Edith Kurzweil
THE FREUDIANS
Where is psychoanalysis now , and where is it going in its own
development and in its resonance in other fields of knowledge? The Boston
Freudian Sanford Gifford (1985) held that its youthful, revolutionary era,
when it appealed mostly to intellectual rebels , is over-subject to an inevitable
metamorphosis that one may welcome or deplore. Of course, American
psychoanalysis has declined in popularity, and its fortunes have turned.
But
just as people, to paraphrase Daniel Bell on Marxism, have to live through
their own
Kronsladt -
that is, through the loss of illusion - so psychoanalysis
everywhere will lose in influence after its initial (exaggerated) promises have
not been fulfilled. Then its ideas seem
to
inspire "lesser" therapies while
psychoanalysts devote themselves to their "elite" patients and to research.
During periods of flowering, leading Freudians tended
to
work at en–
larging both theory and therapy, in the course of which they inevitably fueled
the idealistic and humanistic aims of their particular society. At that time, as
we have noted, not only doctors but anthropologists, sociologists, psycholo–
gists, and political scientists borrowed Freudian ideas . Fields like
ethnopsychoanalysis and psychohistory, in fact, began to legitimate them–
selves only after psychoanalytic thought achieved a certain amount of
visibility. This could not occur before the society had reached an advanced
level of well-being - that is, before there was at least a small middle class,
and before the political climate had become fairly liberal. Occasionally, this
has happened during a phase of liberation in a repressive society, such as
Hungary, Chile, or Argentina, when psychoanalysis had a chance to emerge
from "internal emigration" to create some sort of free space for itself.
(U
nder
repressive conditions, as in Nazi Germany or even Yugoslavia, psy–
choanalysis could be manipulated by those in power or coupled to behavior
therapy, thereby making it psychoanalysis in name only.) And before it could
serve feminist or Marxist ends, a large sector of the society had to be con–
versant with notions of the unconscious, and the society had to be able
to
withstand massive internal protest.
Consequently, the place accorded
to
psychoanalysis varies from coun-
Editor's Note: Excerpted
by
permission from
The Freudians: A Comparative Per–
spective
by Edith Kurzweil. Copyright
©
1989 by Yale University. Fonhcoming in
January
from
Yale University Press.
