S iegmund Freud was, perhaps above all things, an unparalleled encyclopedist of the perversity of human misery, detailing in countless volumes every conceivable means by which men and women bollix their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and capacities. Though he dedicated his life to the alleviation of such suffering, Freud wasn’t especially optimistic about the nature of the cure he could offer. He once said that through analysis a person could expect to rise from a state of abject despair into one of everyday unhappiness. Freud discerned in human nature a series of animalistic urges and drives kept in check by a merciless hanging judge called the “superego.” But while the lower animals have an innate instinct for survival, Freud’s humans must wrestle with a drive toward self-destruction he called “the death instinct.”
Needless to say, this dark vision of human nature is dramatically at odds with the animating spirit of the United States — a nation whose founding document affirms an essential right to the pursuit of actual happiness. What’s more, the notion of a self-governing society of citizens is directly in conflict with Freud’s notion that people are driven by their very natures to act in ways injurious to themselves (and, by logical extension, to others as well).
So just how was it that this most European of contemporary thinkers, whose work is drenched in Spenglerian pessimism, became the greatest intellectual influence on the population of the United States in the twentieth century? We Americans are all Freudians (or post-Freudians) now, incapable of thinking of the world and ourselves in a nonpsychological way. Not only did Freud’s way of thinking dominate the science of mind for much of the past 100 years — in ways that Freud’s critics now contend did immeasurable damage to the fight against mental illnesses and the suffering they wreak — but various bastardized versions of Freud’s “talking cure” have come to dominate the public square.
It is Eva S. Moskowitz’s interesting contention that what she calls “America’s obsession with self-fulfillment” actually predates Freud by half a century. In her new book, In Therapy We Trust, Moskowitz locates the origins of the American passion for curing afflictions of the spirit in the work of one Phineas Quimby, a Maine doctor of the mid-nineteenth century, and his influential tome, Science of Health and Happiness. “Dismissing self-denial as untherapeutic, immoral, and sacrilegious,” Moskowitz writes,
Quimby’s new moral calculus emphasized the ideal of self fulfillment. His science, or medicine, was designed to secure happiness. In fact, he argued that contentment and growth were the standards by which his healing methods could be judged . . . . Independent of Freud, Americans charted their own therapeutic course.
Moskowitz argues that Quimby gave birth to a new spiritual-intellectual movement in the late nineteenth century called New Thought, whose most famous offshoot was the Christian Science Church founded by Mary Baker Eddy: “At the core of New Thought’s religious vision were the ideas that everything was possible and that man through the power of his mind could control his health and his happiness.” The movement’s “effort to call attention to the problem of unhappiness was unprecedented in both its extent and its quality . . . . Its medicalization of a whole range of feelings set it apart from late Victorianism.”
From New Thought, Moskowitz moves to the social-reform efforts of the early twentieth century and efforts to foster higher values and a more expansive vision of life among the poor, then to the rise of marriage counseling as a profession, the use of psychological testing in World War II, the rise of feminism and identity politics, the explosion of self-help and support groups in the 1970s and 1980s, and the dissolution of the very notion of reticence as represented by the triumph of Oprah Winfrey and the daytime talkshow boom. And she attempts this project in a mere 284 pages.
In Therapy We Trust is an especially fascinating work because its author is, of all things, a professional politician. Moskowitz has represented the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City Council for three years now, and due to the structure of New York’s new term-limits law, she will be the most senior member of that body come January. You may take it on faith when I tell you that the New York City Council is not generally known for the intellectual aspirations of its members. So it’s all the more striking that the chief failing of In Therapy We Trust is that it is far too intellectually ambitious for its own modest size. Samuel Johnson once said of Paradise Lost that “none ever wished it longer,” and it’s a sentiment I share about almost every book I’ve ever read. But In Therapy We Trust is so astonishingly broad in scope that it necessarily treats almost every detail in the course of its history in a cursory manner, and makes vast generalizations that are easy to dismiss (was Phineas Quimby more important in the history of American self-fulfillment than Thoreau or the Transcendentalists?). It ought to have been much longer.
Still, Moskowitz is an intelligent writer with a wicked eye for detail, as in this little summa of our embarrassing recent history:
An estimated 40 percent of Americans, or approximately 75 million adults, attend [support groups] . . . . Jeffry Ahorn, for example, recounts how the local chapter of California’s Pet Loss Support Group helped him deal with the death of Fred, his twenty-pound boa constrictor, whereas outside the group “no one understood what Fred had meant to me.” Jennifer Stratford credits her nail-biters support group for helping her overcome her habit. She proudly announces that she can finally wear orange nail polish “without feeling foolish.”
Moskowitz’s skepticism about the inexhaustible national hunger for psychological introspection makes In Therapy We Trust exceptionally entertaining for an academic tome published by a university press.
Her skepticism is ideological as well as moral and aesthetic. Moskowitz, a liberal Democrat, believes that the effort to locate the sources of poverty and dysfunction in the psyche has obscured the real root causes of these conditions — which is to say, class, race, and gender bias. She hints, though she does not say outright, that progressive political solutions to difficult problems were hijacked by the nation’s obsession with psychological cures. The insistence on looking inward relieved what might otherwise have been irresistible pressure to redistribute income and political power.
Moskowitz, in whose City Council district the very notion of “limousine liberalism” was born 30 years ago, too often indulges here in unthinking parlor Marxism — or perhaps it’s assistant-professor-faculty-lounge Marxism — about immensely complicated subjects that cannot be boiled down to simple political equations. The prefeminist efforts to counsel unhappy wives in women’s magazines, she writes dismissively, “seem . . . geared more to cold-war values than to women’s needs.” The very term “cold-war values,” which is both ominous and meaningless, is unworthy of a book that offers so many genuinely witty criticisms of American self-obsession.
Moskowitz’s politicized critique of psychological thinking is no more convincing today than it was when Frantz Fanon made it in The Wretched of the Earth 40 years ago. But it does inadvertently point to one possible answer about the triumph of Freudian thinking in the United States. Despite Freud’s skepticism about human nature, he was the most egalitarian great thinker who ever lived. In the Freudian worldview, everyone from stevedore to senator is possessed of an inner life of stunning complexity and an imagination of unbounded power — even if the power is only exercised over the self. There are no wily Tolstoyan peasants here, possessed of a simpler and higher wisdom, or Shakespearean buffoons so dull-witted they can’t speak in poetry. Everyone is equal when it comes to the ability to make a total hash out of life.
When you think about it, it is the only theory of human behavior that is genuinely appropriate for a heterogeneous democracy. No common faith, no common deity, no common set of political principles is required. We all have fathers and mothers who failed us at one time or another. We’ve all had our hearts broken. We’ve all had trouble losing those last five pounds, not to mention the first five. We are all equal under Oprah.
