Chapter 12 The United States of America

Child psychoanalysis developed in the United States in several stages. Initially, after the celebrated voyage of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in 1909, psychoanalytical ideas spread very quickly and met with both an immediate success and indignant reaction.

Abraham A.Brill, who had worked at the Burghölzli in Zurich and then in Vienna, founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1911. In that same year the American Psychoanalytic Society was formed to bring together all the societies that might be founded in the various states. In 1914 a society was founded in Boston with James Putnam as its first President. Other cities were soon to follow suit: Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia. The Americans brought dynamism, pragmatism, efficiency and advertising sense to bear on the development of psychoanalysis. They also brought some shortcomings: they forbade the practice of lay analysis, in order to guarantee therapeutic content; and they let a climate of laissez-faire take hold in training and perhaps even in conceptualization, which led Freud to remark in 1926 in The Question of Lay Analysis: ‘I venture to assert that—not only in European countries— doctors form a preponderating contingent of quacks in analysis. They very frequently practise analytic treatment without having learnt it and without understanding it’ (1926a: p. 230). And Samuel Goldwyn’s offer to Freud (which, of course, he refused) in 1925 of 100,000 to collaborate on the film Anthony and Cleopatra would have done nothing to make him change his mind.

One of the consequences of the rapid spread of psychoanalysis throughout the United States was the excessive application of the ideas of the pioneers of psychoanalysis to the up-bringing of children (in proportion to the size of the new continent and its possibilities of absorption—the ‘melting-pot’ phenomenon). Physical or emotional shock to children from upper-and middle-class background