PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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institution of late high bourgeois culture-in its strengths, weak–
nesses and contradictions. (I am being very condensed here.) And
what we have been witness to in the last decade and a half is the
beginning of the visible and rapid destabilization and dissolution of
that culture. In the progressive and rapid discreditation and decline
in the legitimacy of the values and beliefs of bourgeois culture,
psychoanalysis as part of that culture has inevitably been adversely
affected. In this sense the Marxists were right-psychoanalysis is, I
think, a bourgeois science.
There is more than adequate irony in this. American culture and
society have always been, in contrast with other like entities, in a
state of rapid change. Within that context of incessant change,
however, psychoanalysis took its roots in America and achieved its
largest influence in three overlapping periods of what can be
understood as factitious or pseudo-stability. There was first the large
influx of European analysts which began in the 1930s amid the false
or pseudo-stability of the Great Depression (there was a widespread
sense that it might never end); this was followed by the pseudo–
stability of World War II, when the nation and culture were united
against common enemies; and this in turn was followed by the long
postwar years and the pseudo-stability of recovery, steady progress,
prosperity and even the factitious stability of the Cold War (which, it
also seemed, might go on indefinitely, if not forever). In the general
break-up that has since occurred we can now see how fragile and
often misleading the sense of social and cultural stability and
continuity within change could sometimes be.
Such larger alterations are usually accompanied by some kind of
analogous alterations in personality or deeper cultural style. Al–
though all sorts of people came as patients to the early generations of
analysts, they by and large brought with them and were met by
certain normative expectations and assumptions about what it
meant to be an individual person. The character type referred to in
such preconceptions was identifiably part of a general middle-class
configuration.
It
valued and internalized the virtues of work, produc–
tivity, and various other kinds of disciplined behavior; it believed in
rationality and in rational moral conduct; it tended to suspect
pleasure and was uncommonly and ingeniously skilled at postpon–
ing gratification; it set great store by linguistic communication, both
oral and written; it tended to be guilt-ridden and even in some sense
to believe in the rightness and efficacy of that guilt. The neuroses it
typically suffered from had to do with certain inhibitions, repres-
