality and the unconscious that emerged as a startling new form of cultural expression alongside the innovations of Picasso, Stravinsky and Nijinsky, to the de-eroticized theories of the ego, self and identity with which it became associated for the larger part of the century?
How did a discipline hailed for its emancipatory possibilities become reviled for its repressive attitudes toward women and homosexuals, for its authoritarianism and for its murky role in the repressed-memory debate? And how, despite these crises, has it continued to inspire new generations of radical thinkers?
Eli Zaretsky’s sweeping survey of this monumental discipline charts the historical developments that help explain its competing legacies. Zaretsky’s central idea is that an individualized form of “personal life” emerged around the turn of the 19th Century and that psychoanalysis rose to prominence as its theoretical elaboration. New possibilities of personal life were a product of the “second industrial revolution” and “Fordism,” which together completed the transition to mass production, introduced standardized parts and labor with the invention of the assembly line, and paid laborers a higher-than-subsistence wage, making possible the rise of consumer society. The second wave of industrialization saw the entry of women into the urban workplace along with the emergence of personal and sexual possibilities outside of the traditional family framework. Zaretsky carefully tracks the subtle changes in Sigmund Freud’s contributions to conceptions of homosexuality, masculinity and femininity over the years. He sees these shifting theories of sexuality, set in the context of the personal (rather than the collective) unconscious, at the heart of the early significance of psychoanalysis.
This psychoanalysis–which emphasized the dream world of the personal unconscious and an understanding of sexuality loosened from the requirements of reproduction, where homosexuality came to be seen as a component of every psyche, and where qualities ascribed to “primitive” peoples were recognized as native to us all–this was the psychoanalysis that inspired the surrealists and attracted such disparate figures as Leon Trotsky and poet H.D., placing itself at a tangent to the dominant culture and unmasking the conventional pieties of everyday life.
But this psychoanalysis soon underwent tremendous changes, influenced by the enormous impact of World War I, by schisms within Freud’s inner circle, by its favorable but differing receptions in Britain and the U.S., and by the large-scale admission of women into its previously all-male circle. Zaretsky details the impact on Freudian analysis made by the various defectors from Freudian orthodoxy: C.G. Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank each proposed theoretical innovations that Freud could not accept, but each provoked new formulations that eventually became incorporated into classical psychoanalysis.
Continental analysts faced with the unprecedented horrors of the century perpetrated on their own soil came up with correspondingly dark accounts of the psyche. British analysts, on the other hand, were preoccupied with victims of war and worked within a developing welfare state that stressed the mutual responsibility of all of its members. Under the influence of Melanie Klein, they shifted Freud’s emphasis on Oedipal themes to a concern with the maintenance of interpersonal connections. In the U.S., the medicalization of psychoanalysis which Freud himself strongly opposed), together with the influence of the positive-thinking approach of widespread “mind-cure” traditions, resulted in an American psychoanalysis that tended to bleach out the discipline’s more pessimistic strains.
Zaretsky is particularly good at limning the relationship between psychoanalysis and the development of American consumer society, showing how psychoanalysis was taken up by advertisers and Hollywood filmmakers who shaped the self-image of middle-class Americans as consumers. Practiced not only by psychiatrists but in diluted form by clinical psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors and pastoral counselors, psychoanalysis became part of the social mechanism of adaptation to mainstream society. Packaged by experts such as Dr. Benjamin Spock (a pediatrician and, Zaretsky tells us, a psychoanalyst, whose book “Baby and Child Care” sold more than 40 million copies), the insights of psychoanalysis morphed from the transgressive to the domesticated.
But side by side with these tempered strains of psychoanalysis there continued a vision of psychoanalysis as radical and utopian, elaborated by such figures as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown and Ronald Laing. Similarly, psychoanalysis maintained an ambiguous relationship with feminism and, more recently, gay liberation. The large-scale entry of women into psychoanalysis from its second decade on stimulated a shift from Freud’s focus on the importance of the father to that of the mother. As Zaretsky astutely points out, however, this perspective, advanced by women in the service of women, eventually became used against women, leading to theories that blamed mothers for everything from schizophrenia to autism. Analysis became, by mid-century, a practice that encouraged women to find satisfaction at home and pathologized them if they did not. Freud was a major figure whom second-wave feminists loved to hate. Yet soon after the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, a new round of feminist psychoanalysis took off.
Zaretsky’s panoramic history recognizes psychoanalytic theories as human artifacts (rather than eternal truths discovered by infallible thinkers), yet they are no less significant on that account. He is at his best connecting the twists and turns of psychoanalytic theories to the social and economic changes that those theories reflected and helped shape. He marshals an impressive array of detail, providing intricate explanations of the many developments spear-headed by Freud, his followers and his detractors. We learn, for instance, how Reich’s theory of character survived Reich’s dismissal from the ranks of psychoanalysis to become absorbed into the theory of the defenses, how the analysis of resistance became the centerpiece of ego psychology, and how the new theories of narcissism in the 1950s and ’60s ranged from the conservative (Otto Kernberg) to the re-evaluative (Heinz Kohut) to the utopian (Marcuse). Clearly sympathetic to Freud and to the psychoanalytic enterprise, Zaretsky is not shy to point out the moral failings of Freud and of the psychoanalytic movement as a whole.
The ambitious scope of Zaretsky’s work leads him at times to paint with a broad stroke; occasionally he loses in specificity what he gains in breadth. The reader who has more knowledge of psychoanalysis than of social history may have to reach for Google to remember just what the Popular Front or the Beveridge welfare state was, and some readers may take issue with the ways certain topics have been represented. For instance, Zaretsky gives ample space to many of Freud’s dissident offspring but gives short shrift to Jung, following a long-standing Freudian tradition of dismissing him as an anti-Semite. While Jung certainly wrote some offensive anti-Semitic passages that make one cringe, his intense early association with Freud and Freud’s largely Jewish proteges suggests that his position on race was problematic but complex and should not stand in the way of giving due recognition to his work, the enduring impact of which has been as great as or greater than that of Rank, Ferenczi or Adler.
On a different note, Zaretsky repeats without comment the notion that traumatic experiences are not experienced consciously. The reader deserves to know, however, that this notion is at the heart of the heated debate over repressed-memory syndrome, where it is strongly contested.
Finally, Lacanians are unlikely to recognize Zaretsky’s definition of “discourse,” and non-Lacanians may be taken aback by his ascription of the distinction between the penis (as anatomical organ) and the phallus (as psychical representation) as originating with Freud.
Nevertheless, those interested in psychoanalysis as well as in social and cultural history will come away with a deepened sense of the far-reaching entanglement of psychoanalysis with the changing historical trends of the past century, and of the variegated turns taken by psycho-analytic theory as it has traversed the decades. Zaretsky concludes that current concerns with race and gender known as identity politics have effaced, rather than productively complicated, the psychoanalytic “ethic of self-reflection.” One need not agree with this conclusion to gain from this book an enriched and expanded understanding of psychoanalysis as seen through its profound connections with the social and cultural developments of the 20th Century.
