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few connections between itself and the academic-intellectual world
in America. As a cultural science or discipline it seemed very odd
indeed that its filiations with departments and faculties in the social
sciences, the humanities and the natural sciences were so few and far
between. (Psychoanalysts are, of course, not entirely to blame for this
deficiency; they were frequently unwelcome company within certain
academic circles. But the question is complex and cannot be fully
entered into here.) It is only in relatively recent years that such
filiations have begun
to
play any significant role in many psychoan–
alytic organizations, and recent years may be a very late time indeed.
This is a very rough, abbreviated and excessively simplified
outline of certain configurations that could be made out about
Freudian psychoanalysis as it appeared in the contexts of American
society and culture some twenty-five years or so ago. Its intellectual
and social prestige among certain groups of Americans was very
high; interest in it as therapy and theory was strong. It had its
problems clinically, intellectually and socially as well. But it seemed
secure and, I venture
to
say, seemed secure to itself.
Today matters appear in a very different light. Psychoanalysis
no longer commands the interest that it once did; it has lost as an
institution the centrality and authority it could once lay claim to,
and has suffered a general loss of self-confidence as well-the last of
these may be a useful development. There is some talk in certain
quarters about "the death of psychoanalysis" -but such talk, like
others before it, is premature. There is also talk in other quarters that
psychoanalysis is now in the phase of what Thomas Kuhn has called
"normal science" -but that, I believe, is whistling in the dark.
Myriad influences and events have worked their consequences, and I
can only touch upon a few of them here.
To begin with, the institution has generally gone along with the
inflationary character of the economy. Ten, fifteen or twenty-five
dollars for a fifty-minute hour in 1950 has become fifty, seventy-five
and more for a forty-five minute session. To be sure, money is not the
only force at .play here, but sooner or later a point of diminishing
returns has to be reached. Psychoanalysts have as a rule chosen to live
in a certain moderately affluent- and identifiable-style. Their fees
are to some extent an expression of this choice. One of the partial
results of such a determination is the diminished number of psycho–
analytic patients who are embarked upon a full analysis in the older
sense of the term. According to a recent survey, analysts reported that
only about twenty percent of their time was now spent in classical or
