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The years that followed World War II witnessed a rich expansion of psychoanalysis in many directions. New observations of infants undertaken by Anna Freud, René Spitz and Margaret Mahler forced a revision of some significant concepts of classical psychoanalysis. These were integrated into a theoretical frame of reference by Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Jacobson and others. The new findings, as well as the theoretical formulations, enabled psychoanalysis to widen its therapeutic scope and to become increasingly effective in the treatment of mental illnesses whose severity goes beyond the classical neuroses.
A similar expansion, however, did not take place in the application of psychoanalytic concepts to culture and society. If we examine the early analytic periodicals, or the Minutes of the Meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,24 we note with astonishment how much energy and space was given to fields now usually designated as applied psychoanalysis. Books, such as Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents,15 Ferenczi's Thalassa,9 and Rank's The Incest Motif in Poetry and Legend28 have no counterpart in the post World War II period. It seems that only writers who are not professional analysts, such as Brown,5 Rieff,32 and Marcuse,23 dare write on subjects so broad in scope. They draw their inspiration from Freud, but their books are not influenced by recent developments within psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysts have learned more about psychoanalysis, they have become more parsimonious in their willingness to generalize from their clinical observations. The field of biography constitutes an exception where significant new developments have taken place (Greenacre,17 Eissler 7, 8).
Among those subjects which lie outside the field of clinical psychoanalysis, the myth has always held a place of honor. A