A Freudian slips across the Atlantic

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.