Morality, Capitalism, and The Limitless Unconscious: The Development of Psychoanalysis in the United States

Rachael Morgan is a student of Psychology and Russian at Grinnell College with a particular interest in divergent behavior. After her education, she plans to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and pursue a career in therapy, concentrating on human sexuality and gender identity.

Entering a therapist’s office today and looking around, you’re likely to see a variety of strange objects. Amid the usual comforting sofas, potted plants, and boxes of tissues, you might find a hand-held maze, erotic art, drawing paper and molding clay, or lamps to mimic natural sunlight. Placed to spark thought and stimulate the unconscious, these items are the result of recent theoretical developments and treatment methods in clinical psychology. Born from Freud’s psychoanalytic method and shaped by the social, economic, and scientific climate of the United States, talking therapy has gained validity in the medical community. Yet for a mentally ill patient 200 or even 20 years ago, seeking treatment would have been a radically different experience.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, there was virtually no understanding of psychiatric disease. The mentally ill were considered immoral “lunaticks,” possessed by the devil and sequestered into cruel madhouses away from the public eye. The earliest efforts in the United States of actual treatment, rather than confinement, of the mentally ill were asylums begun by religious groups. Although these early institutions had little scientific basis for their methods of care, they became the first consistent effort to alleviate the suffering of the patients rather than relying on sedatives to control their behavior. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the somatic style of care was used to treat patients exhibiting abnormal psychological symptoms. The somatic style was based around the idea that mental diseases originated in the nervous system, and that the correct stimulation of nerves could improve a patent’s “mental hygiene”^[[1]]. In effect, impressive treatments like shock therapy satisfied patents’ desires for tangible physical of their medical care, like spasming muscles, even if the treatments didn’t significantly affect their mental distress. Results, however, were lacking; despite advances in clinical technology and psychological research, the recovery rate for mentally ill patents dropped 50% between 1870 and 1910^[[2]].

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a theory called parallelism gained prominence among medical professionals.  Proponents of parallelism argued that the mental state and the physiological nervous state were distinctly that is, lapses in “moral behavior” caused mental illness. The further a patient’s behavior from the social norm, such as indulging in overly sexual behavior, the greater the degree of their mental illness. The result? A population of morally “superior” people somehow not getting better despite their idyllic notion of civilized morality^[[3]]. This social climate set the stage for the rise of psychoanalysis in the United States.

Freud’s psychoanalytic method at the turn of the century focused on tapping into the unconscious and cleaning psychological dirt from the mind. But what about psychoanalysis made it so popular, particularly in the United States? Americans’ continuing fascination with mental and moral hygiene was certainly placated by the idea that their unconscious could be cleansed, and since everyone had some mental dirt needing cleansing, psychotherapy became a comfortingly medicalized practice that somewhat reduced the stigma of seeking psychological care^[[4]].

 Some historians argue capitalism, too, was significant to Americans’ affinity for psychoanalysis; the limitless unconscious became the new “American frontier”, a bottomless source of material from which to produce results and that would never run dry, assuring the continued services of a therapist ^[[5]]. However, just as psychological services today are generally limited to those who can afford both the time commitment and the high costs of therapy, the extensive time required for talk therapy made psychoanalysis a tool with which only wealthy Americans could periodically cleanse their minds and increase their own market value.

The United States’ love affair with psychotherapy reached its peak between 1920 and 1960, until less costly and time-consuming therapeutic methods gained popularity ^[[6]]. Through the development of psychological care in the United States, social and economic factors drove change as much as scientific development. Although therapy has since dramatically evolved into a far more empathetic practice than Freud’s original psychoanalytic method, many of the tools for emotional development found in therapist’s offices today are based in the early American ideals of psychoanalysis and the limitless unconscious.