Why the Freudian Century: Reflections on the Statue of Athena

Between the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and the 1970s, psychoanalysis transformed the understanding of the human mind not just in the West, but also throughout the world. It affected not only sciences such as psychiatry and medicine, and arts such as literature, theatre, painting, and film, but also advertising, design, news coverage, and manners. Most importantly, it created an everyday, folk psychology, close to personal experience, of the sort that men and women needed as villages gave way to global cities and as a new mass culture emerged. The essence of that psychology rested on a new sense of personal life, itself the product of a historical transformation.

Previously, the individual's sense of identity was largely determined by his or her place in the family. In the nineteenth century, however, the separation (both physical and emotional) of paid work from the household, which is to say the rise of industrial capitalism, gave rise to new forms of privacy, domesticity, and intimacy. At first, these were experienced as the familial counterparts to the market. Later, they became associated with the possibility and goal of a personal life distinct from and even outside of the family. This goal found expression in such phenomena as the “new” (or independent) woman, the emergence of public homosexual identities, and the turning of young people toward sexual experimentation, bohemia, and artistic modernism. Personal identity thus became a project for individuals, as opposed to something given to them by their place in the family. Psychoanalysis was a theory and practice of this new aspiration for a personal life. Its original historical telos was defamilialization, the freeing of individuals from unconscious images of authority originally rooted in the family.