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Psychoanalysis and the American Scene: a Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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For many people in the United States the designation of the first part of the twentieth century as the Age of Analysis does not seem strange or even overstated. They know immediately that the phrase refers to psychoanalysis and not spectrum analysis or content analysis or market analysis. Psychoanalysis as a therapy, as a way of looking at the world, undeniably caught on in this country and in this hemisphere to a far greater extent than it has anywhere else in the world. Yet today many signs indicate that its influence has leveled off and perhaps even declined, while in Europe and Japan the boom may be just getting under way. This current disparity between the Old World and the New provides fresh impetus for speculation about the forces that implemented the acceptance of psychoanalysis in this country and for illustration of how this acceptance became in part a silly infatuation. Some of these factors should be outlined both from the point of view of phychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon and from the point of view of psychoanalysis as potentially the most inclusive general psychological theory. To spell out some of the conditions that did and do obtain in the United States in regard to psychoanalysis may supply a baseline from which to study the similarities and differences in the growth, in other countries, of psychoanalysis as an institution and as a system of thought, as well as a part of medicine along with its barely legitimate offspring, dynamic psychiatry. This vast task can be undertaken here only in the broadest possible terms. Hence historical, sociological, and psychological generalizations will be offered without the necessary noting of ever-present exceptions and disagreements.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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