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When James McKeen Cattell arrived at Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in the early 1880s, he brought with him a new machine—a typewriter. Wundt was amazed by it and uttered the historical words, “Ganze Amerikanisch” (totally American). Alongside the American tradition of invention, aimed at improving the quality of life, is the tradition of mind curing of self-improvement, which stems from and is manifested in such people and movements as Ralph Waldo Trine, Mary Baker Eddy, Emerson's transcendentalism, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Southern California's human potential movement, Est, and the New Age Revivalism, with its trend of narcissism so amply documented in the 1970s and 1980s. This tradition has gradually become institutionalized in pop psychology and even in health-care provisions as we move into a postindustrial age. In fact, I recently received an inquiry about establishing a franchise for an enuresis center that employed behavior-modification techniques. A week does not go by in my practice that some circuit rider does not contact me about workshops on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), marketing strategies, women in treatment, the borderline. American Psychological Association (APA) members are suing to become psychoanalysts, to get into Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs), and to join a burgeoning video industry. Whatever happened to our intellectual and scholarly roots? As every endeavor becomes business, young colleagues, whom I supervise, no longer talk about their practices but about their businesses.
The Menninger Foundation—established in the 1920s in Topeka, KS, as part of Middle America's reaction to the too-European, too-Jewish, and too-sexual Freudian psychoanalysis—has served as an innovator in the pragmatics of treatment and training. But situated squarely in the American tradition of good works and mind curing, it has also purveyed pop psychology through