Freud, Rief, and the Critique of American Culture

Freud is back in fashion across the Atlantic. There is an increasing awareness that the impact of psychoanalysis on American culture is not limited to the important middle-class minority for whom the analyst has become an indispensable appendage, but has affected in a more general and pervasive way people's thinking. As a source of ideas concerning sexuality, inner conflicts, and possible solutions through therapy, psychoanalysis has become part of the fabric of American culture. This presents us with the apparent paradox of the United States, the forward-looking land of incurable optimists adopting a pessimistic doctrine of humanity, which aims at destroying some of its highest ideals and at demonstrating the overwhelming weight of its past upon its present. This adoption could not have happened without psychoanalysis paying a heavy due. Like other exotic immigrants, it had to be acculturated before being accepted; many of its key ideas were distorted or “corrected” to generate an optimistic clinical psychology focussing on “growth,” “self-realization” and, ultimately, adjustment of the individual to the demands of society; Freudian concepts with a critical edge—like desire, repression, renunciation, and conflict,—were smoothed over or eased out to allow for the domination of a vocabulary of authenticity. The self-realization of authentic individuals was seen as perfectly compatible with demands originating in the social order.

This perspective saw a relative decline during the sixties, when American society was dominated by the great political and minority movements which furnished most of the novel elements of its culture. It is now widely recognized that if the sixties was the decade of the