SONYA RUDIKOFF
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analyze such phenomena in the vocabulary of individual psychology,
and to see the pursuit of self-realization as narcissistic is really beside
the point. Perhaps more important is the faCl that the very existence of
these clients is without precedent. Such people simply were not to be
found in large numbers before our time. Only a tiny handful of the
literate and articulate could afford
to
be out of sorts with life. Only a
postindustrial culture like our own could permit the widespread
experience and consideration of unease, only the past hundred years
has introduced us to the possibility of special kinds of therapy for this
new kind of unhappiness.
Past ages had the vocabularies of philosophy, poetry, and religion
for the management of life's problems, and the social structure and the
folk culture to reinforce personal understanding.
In
the nineteenth
century that vocabulary remained, and there were cults and therapies to
rival our own in number and variety. Troubled people then went
to
mesmerists, hydropathic healers, to homeopathic magicians and in–
spired preachers. Reputable doctors prescribed (and their reputable
patients followed) rest cures, over-feeding, phrenology, mind cures,
leeching, genital cauterization, and hypnotism for the relief of mental
illness and nervous disorders. The nervous intelligent people of New
England, Philadelphia, and New York were interested in all of the new
ideas, and it was in just this spirit that they were alert to the work of
Morton Prince, S. Weir Mitchell, the Emmanuel Movement (the first of
the group therapies), counseling, the settlement house movement, the
ideas of Sigmund Freud-all of which sought a hearing in this country
between 1880 and 1910. Theosophy appealed to many people then ,
often in conjunction with socialism, sex reform, new an, binh control,
and other forms of new thought.
Katherine Mansfield, enthralled by Gurdjieff a little later, slept in
a stable, hoping the exhalation of cows would cure both her unhappi–
ness and her tuberculosis, and for the past fifty years such remedies
have made continuous appeal. Eastern mysticism, meditation, Zen,
Sufi, Yoga disciplines, Jewish and Christian mysticism-all have been
summoned not so much for their truth but for their power to repair the
ravaged modern life. Contemporary unease has also increased the
interest in social therapies, frequently cranky as in the nineteenth
century. The story of utopian communities, millenarian faith, new
religions , social philosophy, and new spiritual adventure prefigures
modern experience; impulses toward personal coherence and evangeli–
cal renewal have a social context and a belief in the possible. Our
contemporaries might phrase their yearnings differently, but for us as
