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Awareness of the powerful social pressures on the individual and his family toward conformity, regressive behavior, and ego constriction is essential to the psychoanalyst. Defects in this awareness, like more familiar blind spots, will impair the psychoanalyst's reality testing, professionally and in his personal life. To the extent to which he is unconsciously a victim of these pressures, he becomes an agent in their perpetuation—probably a greater hazard for the psychoanalyst living and practicing in the suburbs than for his urban colleagues. Aside from problems he has in common with other members of his profession, the suburban psychoanalyst is besieged by neighbors, PTA, church, and other groups to act as God-Expert on the platform, before the microphone, and on the printed page. The demand, explicit or tacit, is chiefly for painless prescriptions for anxieties displaced from their intrapsychic sources onto reality problems in child rearing, education, religion, and politics. Some of us retreat from this apotheosis as though aware of the primal God's fate. Some succumb to the blandishment, and play God responsively; this group characteristically tends to provide psychoanalytic rationalizations for the prevailing values in our society. Most of us recognize that we can make a valid contribution on the institutional or community level without compromising our professional standards or adding to the public's confusion about psychoanalysis. Judicious activity of this kind becomes particularly difficult when, simultaneously, the need exists to assert ourselves as citizens and parents in the community.
Because it casts so much light on these and many other issues,