cover image The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985

The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985

Nathan G. Hale. Oxford University Press, USA, $40 (496pp) ISBN 978-0-19-504637-3

Hale (Freud and the Americans, Volume I) begins this balanced, eloquent, highly illuminating study by explaining how American psychoanalysts gained influence treating shell-shocked WWI soldiers and veterans. He traces the liberalizing impact of psychoanalysis in the 1920s and '30s on social work, education, criminology and mental hygiene. Welcomed as an optimistic ideology of sexual and cultural reform, psychoanalysis could also be seen as sanctioning a stoic, tragic vision of unending conflict. Hale follows the popularization of psychoanalytic ideas in novels, films, the press and among artists, intellectuals and social scientists. After WWII, the practice expanded greatly, but in cloaking itself in the scientific authority of medicine, psychoanalysis hastened its own decline, Hale suggests, because the single-case method by the single observer fell out of favor. Other factors Hale identifies in the current crisis of psychoanalysis include attacks by behaviorists, feminists, gays, psychoanalysts themselves, as well as the proliferation of alternative therapies. This concluding half of a two-volume study reclaims psychoanalysis as an art and a skill to foster the cure of souls. (Jan.)