Importing Freud: First‐wave psychoanalysis, interwar social sciences, and the interdisciplinary foundations of an American social theory

Abstract

For all that has been written about Freud, one of the most significant sites for his initial importation into the U.S. remains largely unexamined: namely, within and through the social sciences. During these early years, social scientists were attracted to psychoanalysis for reasons that were not only personal and idiosyncratic, but also intellectual, social, and professional. Focusing on the University of Chicago's Division of Social Sciences and using oral histories, students records, course materials, as well as published sources, this essay explores this varied attraction and its substantive impact upon American social theory vis-à-vis the ideals and ideology of "social adjustment."

History of psychiatry and its institutions

“…The history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and psychiatric epidemiology, and the explicit role they play in the research and targeting of psychoactive medications, continues to attract great historical interest [53 && ,54 && , 55,56]. Other studies have analyzed psychiatry's post-WWII relationships with the social sciences, especially with psychology and sociology, and the impact that the 'rebiologization' of psychiatry had on those relationships [60][61][62], as well as psychiatry's place within the larger rise of the neurosciences and the 'neuromolecular gaze' [63]. For example, an important article on the relationship between the diagnosis posttraumatic stress disorder and the law demonstrates the considerable degree to which normative/legal judgments have come to be medicalized [59 && ].…”

The great escape: World War II, neo‐Freudianism, and the origins of U.S. psychocultural analysis

“…He surrounded himself with a group of well‐placed scholars who were keen to see psychoanalysis more fully incorporated into mainstream academia. They included, in addition to the two men who had hired Alexander—Robert Maynard Hutchins, the university's president, and Frank McLean, the director of the university's medical clinic and husband of the soon‐to‐be Chicago “doyenne of psychoanalysts” Helen McLean (Landau & Hodges, 1991, p. 308)—but also William F. Ogburn, L. L. Thurstone, Charles Merriam, Frank Knight, T. V. Smith, Mortimer Adler, and the rising scholars Harold Lasswell and John Dollard (Gitre, 2010).…”

“…As with “Importing Freud” (Gitre, 2010), this article has benefited immeasurably from a constellation of scholars and institutions. Alice Schreyer, Julia Gardner, and the superb staff of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago provided support for this project from its inception, crucially by awarding me a research fellowship.…”

“…In Susman's analysis, neo‐Freudianism stood out in this domestication process, concurring with Robert LeVine's later observation that from 1918 to 1939 psychocultural studies “was arguably one of the most exciting intellectual explorations launched by American social science in the 20th century” (LeVine, 2001, p. 809). For a generation prior to Fromm's arrival and the migration of other neo‐Freudians such as Karen Horney, American social scientists had been incorporating Freudian analysis into their research (Gitre, 2010). It was an ongoing project, a lively debate, and a growth area in several disciplines, yet it was also hamstrung, namely by Freud's biologism.…”

The Politics of Neutrality: UNESCO’s Social Science Department, 1946-1956

“…14 US ascendency in the department was obviously also partly related to the vacuum left in continental Europe by totalitarianisms which forced scholars to emigrate to the US and the UK where their ideas flourished in unexpected ways like in the case of Freudian psychology. 15 In a recent paper, Gitre (2010) has shown how while psycho-cultural studies were already present in the USA in the 1930s, they really flourished after 1945. …”