He has had both the advantages and the handicaps of a boom. His admirers have obscured or exaggerated him and his enemies have derided his popularity as proof of a reputation based upon sensationalism. In fact, Freud met with three fates: he was either wildly embraced, or rejected in toto with an appropriate academic lynching, or else he was accepted with “improvements.”
He was fortified by previous experience against the second alternative and probably resigned to the third: it was the embrace that most nearly proved fatal to him. For America was to see the most extravagant development of the so-called “wild” psychoanalysis, a danger against which Freud himself had issued a warning. In 1916, for instance, an informal canvas revealed that approximately five hundred individuals were quite willing to psychoanalyze patients in the city of New York alone, whereas there were probably not more than six properly qualified medical practitioners in the whole State. Advertisements offered to teach the psychoanalytic technique by mail and instructors in chiropractic included it in their curriculum. This gross abuse was due to the general laxness of medical law in this country which still remains to be remedied. It was not only the amateurs that offended; doctors themselves were often at fault. For it cannot be too often emphasized that a psychoanalyst must have something more than the conceit of psychological subtlety common to most of us; he must be a trained neurologist and must have had considerable experience in psychiatry if he would escape the pitfalls of differential diagnosis—a case of hysteria can be dangerously like an incipient tumour of the brain and a compulsion-neurosis may simulate a paranoid condition. These abuses are, of course, no criticism of the intrinsic value of psychoanalysis. It has been the history of so many medical discoveries that they are recommended as a cure-all; we need but recall vaccination, or the present vitamine craze. On the other hand, it is regrettable that the direct attack upon Freud in this country has rarely risen above the level of denunciation. Quite recently, for instance, one of our socially eminent neurologists allowed himself to indulge in the teleological, or rather disguised theological, argument that if the unconscious is really so full of dreadful things as Freud says, they should be left there. And yet it is just serious and sympathetic criticism of which the science of psychoanalysis stands most in need.
The attempts to assimilate Freud were of two kinds. The first of these, like Professor Holt’s book on “The Freudian Wish” or Doctor Edward J. Kempf’s “The Autonomic Functions and the Personality,” were sincere attempts of critical dignity to relate psychoanalysis to American behaviouristic psychology on the part of men who are not altogether professed Freudians. The second were more in the nature of somewhat pompous criticisms which attempted to reconcile and soften what seemed to be the more repellent features of the Freudian theories. There is a prevalent tendency among medical men in America to indulge in criticism without any due regard to the proportions between the magnitude of a subject and their familiarity with it, somewhat after the manner of the green theological student who is confident of his ability to subvert the theory of evolution in a casual thesis of his own. The scientist in many fields is constantly facing this debasement of standards, making science not too scientific or logic not too logical lest it should be misunderstood; it is certainly a commentary that the majority of Americans, for instance, look upon Edison as our greatest scientist. The tendency to sweeten and refine Freud has taken some peculiar forms, due, in great part, to Doctor Jung who, on having re-introduced the libido theory to American audiences with a number of philosophical and mystical trimmings of his own, felt that he had made Freud more palatable over here.
Ironically enough, it would have been a very simple matter to “put over” Freud in this country with all the éclat of the Bergsonian craze which just preceded him. It was merely a question of the right kind of publicity, for the problem of how to handle sex in America has been solved long ago. The way to do it is to sentimentalize it. If Freud, instead of saying that the incestuous longing of the child for the parent of opposite sex is a natural impulse, though normally sublimated during the period of adolescence, had put the same idea into the phraseology of so many of our popular songs which reiterate the theme about mother being her boy’s first and last and truest love, he would have encountered no opposition. And if he had given his theory of the unconscious a slightly religious setting by emphasizing the fact that the unconscious has no sense of the passage of time and cannot conceive its own annihilation, he would have been hailed as the latest demonstrator of the immortality of the soul. A little personal press-agenting to the effect that he led a chaste life and was the father of a flourishing family would have completed the prescription. He would have gone over with a bang, though he probably would have been quite as amiably misunderstood as he is now viciously misunderstood.
Freud, however, presented his case at its own value and, aside from informing an astonished American audience that Doctor Sanford Bell had preceded him in announcing the preadolescent sexuality of children, shouldered the responsibility for his theories. What he has said, carefully and repeatedly, is that ever since, for a long period in our development, the difficulties of satisfying the hunger impulse have been overcome in so far as civilized man has pretty well solved the problem of nutrition; it is the sex impulse to which the individual has the greatest difficulty in adjusting himself. This difficulty increases rather than decreases with the advance of culture and at certain stages leads to the group of diseases known as the neuroses. In a normal sexual life there is no neurosis. But our civilization has in many ways become so perverse that we find something akin to an official preference for a neurosis rather than a normal sexual life, in spite of the fact that the neurosis ultimately will destroy civilization. This is the vicious circle which Freud attacked. In doing so he had first to enlarge the concept of sexuality and show its complex relation to our whole culture. In studying civilization at its breaking point he naturally had to study what was breaking it up, namely, the individual’s maladjustment to his sexual impulses. But he has never attempted to sexualize the universe, as has been claimed, nor has he ever lost sight of the fact that while man as an egocentric being must put the self-regarding instincts first, man regarded as one of the processes of nature remains to be studied in terms of his reproductive instincts. Freud has been persistently oversexualized both by his admirers and his opponents, and the degree to which this has been done in America is at least some indication of how close he has come home to conditions here.
Freudian research in this country has been limited almost entirely to cases. Our physicians who practise psychoanalysis have lacked either the leisure or the culture to apply their science to wider cultural questions to which the Freudian psychology applies, and among the lay scholars using the psychoanalytic technique there has been no outstanding figure like that of Otto Rank who has done such notable work in Vienna. But the study of specific cases of hysteria and neurosis as they occur in America already permit of some general conclusions as to the character of the national matrix from which they spring. One of the most striking features of our emotional life is the exaggerated mother-love so frequently displayed by Americans. The average American, whether drunk or sober, can grow maudlin about his mother’s perfections and his devotion to her in a way that must shock the European observer. Not that the European loves his mother less: it is simply that he is more reticent about expressing an emotion which he feels has a certain private sanctity; he would experience a decided constraint or αἰδώς in boasting about it, just as a woman of breeding would not parade her virtue. The American adult knows no such restraint; he will “tell the world” how much he loves his mother, will sing sentimental songs about her and cheerfully subscribe to the advice to “choose a girl like your mother if you want to be happily married,” and then grows violent when the incest-complex is mentioned. This excessive mother worship has reached almost cultic proportions. It is reflected in our fiction, in our motion-pictures, in the inferior position of the American husband, and in such purely matriarchal religions as Christian Science where a form of healing is practised which is not very far removed from a mother’s consolation to her boy when he has bruised his knees. All this points to a persistent sexual infantilism and an incomplete sublimation, which are such fertile breeders of hysteria. One is involuntarily reminded of Doctor Beard’s rather enigmatic statement that the extraordinary beauty of our women is one of the causes of nervousness in America. In so far as they offer a maximum of enticement with a minimum of conjugal satisfaction the charge is certainly justified. It is as if they did not even know their own business in terms of their sexual function of weaning their husbands from their mothers and thus completing the necessary exogamic process. We thus have the condition where the husband, in further seeking to overcome his incest-complex, becomes everything in his business and nothing in his home, with an ultimate neurotic breakdown or a belated plunge into promiscuity. The wife, on her part, either becomes hysterical or falls a victim to religious or reformatory charlatanism.
The study of compulsion-neuroses and allied paranoid states which are so prevalent among us has given us further insights into the neurotic character of the American temperament. One of the most valuable of these is the recognition of the compulsive nature of so much of our thinking. This has also been well observed by a foreign critic like Santayana who says of America, “Though it calls itself the land of freedom, it is really the land of compulsions, and one of the greatest compulsions is that we must think and feel alike.” This is a rather fatal indictment of our boasted individualism, which is, as a matter of fact, an individualism born of fear and distrust such as already marked our early pioneers. We are indeed ultra-conformists, and our fear of other-mindedness amounts almost to a phobia. But such an atmosphere constitutes a paradise for the compulsion-neurotic because he finds it easy to impose his compulsions upon the rest of society. The fact that compulsion-neurotics are constantly indulging in neo-religious formations through which they are enabled temporarily to accommodate their taboos and phobias in religious ceremonials, enables them to make use of the general religious sanctions of society in order to impose their compulsions upon their fellow-beings.
Herein probably lies a better explanation of American intolerance than in the indictment of Puritanism which furnishes such a favourite invective for our iconoclasts. Puritanism has become a literary catchword and by no means covers the case. For it must be remembered that we are dealing with offshoots of deteriorated religions which spring from a very wide range of individuals. Religion, having been cut off from direct interference with the State, and having gradually lost its primitive anthropomorphism which really was one of its sources of strength, proceeded to project itself more and more outwardly upon social questions. As the personality of God grew dim the figure of the Devil also lost its vividness and the problem between good and evil could not longer be fought out entirely in the individual’s own bosom; he was no longer tempted by the figure of the Devil appearing to him in person. Christian religion in its prime saw very clearly that the soul must put its own salvation to the fore, and constantly used many apt similes, such as the beam in our own eye, to remind us that while our neighbour might also have his hands full in fighting the Devil, he probably was capable of taking care of himself. Our modern reformer has no use for any such simile; he would have to go out of business if he could not keep picking at the mote in his neighbour’s eye. He finds the equivalent of the Devil in our social vices, in alcohol, in tobacco, in tea and coffee, in practically all forms of amusements. He preaches a crusade which no longer has an ideal object, and enlists a vague religious emotion which is inaccessible to reason and mocks intellectual criticism. The device of using religious associations as carriers of propaganda has often been used for political purposes with consummate skill. Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold speech and Roosevelt’s Armageddon appeal are excellent examples of it.
The question has often arisen why the fanatical reformer is so omnipotent in America. Why does he succeed so well in imposing his compulsions upon others? Why are we so defenceless against his blackmail? Why, in plain language, do we stand for him? Foreign observers have frequently commented upon the enormous docility of the American public. And it is all the more curious because ordinarily the average American prides himself upon his assertiveness and his quickness in detecting false pretensions. Yet it is a common occurrence to meet people with valid claims to hard-headedness who nevertheless submit to every form of compulsion. They do not believe in prohibition but vote for it, they smoke but think smoking ought to be stopped, they admit the fanatical nature of reform movements and yet continue their subscriptions.
In giving what can at best be only a partial answer to this national enigma, we may briefly consider two types which profoundly contribute to our atmosphere of compulsion: our immigrant and our native aristocrat. The first, from the very nature of the case, becomes the victim of compulsion, while the second imposes the compulsion and then in turn, however unwillingly, succumbs to it himself. Our society, with its kaleidoscopic changes of fortune and its unchannelled social distinctions, presents a problem of adjustment with which even those who are at home in America find it difficult to cope. People on the make, people who are not sure of themselves on a new social ladder, are likely to conform: we find an astonishing amount of social imitation, in its milder and more ludicrous form, in all our pioneer communities. The immigrant faces the same problem to an intensified degree. He comes to us in an uprooted state of mind, with many of his emotional allegiances still lingering in his native country, and often with an entirely alien tradition. His mind is set to conform, to obey at first without much asking. He is like a traveller arriving in a strange town who follows the new traffic directions even though he does not understand their purpose. But even with the best of will he cannot entirely conform. He finds himself in a new world where what formerly seemed right to him is now considered wrong, his household gods have lost their power, his conscience is no longer an infallible guide. It is a sign of character in him to resist, to refuse to sink his individuality entirely, to struggle somewhat against the democratic degradation which threatens to engulf him too suddenly. But his struggle leads to a neurotic conflict which is often not resolved until the third generation. It is thus quite permissible to talk of an immigrant’s neurosis, which has considerable sociological importance even though it does not present an integral clinical picture. It leads either to the formation of large segments of undigested foreigners in American society who sullenly accept the forms we impose upon them while remaining comparatively inarticulate in our cultural and political life, or else it produces a type of whom our melting-pot romanticists are foolishly proud, the pseudo-American who has sunk from individualism to the level of the mob, where he conforms to excess in order to cover his antecedents and becomes intolerant in order that he may be tolerated.