SONYA RUDIKOFF
35
nounced religion an illusion, interesting only for its psychopathology,
but what an important source of strength in the civil rights movement
came from the little wooden churches and the expressive Baptism of the
rural Southl Amid the heroism of all those black ministers, those
domestic servants, those students, those passionately committed con–
gregations, psychoanalytic formulations could contribute very little.
Perhaps too much had been said already in that process of fetishization
which had made psychoanalysis serve a religious and philosophical
moment peculiar to American life and history.
The proliferation of new therapies expresses not only a felt
inadequacy in psychoanalysis but also the transformation of psychoan–
alytic insights into more available therapeutic practices. Family ther–
apy is an example of such transformation, with the transference
abandoned, the psychodynamics of family life sharpened, an active
interventionist approach on the part of the therapist, and a move
beyond family histories and fantasies to the more specific current
interaction.
(It
is interesting to note, by the way, that just when the
nuclear family is everywhere pronounced dying or already dead, family
therapy should be increasingly significant and appealing.)
Other therapies provide additional examples of such transforma–
tion. Counseling, social work, and group therapy have all drawn upon
a psychoanalytic psychology as their various techniques have evolved.
The family life education programs and the family advocacy groups
sponsored by the family service agencies throughout the country have
taken therapy to a further stage of social intervention. The millions of
student clients of the numerous counseling centers at American col–
leges and universities are less likely to enter psychoanalysis because
they have availed themselves of the often psychoanalytically-oriented
therapy of counseling, and the same is true of the millions of clients of
the nation's social workers, clinical psychologists, and group thera–
pists. These therapists are far more numerous than psychoanalysts, less
costly, and can be seen less frequently. Psychiatry itself has been
transformed in the eighty years since Freud's studies in hysteria,
primarily affected, of course, by psychoanalysis. All of these develop–
ments and many others, have changed the position of psychoanalysis
among the therapies in recent decades, not to mention its changed
position in intellectual life.
Perhaps the profound and protracted psychological archaeology
of Freudian theory and practice was fundamentally uncongenial in
America. This nation of immigrants is itself a denial of history, or a
defiance of it, and what some of the new therapies express is an
