524
PARTISAN REVIEW
knows what else. Most of these practices are overtly hostile to
psychoanalysis, though many of them consist of taking one or two
pieces of psychoanalytic discovery, procedure or insight and trans–
forming it or them into an entire therapeutic regime. From the point
of view of psychoanalysis itself, these new formations have
to
appear
as in large measure deformations of the complex theories of person–
ality, development and therapy that the discipline has built up in its
career of three-quarters of a century.
These phenomena do not, I believe, represent the same thing as
the divisions, disputes and deviations that beset the psychoanalytic
movement in its early years.
It
is no criticism of psychoanalysis to
remark that it has always been in part something of a religion (albeit
a secular one) and has been organized like a church. The early
differences and splittings off-by Adler, lung, Reich et al.–
represented heresies and the subsequent establishment of new
churches or sects. Activities like these are, according to historical
sociologists of religion, characteristic of new religions in their
formative periods. But many of the recent phenomena I have just
referred to resemble cults more than sects or new religions, and cults,
as Daniel Bell has recently observed, are ordinarily associated with
religions in states of incipient or actual decline. They represent the
search for immediate and authentic experience that an institution in
deterioration can no longer give, especially when its organizational
framework begins to fray and tatter. Cults typically claim that they
have access to some special or transfiguring source of power, insight
and knowledge that the orthodoxy and its bureaucratic functionaries
have hidden, suppressed or diverted. They are frequently headed by
some spellbinder or pundit who alone has the capacity to transmit
the new teachings. They characteristically permit their adherents to
act upon impulses that the orthodox institution had constrained,
and they therefore offer the experiences of personal transcendence
and liberation. They are magical, and they take effect very quickly, as
magic commonly does.
In
turn, their magic also commonly passes
away very quickly, and their initiates move on without intermission
in search of new redemptions.
But these phenomena are also part of larger movements of
cultural change in which psychoanalysis itself is involved. Psycho–
analysis was created in particular cultural and historical sets of
circumstances and bears upon it the markings of the contexts in
which it originated.
It
came into being in the context of a liberal
bourgeois culture and may in some measure be understood as an
