Psychoanalysis in America and the Impact of the European Intellectual Migration

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN AMERICA AND THE IMPACT OF THE EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION

The Nazis Ban Psychoanalysis

In October 1933 Nazi Germany labeled psychoanalysis a "Jewish science" and banned it from the Congress of Psychology in Leipzig. The Nazis burned psychoanalytic literature, and practicing psychoanalysts, mostly from Berlin, first joined Sigmund Freud for a brief stint in Vienna or left directly for the United States to save their lives and their practices. Their contributions made a profound impact on American psychology and contributed to the growth of a more influential psychiatric profession in the United States.

The Psychoanalytic Diaspora

Freud is honored as the genius of psychoanalysis, but not all American academicians or medical psychiatrists were ready to accept his ideas wholeheartedly. In the first third of the century there was a great deal of ambivalence to his ideas in the United States. Other schools of thought, such as behaviorism and experimental psychology, were more popular. The European psychoanalysts were accustomed to the lukewarm embrace of psychoanalysis. Analysts were to a large extent outsiders in their own countries and subject to the hostile climate of opinion that surrounded Freud's European psychoanalytic movement. But they brought certain strengths to the United States, They already knew their American colleagues from the international congresses of the psychoanalytic movement, and as practitioners of a middle-and upper-class urban profession, they were financially well situated. They settled in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and were soon busy in private practice, as professors, and as supervisors of a new generation of American psychiatrists.

The Popular Success of Psychoanalysis

The Great Depression was a time of much soul-searching for the American middle class, and these European psychoanalysts arrived at a time when there was a need to explain an event and the feelings it provoked in a new way. Popularized versions of Freudian theory reassured many that there were reasons for failure beyond their control—perhaps something from early childhood. The tremendous success of psychoanalysis in the popular culture forced academics to take a closer look. Beginning in 1936, a series of seminars was organized at Yale University with the aim of "achieving a synthesis of conditioning theory [behaviorism] and psychoanalysis." These seminars brought psychoanalysis to the center of attention at the Yale Institute of Human Relations. They were an important step for the history of Freud's influence on American psychology because they made many of his psychoanalytic concepts familiar-sounding and talked-about by psychologists.

American versus European Psychology

Much of American psychology emphasized measurement and scientific classifications; European psychoanalysis focused on imagery and dreams. Immigrants such as Ernst Kris and Rene Spitz, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Kathe Wolf adapted American methodologies and fused empirical research to psychoanalysis. Other Europeans combined different psychological schools with American practices. Gestalt psychology, with its emphasis on empirical research, was a good methodological fit and was carried into the United States by Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, and Alfred Lewin. Although Adler's individualist psychology did not interest academic psychologists, it was recognized and used by clinical workers to treat patients. It is not possible to separate completely the influence of the European intellectual migration of the 1930s from the natural evolutionary course of American psychiatry in understanding the convergence of psychoanalysis and general psychology. The fields of psychology that were the most affected by the Freudian diaspora included: abnormal, personality, developmental, industrial and social, and psychotherapy. But the fact remains that America has become a world center of psychoanalysis, while, in Europe, Freud is honored as a genius of a past epoch and psychoanalysis is mostly ignored.

Sources:

Marie Jahoda, "The Migration of Psychoanalysis: Its Impact on American Psychology," in The Intellectual Migration. Europe and America, 1930-1960, edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969): 420-445;

David Shakow and David Rapaport, The Influence of Freud on American Psychology (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1964), pp. 135-142, 194.