BOOKS
The Future of Psychoanalysis
THE RISE AND CRISIS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE
UNITED STATES. FREUD AND THE AMERICANS, 1917-
1985. By
Nathan
G.
Hale, Jr. Oxford University Press. $30.00.
Twenty-four years was a long time to wait for the sequel to Nathan
Hale's path-breaking book,
Freud and the Americans,
1876-1917.
But
the wait was worthwhile, despite the fact that in the interim experts
have produced an abundance of specific and partial psychoanalytic histo–
ries, biographies of Freudians and "deviants," clever exegeses and partis
pris exposes, as well as pro-Freudian statistical studies and their anti–
Freudian refutations. Hale takes all of these stances into account. He
does so without rancor or prejudice, summarizes the central arguments
and their refutations, while never losing sight of longitudinal changes in
psychoanalytic knowledge and in the social milieu. And he clarifies the
dominant and forever shifting beliefs among Freudians and neo–
Freudians, the debates that have grown out of technological and
medical advances, and their dissemination in the popular press. Yet he
does not try to inveigle the reader to believe anyone explanation for
psychoanalysis's staying power, for why it has remained a central
preoccupation of Western culture for over a hundred years. Instead, he
explains its rise and fall in popularity, as well as "the growth of
psychotherapies which then proliferated independently into a variety of
theoretical and practical systems." This was particularly true in America,
where psychoanalysis had been accepted with open arms, first when
Freud visited in 1909, and then from the 1940s to the
i
960s, when psy–
choanalysts - who had been central in diagnosing and curing battle–
worn and psychically damaged soldiers and sailors during World War II
- increasingly became leaders within the psychiatric establishment.
Each of Hale's twenty chapters picks up threads from previous ones,
showing, for instance, that the schisms in the major institutes (New
York, Washington-Baltimore, and Boston) had their repercussions in
San Francisco and Detroit; that models of theory and therapy, as well as
departures from them, made for the Freudians' vehement disagreements
as well as close friendships; that changes in patients' symptoms brought
forth new types of diagnoses; that advances in knowledge might have in–
fluenced such diagnoses; and that interest by the popular media, all
along, had its own impact (and feedback) on the psychotherapies that
would gain (or lose) adherents.
Hale notes that between 1920 and 1940 some theories of libidinal
