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Throughout this century Americans have developed a special romance with psychology, one that has become increasingly influential in the rest of the world. Wherever traditional religious faiths have waned, psychological convictions have been able to function as a replacement. Whereas once the concept of soul could be invoked without embarrassment, people on this continent now tend to feel more comfortable talking about “selfhood”; while competing notions about God were unashamedly discussed and disputed for centuries, psychology has popularly displaced the domain of theology. Even if religious dogmatism may appear to be hard to defend, at least among nonbelievers, it has been relatively easy to be attracted by the claims to certainties put forward by advocates of the so-called science of psychology.
Clinicians have often insisted that their work was morally neutral. But all the intense controversies throughout the history of depth psychology have been fueled, I think, by largely underground rival conceptions of how the good life ought to be lived. It seems to me unthinkable to try to imagine a clinical encounter taking place apart from an ethical context, even though it remains true that not much attention is paid to the moral dimension in the course of the work of training facilities. From the point of view of intellectual history, not only do ethics become relevant at the points where power might be abused, but all aspects of psychological thinking are (and should be) colored by an awareness of the possible options provided by differing standards of right and wrong.
Ellen Herman's The Romance of American Psychology is a scrupulously dispassionate account of the public uses that psychology has been put to in America over the past 50 years. Starting with