Aerobics created by Fotoburo de Boer between 1983 and 1985. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Mind, Body and Spirit

The History of Wellness in America

04.03.20

In these trying times, we’re all trying to stay well mentally, emotionally, and physically. Naturally, that got us thinking about the history of health in America. It also reminded us that maybe we could all use a break from thinking about COVID-19. So this week BackStory explores the history of wellness, a story which involves breakfast cereal, aerobics, and Sigmund Freud.

health; wellness

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Segments

Not Jane Fonda

In the 1980s, aerobics was all the rage and while the movement developed alongside second-wave feminism, not all women were on board.

Jenny Ellison unpacks the feminist critique of aerobics and tells us how a movement made up of self-identified fat women adapted aerobics to make it their own. In “aerobics classes for fat women only,” the goal wasn’t weight loss, but a holistic understanding of wellness that privileged mental and physical wellbeing.

And Deb Burgard, a psychologist and fat activist, reflects on the fitness classes she taught in the 1980s for fat women in the Bay Area.

Music:

Funkadelicoscious by Ketsa
Birthday Cake by Jahzarr

physical fitness; self improvement

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week along with our colleagues Joanne Freeman and Nathan Connolly we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: Now close your eyes, relax your body, and take a deep breath. Breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.

Ed Ayers: And we thought we’d start you off this week with a little meditation courtesy of your favorite meditation teacher Brian Balogh.

Brian Balogh: Yes Ed. You’re the only person I know who speaks while he meditates. Let’s try it again. Breathe in, breathe out, breath in, breathe out.

Ed Ayers: I’m afraid you’ve put all our audience to sleep Brian.

Brian Balogh: It wouldn’t be the first time Ed.

Ed Ayers: Meditation has gone mainstream recently, promoted by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z. It’s part of a broader wellness craze that’s taken over the country and making lots of money. Recent estimates have it that the global wellness industry is worth some $4.2 billion and growing.

Brian Balogh: This week on BackStory, we decided to dive into the history of wellness and explore practices that were embraced or rejected throughout history.

Ed Ayers: We’ll bring you the story of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who brought Seventh-day Adventist theology to his wellness center in the late 1800s.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll learn about how Dr. Sigmund Freud’s one and only visit to America carried psychoanalysis across the Atlantic.

Speaker 2: All righty. Here we go. Hopefully the microphone is long. Two, cooperate, over the chest, [inaudible 00:02:36]. Easy the punch.

Ed Ayers: What you’re hearing is a clip from a local aerobics class. Don’t worry, I’m not wearing my leotard.

Speaker 2: All right. Opposite side now, side to side. Stop and release.

Ed Ayers: People mostly women sweating it out, dancing, and jumping around to a choreographed routine.

Speaker 2: In four, three, run on the spot. [inaudible 00:03:09]

Ed Ayers: Today, aerobics has been eclipsed by more popular kinds of exercise like CrossFit and yoga, but it used to be all the rage.

Jenny Ellison: Aerobics was very popular on the 1980s and there’s a few ways that we can see this. One is simply by looking at the ways in which it emerges in popular culture and popular discussion of the decades.

Ed Ayers: That’s Jenny Ellison. She’s a historian who specializes in the history of aerobics and activism.

Jenny Ellison: We have films like Perfect featuring Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta sharing these kind of seductive glances in aerobics classes. We see the rise of competitive aerobics like the Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship, where instructors go and they compete. And so we just see this sort of emergence of aerobics as part of the culture and part of the discussion.

Jenny Ellison: Another way we can see it is true the popularity of someone like Jane Fonda. Between 1982 and 1987, Fonda sold 4 million copies of her workout videos in the United States alone.

Ed Ayers: Jenny says aerobics might seem frivolous on the surface, but it actually grew out of some big changes happening in American fitness and American culture.

Jenny Ellison: First, what we see in the 1960s is growing awareness of the health benefits of cardiovascular exercise and the rise of sports, like running that become increasingly popular through the 1970s. So there’s a greater understanding of the value of physical fitness. We see a transformation in the kinds of sport and leisure activities that become popular with the Baby Boomers. The Baby Boomers are the first generation raised on play. And as they come of age in the ’70s and 1980s, we see these sport crazes like jogging, like aerobics. We see new leisure activities that are playful, but they’re for adults. I would say aerobics is part of that overall trend of bringing greater playfulness and fun to adult exercise.

Jenny Ellison: Lastly, I’d say a big part of it is it’s an outgrowth of the feminist sport movement. Title IX is an example of that, an outcome of that activism. But just in a general sense that part of women’s liberation is a bodily liberation that gives them opportunities to play sport.

Ed Ayers: But not all women were on board with aerobics. Although it developed alongside second-wave feminism, some women took issue with the culture it perpetuated.

Jenny Ellison: The feminist critique of aerobics is that it encourages a culture of display, where women are encouraged to adopt a feminine appearance rather than focusing on their physical fitness. If we look at representations of aerobics especially pop culture representations, and I want to emphasize that they’re here because we don’t have images of women in rec centers and church basements doing aerobics. But if we think of the popular image of aerobics, it’s Jane Fonda. And although Fonda positioned herself as … She positioned herself as an ally to her audience and you know, “I’m just like you. I’m looking for exercise to make me feel good.” It was a way to achieve bodily liberation through self-control. Feminists didn’t see it that way. They saw Fonda as a slim white woman, who was perpetuating this norm and this pressure to be slender among American women.

Ed Ayers: For many women, the Jane Fonda look was impossible to achieve no matter how many classes they attended or how many diets they tried out. But it didn’t stop some from adapting aerobics to make it their own.

Jenny Ellison: In the 1980s, as part of the fat activist movement, we see the rise of aerobics classes created by fat women, taught by fat women, and attended by fat women. And so this is aerobics for fat women only. The term ‘fat’ just depended on the person. So the aerobics movement, it takes different shapes across time and in different places. So the groups that I studied often use the word ‘large,’ but we also see examples of the use of the term ‘fat.’

Jenny Ellison: In California in particular, there’s a really robust and exciting fat activist movement from the late 1960s. And the aerobics classes that were popular there were a branch out of that community of feminist in California who were critiquing feminine and bodily norms. And aerobics for fat women only emerged from this movement, because it emerged with this idea that fat women should have safe spaces to exercise.

Jenny Ellison: There’s no single starting point for it. It gets taken up by women in different parts of the United States and Canada and different places. And many of these women didn’t even know that other people were doing the same thing. What they do in general is they have an instructor who gets training or is trained as an aerobics teacher and they invite other like-minded women or they advertise classes for fat women. They use images of larger women in the ads to draw women in, and they begin teaching these classes, and they they became quite popular for the 1980s, and we see them in most American states and in several Canadian provinces.

Ed Ayers: Deb Burgard was one of those women leading fitness classes for fat women in the 1980s. She was inspired by West African and Middle Eastern dance classes she’d taken, where the focus was on having fun and building community not losing weight. But then Deb relocated to the Bay Area and what was initially a setback quickly became an opportunity.

Deb Burgard: I was kind of looking around and thinking you know I’m not finding any places where larger people are going to feel like the activity is really paced for them. And I was thinking about how the traditional aerobics classes that I was seeing … I was trying to kind of try on the idea in my mind of, is like Jazzercise the sort of folk dance of our culture right now? Like it’s kind of a reflection of our culture, isn’t it? It’s sort of like … And if this is the version of our folk dance right now, like (beep) it. It’s terrible. I started teaching my class and I called it We Dance. I was not going to have any cutesy plays on words or anything, it’s just like, “We’re going to dance. This is We Dance.” That’s what it’s going to be called.

Deb Burgard: And I was teaching it in Berkeley and Oakland. And I did advertise it as a dance class for women over 200 pounds, and I did that somewhat ambivalently because I didn’t want anybody to be more weight focused [inaudible 00:10:01] there had to be some sort of weighing before you can come in to the class or something. But I really did want us to be very concrete about this is not a dance class for people who feel fat and who are not subject to these exposures to discrimination. I want this class to actually be paced for bodies that are heavier, and I want people to look around the room and see themselves in other people, and I want there to be this kind of saturation in our experience of each other, of people at higher body weights who are really just sort of seeing what it feels like to move in these bodies, and you give the opportunity to people to come and party. And that’s what we did. It was just so fun.

Ed Ayers: Deb says her classes were part of a broader movement with a radical vision.

Deb Burgard: There was a woman in San Francisco who had a class called Fat and Fit. Her name is Eliza [Mimski 00:11:08]. The other class that was going on at the time which is fabulous was called Light On Your Feet, which was also in Oakland. In my life, it was the beginning of my fat activism for sure. Like if you’re a member of a stigmatized group, the world is always telling you how your body is wrong and it’s telling you, “You have to do this in order for your body not to be wrong.” And some of what they’re telling you might be horrible information, but some of the information, like find a way to move, is not necessarily bad information. But if your experience as a member of that stigmatized group is that the movement is connected to repairing how your body is wrong, it’s not going to be a good experience, it’s going to be a traumatizing experience or stigmatizing experience, right?

Deb Burgard: And so I was trying to sort of think about what is the best chance of a good memory of movement for people? And I thought a lot of people, at least some people, have had terrible experiences of PE, but better experiences of recess. So I was thinking about, “All right so how do we bring back recess for adults?” But just really thinking about the idea of play as opposed to the idea of punishment, which is still a radical idea.

Ed Ayers: Nowadays, aerobics might not be the most popular class at your local gym, but Jenny and Deb say the fat aerobics movement offered some important lessons on wellness, public health messages, and body size.

Deb Burgard: I had to field a lot of calls. People would call, get information about the class, and they would just disparage themselves and say, “Oh, I can’t even climb up the stairs. I’ve gained 50 pounds you know. I can’t bring home my groceries.” And I would think to myself, “Well, come. Wait until you … ” I’m thinking, “Just come to the class. You’re going to see people who are 100 pounds heavier than you doing splits. So you’ll get it, you’ll get it.” That this is perspective that you’ve been fed from the dominant culture and you need to see your family, like your fat family. You need to see the fat family that you weren’t born into. You need to see the beauty in this fat family and the people who are figuring out how to sort of make a way even though there’s so much (beep) that is kind of inherently there day by day. It’s like recognizing how brilliant people can be at resisting this stuff and finding each other and making a party happen. I just wish I could transplant that experience into everybody’s brain.

Jenny Ellison: when we talk to people who participate in aerobics classes for fat women only, what we learned is that women spent years and decades and sometimes a lifetime, trying to lose weight and never did and felt badly about this, and then had a really negative impact on their interpersonal relationships.

Jenny Ellison: Once they had come to terms with the fact that they were fat and this was unlikely to change, they began to see their lives a lot differently. And so one of the questions that the movement raises for the medical profession is the general failure to find a solution for the challenge of obesity. If we take the analysis that obesity is bad for people, the medical profession has actually never been able to find a clear solution to this problem. And so for decades, men and women have struggled to lose weight because of this sense that being fat is negative, and yet the data show us that diets are rarely successful.

Jenny Ellison: What fat activism and aerobics classes for fat women only offer is a different model, and that’s a model of health at every size, where we meet people where they are and we don’t focus on weight. We focus on physical and mental wellness. And this is a different way of thinking about physical fitness and health than relying solely on metrics like weight to determine whether or not somebody is in good or bad shape.

Ed Ayers: That’s Jenny Ellison. She’s a curator of sport and leisure at the Canadian Museum of History and the author of several articles on aerobics and fat activism.

Ed Ayers: You also heard Deb Burgard. She’s a psychologist and fat activist. Deb is also one of the founders of the Health at Every Size Model.

The Man Behind “The San”

Today, the name Kellogg is synonymous with sugar-coated breakfast cereals. But in the late 19th century, Kellogg was best known for its wellness center in Battle Creek, Michigan. For decades, the eccentric Dr. John Harvey Kellogg led a Sanitarium with the backing of Seventh Day Adventists, and prescribed patients with rigorous daily exercise and strict diets – including enemas of yogurt. Ed talks with scholar Brian C. Wilson about Kellogg’s rise and fall with Seventh Day Adventists, and why many people still practice some of what Kellogg preached at “The San.”

He Went Away by Podington Bear
Dramamine by Podington Bear

Seventh Day Adventists; foodways; religious movements

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Brian, when you hear the name Kellogg, there’s probably one thing that immediately jumps to mind (singing).

Brian Balogh: Well Ed, I’m afraid that’s a little before my time. I think-

Ed Ayers: It’s hard to imagine such a time, but I agree with you.

Brian Balogh: Maybe after it. And anyway, what came to my mind was Cornflakes.

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah. And I can just picture the box and how happy you were to see it in the morning in breakfast. Sure. Today, Kellogg is synonymous with spoonfuls of crunchy sugar coated breakfast cereals. But back in the late 19th century, the name Kellogg was known not for its cereals as much as for its yes, sanitarium. Here’s scholar Brian C. Wilson.

Brian C. Wilson: The Battle Creek Sanitarium was for a time, for many decades in fact, probably the most famous health and wellness destination not only in the United States, but it was known internationally.

Ed Ayers: You might have heard of a sanatorium, but sanitarium was a term made up by the man behind the whole operation, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. He was put in charge of the facility in Battle Creek Michigan in 1876. At that time, it was called the much less appealing Western Health Reform Institute, but Kellogg had a different idea.

Brian C. Wilson: He just said, “Okay. It’s now the Battle Creek Sanitarium.” And somebody pointed out, “Well, sanitarium really isn’t a word, it’s sanatorium.” And he said, “Well, it’s a word I’ve coined because sanatoriums are places where people go to get well, and a sanitarium is a place where people come to learn how to stay well.”

Ed Ayers: Now, at first glance, Dr. Kellogg may not have been the obvious pick for the director of a wellness center. He was a portly fellow who stood at a modest 5 foot 4 inches, but his church, The Seventh-Day Adventist singled him out as a leader at a young age and paid for him to attend medical school.

Brian C. Wilson: And so when he came back to Battle Creek in 1875, he was only 23-24 years old, but he was the best qualified physician the Adventist had. And the idea here was that Del and White had a vision that the Seventh-day Adventist should create a health reform institute in Battle Creek. Ellen White was a prophetess and a leader and had a series of health revelations that basically said that God felt that the Adventist needed to take better care of their health.

Brian C. Wilson: There is a belief that you could only have a pure soul if you had a pure body. And John Harvey Kellogg promoted a vegetarian diet. And he believes that it was important not only for people’s physical health, but also for their spiritual health.

Speaker 4: A man that lives on pork, fine flour bread, rich pies, and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco might as well try to fly as to be chased in thought.

Brian C. Wilson: If you disregarded what he called the laws of life or the laws of health by abusing your body, by eating a bad diet or drinking alcohol or smoking, then you are not only harming yourself physically, but you are also basically offending God. And so there is a very kind of strong moral emphasis on Kellogg’s physiology.

Speaker 4: Disease is cured by the body itself, not by doctors or remedies. All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate how intricate, and complicated are simple childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body.

Ed Ayers: So what would you have experienced if you showed up in Battle Creek at the sanitarium? What would your arrival and day there have been like?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, people would actually come for weeks at a time. And it really became a kind of destination, a kind of resort. And by the 1890s, he built the thing into a huge kind of grand hotel complex of buildings. This giant kind of Victorian pile. And you would be admitted and have a preliminary consultation and then based on that, they would basically tailor a kind of routine for you both in terms of diet and Dr. Kellogg was a real demon for exercise. He believe everybody needed to get far more exercise than they were getting. So they had a very large gymnasium, they had tennis courts, and all sorts of things outside for people to do. But they also had a full laboratory, a pharmacy, all the things that you would see in a modern hospital.

Brian C. Wilson: And so over a course of couple of weeks, maybe even a month, people would basically eat the vegetarian diet, do the exercises, undergo a variety of treatments. Some of them quite novel. Dr. Kellogg was really interested in the properties of light and sunlight, so he created a kind of looks like the first tanning bed, the first light therapy bed. So it really dependent on what the original diagnosis was what your days at the sanitarium would be.

Ed Ayers: So what would be a typical diagnosis? What would be wrong with people when they showed up?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, Dr. Kellogg was really fixated on digestion and he really believe that the colon was kind of the heart of human health and well-being. And he bought into this theory called autointoxication, and this was the idea that undigested food that remain in the colon for too long would poison not only the colon but the entire body. And that’s why he had this real emphasis on regularity and getting the food through.

Brian C. Wilson: They also used enemas quite a bit in order to clean out people’s system. So this whole idea of detoxing goes back to the early 19th century. Now Kellogg was a little bit more inventive about this. He used not only water enemas, but he was excited by yogurt. And the thing he was excited about was that the countries where yogurt was consumed seemed to have longer life spans than other places. And so he attributed this to the constituents of yogurt, but the fact that it also had living bacterial cultures in it.

Brian C. Wilson: And so he was interested in manipulating the flora of the gut long again before this becomes mainstream, but he thought he could do this either by eating yogurt or by using yogurt as an enema.

Ed Ayers: Wow! Now, this was a very appealing place, right? There are a lot of famous people came. Could you tell us about some of those folks?

Brian C. Wilson: Some presidents came. Taft came at a certain point. Henry Ford was very interested in some of the ideas of John Harvey Kellogg. Explorers came, movie stars occasionally came. He also catered to really the kind of elite of the United States. I mean the prices tend to be a little bit on the high side for a room, $10 to $20 a day. The interesting thing is the Battle Creek Sanitarium began as a Seventh-Day Adventist institution for Seventh-day Adventist, but slowly but surely over the years Dr. Kellogg really opened it up to anybody who wanted to come. And he courted the rich and the famous because he knew that they could actually get the word out and spread his ideas.

Ed Ayers: Right. And were they satisfied customers?

Brian C. Wilson: Most were. Most were very satisfied and kept coming back season after season and became a kind of watering hole in that sense without the alcohol. And people really look forward to their time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. That wasn’t always the case. And there’s one very famous exception to this.

Brian C. Wilson: There was a man named to C. W. Post. C. W. Post was a failed business man from Texas who had digestive issues. And so he came and checked himself into the Battle Creek Sanitarium, but apparently he just hated the place from the beginning and he didn’t like Dr. Kellogg. But he really liked the cereal products that were available. And he and his wife managed to get the recipes and the manufacturing process, the secrets of that while they were staying at the sanitarium and then left and then Post turned around and created the Post Cereal Company which was really the first successful breakfast cereal company in Battle Creek. And that set off a boom that lasted for years.

Ed Ayers: And sounds as if Kellogg is developing this kind of empire. Does that put him at tension with the church? I mean you’ve talked about how he’s now courting the the well-bred and and well-fed. Does he have a rift with the church?

Brian C. Wilson: He does. Kellogg was always concerned about the harmony of Science and religion, and in the early 20th century, Seventh-Day Adventism became increasingly fundamentalist in its approach, and its rejection of Darwinian evolution. And Kellogg who is always mindful of his reputation as a doctor, really didn’t want to be seen as somebody who was anti-science. And so he developed a theology, a kind of eminent theology of God that harmonize for him better with his understanding of the development of science, and this put him at odds with the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1907, he was disfellowshipped. He was basically kicked out of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Ed Ayers: So part of that era, these ideas of Darwinism but also of health, it led Kellogg to have some relationships to eugenics?

Brian C. Wilson: Yes. Well, eugenics of course is this idea that you can control human reproduction such that only people who have “good genetics” can basically pass their genes on. And this was thought to be a way to improve the human race. It’s interesting because Seventh-Day Adventism also taught that from the days of Adam and Eve that human beings had been degenerating in terms of their life spans because according to the Old Testament, Adam and Eve and the patriarchs live for just phenomenal periods of time. And then slowly but surely human beings, their life spans became less and less. One of the interpretations of this was that human beings were eating a bad diet and basically abusing their bodies. The idea was by doing that, you were passing on defective genes, and so the human race was actually generating overtime.

Brian C. Wilson: Kellogg was concerned because he felt that in the 19th century so many more, he called them race poisons, things like tobacco and alcohol and meat, were becoming more and more available to more and more of the population. And this was accelerating the degeneration of the human race alcoholism.

Speaker 4: Alcoholism, the opium habit, and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits, which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation. The grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the prohibition amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its stranglehold and more than 100 million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

Brian C. Wilson: He basically talked about a kind of biological apocalypse, if you will, that the human race if it continued on its path would eventually become extinct.

Ed Ayers: We began our conversation talking about Cornflakes, but that’s a different Kellogg.

Brian C. Wilson: Yeah, I know, you’re correct. In the 1890s, Kellogg and his wife Ella Eaton Kellogg got together with Kellogg’s brother Will K Kellogg, and Will K Kellogg at that point was the business manager of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and obviously brilliant, brilliant businessman that always lived in the shadow of his brother. Well, the three of them got together in an effort to design foods that would be more palatable to their guest. And after much experimentation, they came up with this idea of flattening out grains and baking them and creating essentially what we know today is breakfast cereals.

Brian C. Wilson: The problem was Dr. Kellogg, he always had a health food company associated with the Battle Creek Sanitarium, but he really didn’t want to exploit this commercially because he was afraid that it would hurt his reputation as a doctor. But after C.W. Post managed to purloin the the recipes and make a fortune, Will K Kellogg basically had a falling out with his brother because Will K Kellogg wanted to basically exploit Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as a national brand. And so this became very, very acrimonious over the years and the two brothers fought over who got to use the Kellogg name. And unfortunately, never reconciled even up until Dr. Kellogg died in 1943.

Ed Ayers: Wow. There are things that we still believe today that Kellogg introduced to us. Can you give us the best case that we can make for Kellogg’s positive enduring legacy?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, it think the major thing that Kellogg should be remembered for is his emphasis on holistic health, on the connection between mind, body, and spirit for optimum wellness. He really believe that you needed to basically focus on all three things to be a healthy and happy human being.

Brian C. Wilson: It’s interesting because medicine has always been as much an art as a science, and so a lot of it is trial and error. And a lot of what we remember Dr. Kellogg for are some of the things he didn’t quite get right, or some of the treatments we know that are counterproductive. But there are a lot of other things that he did that continued to be practiced today.

Brian C. Wilson: For example, he was very concerned about people’s digestion and of course he wanted people to be regular and that became kind of a theme of his. And so one of the things he developed was the use of psyllium seeds as a bulk fiber. And of course that’s the basis for things like Metamucil today. Some of his practices like he promoted UV light, which he thought was very helpful to the body and of course we know that it’s not. But on the other hand, he had some good ideas as well.

Ed Ayers: Brian C. Wilson is a professor of American religious history at Western Michigan University. He’s also the author of the book, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living.

A Freudian slips across the Atlantic

Sigmund Freud visited America only once, to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909. But the father of psychoanalysis, who as a young man had fallen in love with the idea of America after seeing a copy of the Gettysburg Address displayed at the 1873 International Exhibition in Vienna, had a harder time when he encountered the real thing. He balked at American culture and found American food even harder to stomach. But within a few years, Freudian theories and practices were disseminating through American culture. Gail Hornstein, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College, discusses Sigmund Freud’s visit to America.

Puzzler by Podington Bear
Bristlecone by Podington Bear
American National Anthem Traditional by Bobby Cole
Ambient Voiceover 1 by James Grant

Sigmund Freud; pyschology

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Hey Brian, I’ve got a quick question. Why did you become a historian?

Brian Balogh: The stupendous pay and the wardrobe.

Ed Ayers: That’s interesting Brian. That’s not what I would have guessed as your motivations. Is it possible that your fascination with the past might instead come from childhood regrets that you haven’t been able to move on from, thus giving you and unconscious predisposition to this field of history? Is that possible?

Brian Balogh: So you’re saying I’m a historian because of my inability to overcome my own past. Don’t you think you may be a little over analyzing things here Ed?

Ed Ayers: Well, you would say that, and that’s kind of revealing in itself instead I’m psychoanalyzing. That’s the theory with its focus on the interplay between childhood, behavioral development, and the unconscious mind created by Sigmund Freud in the 1890s. And according to scholar Gail Hornstein, psychoanalysis has had a special appeal here in America ever since Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909.

Gail Hornstein: The president of the University in Worcester, Massachusetts was G. Stanley Hall, a very illustrious even at that time American psychologist who had very radical ideas about psychology. It was a very daring act for G. Stanley Hall to invite Freud to give these lectures.

Gail Hornstein: In 1909, Freud was barely known in Europe and almost entirely unknown in America, but his radical ideas about the mind and especially about sexuality had earned him a certain degree of critique.

Gail Hornstein: Freud was given the premier slot in the organization of the conference. He alone gave a lecture every day of the week of the conference. Freud did not prepare these lectures in advance. Each morning, he took a walk around the neighborhood of Clark University and formulated his ideas, and that he delivered extemporaneously and with no notes what were widely considered to be jewels of clarity. He gave one lecture per day each on a different topic and essentially summarized the key ideas of his theory up to that point.

Speaker 5: In Europe, I felt as though I were despised but over there I found myself received by the four most men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my five lectures upon psychoanalysis, it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream. Psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.

Gail Hornstein: The fact that Freud shows I think brilliantly to give a overall accessible summary of his ideas rather than a set of technical, more complex presentations that assumed any prior knowledge is what helped these lectures to take on such a prominent importance. You can directly trace the spread of psychoanalysis in America to these Clark lectures. Prior to the introduction of psychoanalysis in America, what we really had were what are sometimes lumped together and called The Mind Cures. Freud’s ideas were far more complicated and nuanced than those of other thinkers of the time who valued introspection or who thought about people’s own experience as important, because of the key notion, the core fundamental principle in psychoanalysis of the unconscious.

Gail Hornstein: The unconscious is what prevents us from understanding the roots of our problems and it is only through a very painstaking process of unraveling that it’s possible to get to the actual, the real, the hidden causes of suffering at the surface.

Speaker 5: America is a mistake. A gigantic mistake. It is true, but a mistake.

Gail Hornstein: Freud was never a big fan of America. Freud found America somewhat barbaric. He hated the food, it upset his stomach. He couldn’t really understand the combination of prudery and licentiousness that came to dominate the culture. Freud was very much, in a personal sense, a distinguished European of the 19th century, and America seemed a bit too rough and ready for his taste. And he very, very reluctantly realized that America was the place that psychoanalysis was actually going to most thrive for a whole set of other historical reasons. And Americans ought to be supported in their interest in psychoanalysis, but he himself never wanted to come back to America and he wished I think at some level that England had been a bigger country, and so that more of psychoanalysis could be institutionalized there.

Gail Hornstein: Freud’s ideas did not immediately gain currency in America after his 1909 lectures at Clark, but it was really after World War II that these ideas came to have a much wider cultural currency. And this was largely because a great number of psychiatrists and psychologists were called into service during World War II to cope with the suffering of soldiers, the kind of suffering we would now call PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome. And the core idea of psychoanalysis, that someone can experience a trauma, but then they can work through that trauma by talking through those issues in a complex way with a trained analyst. This idea was very, very important to the physicians who were serving and treating soldiers during the second World War.

Speaker 5: Ladies and gentlemen, if you will permit me to generalize, as is indispensable in so brief a presentation, we may express our results up to this point in the formula. Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain traumatic experiences.

Gail Hornstein: What was most radical about Freud’s ideas at the time was that he took seriously the experience of suffering patients who, at the time, were predominantly women. Women were seen by most other physicians to be fantasists who made up things or malingerers who pretended to have physical symptoms that they didn’t really have. And Freud took seriously, in the deepest possible way, what it was that patients in general and these women in particular had to say about what was happening in their minds.

Gail Hornstein: The suffering patient who might be inarticulate, unable to identify what it was that was causing his or her problems could be taken seriously. And from what the patient said the underlying causes of their distress could be, with the help of the psychoanalyst, unraveled.

Speaker 5: What’s a Freudian slip? It’s when you say one thing and mean your mother.

Gail Hornstein: Psychoanalysis also comes to take a place in the popular culture starting in the 1950s, and we see the ubiquitous cartoons of someone lying on a couch and someone with a beard sitting behind them and many, many other forms of popular representation.

Gail Hornstein: The thing that’s so important to stress about this that I think people often miss about psychoanalysis when they think about sort of the dower of Freud talking about the struggle of life, the sense of psychoanalysis as being optimistic, which during the 1950s and 1960s really seen as one of its key aspects. That you could change things no matter who you were as an adult and no matter what you had been through earlier in your life. You could work that through and you could have a normal adulthood. This was a very, very exciting and positive and uplifting kind of idea to many, many people.

Gail Hornstein: Almost all forms of psychotherapy that exist in the United States are derivation of psychoanalytic theory. And I think understanding oneself is something that people will always want to do. And the optimistic aspect of psychoanalysis, even though it’s very difficult to go through, that one can really change one’s life and not be stuck in one’s fate even if traumatic, is something that will never go away.

Ed Ayers: Gail Hornstein is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College.

End Riff

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: So Brian, that is the recurring theme throughout these different episodes in the story of wellness in America. It’s always a battle in some ways over who’s in charge, who has the authority to tell us how to be well. And I just wondered, do you agree with that? And if you do, what sort of pattern do you see in that claim of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Well, I noticed that theme so I agree with you Ed. And I also noticed a recurring period of time which I’m told we’re supposed to pay attention to as historians.

Ed Ayers: Yes, time is important.

Brian Balogh: That period between the Civil War and let’s say the 1920s, it seemed like there’s just a lot up for grabs and it seems like many of our segments kind of go back to that period. So here’s my theory about the time period and the theme.

Ed Ayers: Okay.

Brian Balogh: To oversimplify a bit, I think that spiritual and moral authority is in pretty good shape for the first two thirds of the 19th century. In fact, I’ve learned from you that religiosity actually intensified in the 1820s and 1830s. But I think after the Civil War, those who are in charge of our moral and spiritual well-being, well who that should be was really kind of up for grabs.

Ed Ayers: Why is that?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think the authority of ministers was being challenged. I think that a lot of Americans were uncomfortable with more and more women disproportionately filling the pews of churches. There was talk about religion becoming feminized. And after the horrible carnage of the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, I think there was a little bit of concern that perhaps we were growing soft. That we really needed to demonstrate our kind of masculine Christianity, so to speak.

Ed Ayers: So that suggest that the concern with wellness doesn’t really grow from a less well population. Do you think there’s a correlation between the need for wellness and our concern with it or is this something generated as something else in the culture?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think if we fast forward to the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, I do think it’s fair to say that it has something to do with wellness because people are living longer and they’re expecting to live longer. And even more than that, they were expecting to feel good well into their 60s and 70s. So I think that’s a period in which the term wellness for me really seems to apply.

Ed Ayers: Before that, people are just determined, hoping to stay alive.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. And if you look at the average lifespan, it turns out that we are living longer and there’s good reason to believe in the new authority including kind of a moral authority on the block, and that’s doctors, that’s science.

Ed Ayers: Brian, anybody who has looked at American culture after World War II, it seems like you see sort of traces of Freudianism everywhere you know. Everybody understands about what it means to get on the couch, right? And go to see a shrink and Woody Allen jokes and all that. So there seems to have been a long-standing fascination with or adoption of Freudian ideas. Do you think the United States was especially searching for that kind of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Well, I think that the United States found in a kernel of Freud’s theory an approach that matched really well with American individualism, and that was power.

Ed Ayers: That we all have our own unique problems.

Brian Balogh: That’s exactly right. And as the end of that segment we heard pointed to, there was a real optimism, which I’m not sure Freud entirely sure at himself given his success rate. But what was taken from Freud was the popularization of a kind of optimistic sense that one can improve themselves, which you know Ed existed in the United States long before Freud ever came over.

Ed Ayers: And it’s one of the great through lines of all the things that we’re talking about. The idea of wellness in America is that you can in fact become more well, right?

Brian Balogh: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: And that it’s our right, and in some ways even her obligation to become more well. And so I thank Freud embodied a certain kind of wholeness that we’ve been looking for in other ways ever since. If we’d eat this diet that we’ll be complete. If we would figure out this technique of child-rearing, we would all be well.

Brian Balogh: That’s right. And not only have we imbibe kind of basic tenets of Freudian psychology. We even have terms like reverse psychology. It’s such a given, these psychological expectations. We have counter psychology, reverse psychology. It’s very much woven into our culture.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. I’ve heard so much about this. I kind of have a complex about it. So how do we get to the present day then, if we have these sort of contestations. You had a doctor like Kellogg, and then another doctor like Freud who are claiming this expertise at least out of some sort of institutional base. Today, the people who seem to be telling us what to do are people who have no claim whatsoever to that, but are successful and happy. And I think about Gwyneth Paltrow and her infamous company, Goop, in which side she’s imagining all kinds of beneficial effects from most unlikely kinds of techniques and substances and so forth. But we also look to Oprah Winfrey, other people like that to tell us how not just to be healthy but to be well. We have more experts than ever now, Brian. So why would we turn to popular culture figures for our source of expertise?

Brian Balogh: Because that expertise has not not solved all of our physical problems, for one. I turned on the television and I will confess I watch kind of mainly cable network news and C-SPAN, which doesn’t have commercials-

Ed Ayers: Well, I’m deeply surprised.

Brian Balogh: Exactly. Now C-SPAN doesn’t have commercials, but cable network knows it does and almost everything advertised these days, it ranges from indigestion to rather esoteric diseases that still exist is my point. And so these experts haven’t solved everything, even though we’re living longer and presumably a little bit more healthy. But they haven’t solved that problem we started with, which is moral authority. How do we feel spiritually good about ourselves? Well, one way we do it is we jog, we go to the gym exercise.

Brian Balogh: Now doctors will recommend exercise, but the people who have popularized that are people that we can really identify with, not because we drive in limousines or we have millions of dollars, but we see them on television. They are those celebrities that you know a lot more about than I do.

Ed Ayers: It’s interesting the celebrities that we seemed to turn to now don’t ask anything of us other than to buy their products. At least when there was Jane Fonda, she wanted us to work out and sweat, right? And I’m sure buy a leggings and leotards too. And I know that you’ve actually had a dalliance with the aerobics craze, is that right Brian?

Brian Balogh: Well, dalliance maybe an overstatement Ed. And it came about because my doctor actually suggested that I get more exercise. And so I signed up for an aerobics class, and in many ways takes us back to the beginning of the discussion Ed, because I discovered just how gendered that aerobics class, and I gather most, were. So this was taught at intramural rec. I show up at the old, unairconditioned, I might add, gym at UVA.

Ed Ayers: I’m impressed already Brian.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, exactly. Well, you would have been less impressed if you saw me because I just wore my regular sweatpants. And to make matters worse, I forgot my sneakers. So I figured what could be what could be the big deal if I just show up in my socks? Well, I was the only guy in a class of like 30 people. Everybody stared at me and then looked at my footwear-

Ed Ayers: Yeah, I’ve had that dream. You’re a fraud.

Brian Balogh: This was a nightmare. And it seemed to me that everybody in the class had taken at least 15 other aerobics classes because they certainly were moving around to rhythm, which I was not, even if I hadn’t been sliding around the class. So I was so embarrassed. I never went back again. Part of it was poor wardrobe choice, but most of it-

Ed Ayers: That’s never stopped you before.

Brian Balogh: It has not. But most of it was being the only guy in this class. And it never even occurred to me.

Ed Ayers: It’s not only being the only guy, but also being the least adept to what everybody was doing.

Brian Balogh: That also is not the first time I was the least adept, but this really underscored what a lot of the second-wave feminist criticized about aerobics. That everybody was thin in this class, everybody was already in good shape. And they use of term ‘undisplay.’ I don’t know how the women felt, but boy did I feel undisplay. It’s almost as though I needed years of therapy to get over that experience Ed.

Ed Ayers: Well, it almost worked out. You seem very well to me now Brian.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio.

Ed Ayers: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Executive Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 6: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.