| Psychoanalysis has been understood and appraised in vastly different ways over the course of its history in the United States. We lack, however, a rich understanding of the social conditions that have underwritten these shifting appraisals. This dissertation seeks to place recent shifts in psychoanalysis' meaning and status in sociocultural context, impelled by the belief that the sense we make of psychoanalysis is bound up with our culture's understanding of the person, his mind, and what counts as important in his experience. I ultimately claim that changes in the ways psychoanalysis has been received in the United States index broader changes in the American conception of selfhood. I advance this claim by focusing on two periods of psychoanalysis' history in the United States: its midcentury apogee of influence, and its nadir of popularity at the turn of the 20th century. I demonstrate that, at midcentury, psychoanalysis became associated with anxieties about mass society, totalitarianism, and conformity, becoming popular in part because it provided a model of the self as uniquely resistant to the totalizing pull of mass social forces. I then show how, near the century's end, psychoanalysis failed to compel a younger generations of Americans because, in a reconfigured postmodern landscape, its introspective project now seemed to undermine, rather than strengthen, the self. |
