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From the 1920s onward, the battle over the unconscious was being fought and lost in the fields of academic laboratory psychology in the United States. In the opening decades of the 20th century, first, the specter of Pavlov and then Watson began to dominate the academic laboratories with theories of learning and their emphasis on classical conditioning. In the 19-teens and twenties, Thorndike’s theory of selecting and connecting and Toleman’s conceptions of latent learning had their adherents, while Kohler’s studies of insight learning, which had suddenly burst upon the scene with the publication of The Mentality of Apes (1925)1 never made any impact among the experimentalists. After Skinner’s Behavior of Organisms (1938),2 operant conditioning came into vogue, solidifying the pervasive infusion of behaviorism as the reigning ideology guiding how psychology as an entire field ought to be defined.3

Meanwhile, reductionistic operationism, epitomized by Boring’s misinterpretation of Bridgman,4 received significant reinforcement with the appearance of the psychophysicist S. S. Steven’s Handbook of Experimental Psychology (1951),5 which became the bible of laboratory research. Clark Hull at Yale captured the era with his formula for the hypotheticodeductive method, declaring it the central motif unifying scientific psychology. Moreover, that way of defining psychology now had its own historical foundations in the form of Boring’s bible, A History of Experimental Psychology.6 Sigmund Koch came to call it “The Age of Theory,” because its framers sought to dominate all other theories.

Meanwhile, valiant but in the end not very successful attempts were carried on to prove that psychoanalysis was a science. Robert Sears and Saul Rosenzweig labored to produce a body of experimental proofs on the subject. Dollard and Miller sought to fuse psychoanalysis with learning theory with their studies on frustration and aggression. The Rockefeller philanthropy threw large amounts of money at Franz Alexander in Chicago to carry on such investigations. The battle, in fact, rages to this day but under the names of different investigators. The language of psychoanalysis has become more accepted, but also defined more in terms of a non-Freudian “cognitive unconscious.”7

Depth psychology, meanwhile, was undergoing its own transformations. The farther it got away from the orthodox Freudians, the more deeply it penetrated as well as helped to shape the soft psychologies of personality, abnormal, social, and clinical psychology. In psychiatry, it came to control the clinical teaching of medical residents whose attention was directed to the ambulatory psychoneuroses, once the office practice of psychotherapy became economically viable, and the psychotherapists stayed away from the psychotics under asylum care. At the same time, however, there were numerous examples that attempted to treat schizophrenia bypsychogenic means in the mental hospitals.

By these means, depth psychology became radically disenfranchised from biological psychiatry, which controlled the laboratories. The biological psychiatrists fought back with the somatic therapies such as psychosurgery, shock therapy, and the soon to flourish industry of psychopharmacology. At the same time, the depth psychologies were being absorbed by a kind of osmosis into the other social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology. The effect there was to produce a socialized form of psychoanalysis, in which less emphasis was placed on the dynamics of the individual unconscious and more on ego adaptation, social forces that shaped the individual within society, and the application of dynamic theories to entire cultures.

Within the clinical domain, two competing models of the person then emerged. One focused on the definition of personality as a function of internal psychic forces, while the other came to define personality as a function of external social forces within the family, the clan, the state, one’s culture, and even the race. Social psychologists became radicalized, as exemplified by the founding of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1936, which attracted liberal psychologists as well as socialists into populist movements and social reform.8 Psychology suddenly became overtly politicized, as more socialist influences were brought to bear on its interpretation, particularly through radicals reading Freud and Marx in the counterculture and later through the Neo-Freudians, who became the real purveyors of psychoanalysis throughout modern popular culture. They were intermingled with the existentialist theologians, the Jungians, and the gestaltists, but particularly influenced by the fusion of dynamic theories of personality with new developments in anthropology in what was to be called the “Culture and Personality movement.” Depth psychology became associated with more phenomenological approaches emphasizing interior experience, while the concept of the unconscious was also being adapted to explanations already extant linking the individual to external social forces.9 The situation in New York was a case in point.

In the United States, once the so-called classical period of Freud, Jung, and Adler started to cool down in Europe by the end of the 1920s, the influence of their dynamic theories of personality were already heating up in places like Washington, Boston, and New York. According to historian Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Smith Ely Jelliffe from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Review with William Alanson White, was in high demand in Washington, while Beatrice Hinkle, Jung’s American translator, was most frequently consulted in New York.10 Meanwhile, the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute remained the bastion of Freudian orthodoxy. They date the founding of the original society from 1911 by A. A. Brill, making it the oldest psychoanalytic organization in the United States. Though he originally came to Freud through Jung, Brill had been meeting with physicians interested in psychoanalysis since 1908 and himself lectured widely on Freud’s ideas, especially to professional associations of New York physicians. He also launched a significant translation project that produced the first English language edition of the Interpretation of Dreams (1913).11

In addition to Brill, significant numbers of American physicians who had sought a direct analysis with Freud in Vienna after the World War I returned to New York, and were soon joined by others who had undergone analysis at the Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna Institutes. Bronislav Onuf, Clarence Oberndorf, Sándor Lorand, Fritz Wittels, Abram Kardiner were among them.12

The society launched a series of successful lectures in 1922 that led to the formation of their educational committee. The committee blossomed to establish the first psychoanalytic training institute in the United States in 1931. They were soon joined by fleeing psychoanalytic émigrés from Europe, which further expanded their numbers. Probably more than any other Institute subsequently founded in America, the New York group saw themselves as the most orthodox, and endeavoring to preserve the Master’s teachings against all deviation and corruption, as Freud himself was endeavoring to do in Vienna.

The major issue during the 1920s was over the question of lay analysis. Freud had championed the idea and supported numerous analysands, such as Oskar Pfister, a Swiss minister, as the various Institutes were being founded. But in the United States, psychoanalysis became the exclusive province of the physicians and hence remained a branch of psychiatry. This, plus the attempt to keep the teachings pure, created a narrow focus for orthodox psychoanalysis, which had the effect of fostering an alteration and expansion of Freudian ideas just beyond the psychoanalysts’ doorstep. These included, among others, The Karen Horney Institute, The William Alanson White Institute, The cultural anthropologists at Columbia, faculty at Union Theological Seminary and The New School for Social Research, Jungians who had founded the Analytical Psychology Club, theologians at the Union Theological Seminary, and individual personalities at such places as Brooklyn College, The City University of New York, and Sarah Lawrence.

The Expansion of Psychoanalysis

As the analytic émigrés began pouring into the United States by the mid-1930s, one informal but highly influential group responsible for the widespread reinterpretation and dissemination of psychoanalysis throughout American culture was already underway. This was the Zodiac Club, which hovered around the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan beginning in 1931. Through Sullivan and the Zodiac Club, psychoanalysis found its way into various avenues of the social sciences related to psychology and psychiatry, particularly sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. Beyond these boundaries several personalities constellating around Sullivan, including Erik Fromm and Karen Horney, applied their version of psychoanalytic ideas to contemporary problems such as gender issues, totalitarianism, the meaning of love and freedom, and the fate of modern civilization. Through their best-selling books, depth psychology in the Freudian mold found able interpreters who by their very deviations served to elevate psychoanalysis to the status of a cultural phenomenon in the West.

The Zodiac Club first convened in 1931, during Prohibition, when Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, William Silverberg, and later a few others began meeting in a New York speakeasy on Monday evenings for dinner, drinks, and discussion of psychiatry, mainly Freud’s ideas. The three had known each other from time they had spent in Baltimore, where Thompson had convened what they then called the Miracle Club, because patients seemed to miraculously get better after their case was discussed by the group.

According to one biographer, the newly reconvened New York circle was named the Zodiac Club on a whim by Sullivan.13 Each member was required to represent themselves through the symbol of some appropriate animal, the exact reason for which has not yet been told. Sullivan became a horse. Thompson became a puma. Silverberg became a gazelle. Later, others were to join this group, including Karen Horney, Erik Fromm, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Ralph Linton, and Edward Sapir. In all, the Zodiac Club became a convergence of intellectual influences from Chicago, New York, New Haven, and Washington, linking some of the keenest minds from those environments in the social and behavioral sciences. For the dozen or so years that it lasted, its members produced some remarkable cultural benchmarks. Not the least of these was a few national best sellers, including Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941).14

As for the group’s internal dynamics, while Sullivan’s stature and ideas dominated, he himself was also changed the more theoretical the discussions became. Thompson was his devoted follower, but she also introduced him to orthodox psychoanalysis and feminine psychology. In a certain sense, she was just as much at the center of the group as the more conspicuous Sullivan. Horney, another important woman in the group, appreciated Sullivan’s ideas, but her psychology was already well formed from her contact with Freud before she arrived. Fromm, on the other hand, continued to go through large changes from all quarters. But overall, everyone operated more or less as independent entities. Each one had their own positions and there seems to have been more interaction and cross-fertilization rather than competition. Ideas and insights were aired and discussed; then each person applied the result in their own domain. Occasionally, some mutual project would emerge. One of the big issues they discussed, for instance, was female sexuality, which led to collaboration between Thompson and Horney.

Just who were these people? And what was the trajectory of their lives that allowed them to intersect at just this moment in both the popular and the professional histories of psychoanalysis in America?

Sullivan

Harry Stack Sullivan, the man at the center of the Zodiac Club, has been variously characterized as a withdrawn and cantankerous drunk, a pretentious high stepper, opportunistic, power-driven, irresponsible about money, who, nevertheless, could also rise to great heights as a sophisticated compassionate human being.15 He was born in 1892 in rural Chenango County, New York, part of the great “Burned Over District,” of Joseph Smith and Ellen White. Sullivan grew up on a farm, the only child of a poor Irish Catholic family. He attended Columbia University for two semesters until he fell in with a gang of near-do-wells and got into trouble with the police, after which, he disappeared for 2 years. His biographer suggests that during this period he may have had the first of several schizophrenic-like episodes and was hospitalized for a time.16

In 1911, he entered the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery, then an unaccredited facility, which was the medical branch of Valparaiso University in Indiana. He completed his class work in 1915, but was not awarded the MD until 1917. Between 1916 and 1921, he worked in the area of industrial surgery and then enlisted briefly in the army as a military surgeon. After the war he continued to find employment as an assistant district medical officer in Chicago assisting in the rehabilitation of soldiers and sailors. He seems to have gone through another schizophrenic-like episode during this period as well.

In 1921 Sullivan passed the Civil Service examination and was assigned as a neuropsychiatrist to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC as a liaison officer for the Veterans Bureau. There he came under the influence of William Alanson White, who was to have an important effect on his subsequent career. At St. Elizabeth’s he also began working with schizophrenic patients.

This arrangement lasted until 1922, when Sullivan went to the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Maryland as an Assistant Psychiatrist, where he remained for 8 years. During this period, he became a renowned clinician and a pioneer in integrating psychiatry with the social sciences. He adapted psychoanalysis to the treatment of the psychoses; he began research into the nature of schizophrenic thought processes; and he became preoccupied with the important period of pre-adolescence. When he was given his own ward, he began successfully experimenting with the social relationships of schizophrenics.

In this milieu, the therapeutic interventions he designed and the innovations he instituted drew national attention. He also developed a strong stand against chemical restraints, lobotomy, and electroconvulsive shock therapy, believing that they interfered with patient’s interpersonal learning, which he believed was the very source of their recovery. Schizophrenics were not lost souls, but more like normals than psychiatry suspected. All of us, Sullivan believed, had access to the schizophrenic process, particularly in the adolescent years, and in these experiences he found the link between the healthy and the insane personality.

It was also during this period that he first met Clara Thompson, life-long friend, professional colleague, disciple, and his training analyst, who introduced him to the work of Adolf Meyer and the psychobiosocial approach in psychiatry. Their relationship, intimate in every way but sexual, was probably the closest Sullivan had with any woman. They never married and he remained a bachelor his entire life.

In 1930, he moved to New York, where he opened a private practice and became involved in psychoanalytic politics. His fortunes declined somewhat as a result of the depression and he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1932. Nevertheless, his professional activities on behalf of psychiatry continued. During this period he began attending seminars at Yale by Edward Sapir in personality and culture. Here Sullivan found that his writings were being used as collateral readings. He established ongoing contact with Harold Lasswell, the sociologist at the University of Chicago who collaborated with Sapir. Meanwhile, he continued to work with William Alanson White on the national scene promoting psychiatric education and research.

By the time the Zodiac Club got underway in New York, Sullivan’s career was also gaining momentum. As a way to organize his professional activities, he launched the William Alanson White Foundation, incorporated in 1933. Under this rubric, he founded the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1936, which began as a way to bring psychiatry more into general medicine. It soon became an interdisciplinary school for training in a wide range of specialties. Then in 1938, Sullivan launched Psychiatry, an interdisciplinary journal. At the same time, in conjunction with William Alanson White, Sullivan became deeply involved in the politics of the American Psychiatric Association.

One of the only two books that Sullivan published in his lifetime also appeared during the period of the Zodiac Club, his Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry (1947).17 These were the first William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, given by Sullivan before a public audience in October and November of 1939. They were printed in Psychiatry during 1940 and eventually reprinted in book form by the William Alanson White Foundation in 1947. Here Sullivan summarized his theories of adolescent and adult schizophrenia, outlined his methods for social re-education, and acknowledged his debt to his many intellectual mentors. Freud, whom he had never actually met, he said was one of them.

The big influences on his intellectual life, according to Sullivan, himself, were psychoanalysis, which he got through his own reading and through Clara Thompson’s work with Sandor Ferenczi, and the psychobiosocial approach of Adolf Meyer, also a big influence on Thompson. There were also the writings of the Chicago sociologists, such as George Herbert Mead, cultural anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict, and the writings of the physicist, P. W. Bridgman, a man who had been significantly influenced by Jamesean pragmatism while an undergraduate at Harvard. Sullivan also showed that he was deeply immersed in the Chicago brand of American pragmatism, which was another of his connections to the earlier visionary tradition of Emerson and James.

Sullivan’s conception of personality was like James’s, in that he believed we had as many personalities as we had interpersonal relations. Since personality could only be known in interaction with others, Sullivan questioned whether or not the idea of a person was even really justified. What we are is not fixed, but malleable, on-going, and in a constant state of change.

In 1939, Sullivan left New York and moved to Baltimore, where he remained for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1940, he participated in the formation of national screening plans for the Selective Service, and in 1942 began teaching at the Chestnut Lodge, a hospital for psychotic patients.

He became seriously ill in 1945, but recovered enough to embark upon a new direction of inquiry, the contribution of the social sciences to world peace. As a final gesture, in collaboration with Gordon Allport and others, Sullivan helped produce the pioneering volume, Tensions That Cause Wars. He died in Paris, in 1949, just before the book was published.18

Karen Horney

Karen Danielson Horney, one of the few non-Jewish émigrés who fled to the United States from the Third Reich in the early 1930s, played a major role in Americanizing psychoanalysis. While the orthodox analysts prefer to see her as primarily a social theorist, her main contribution to American folk culture came through her differences with Freud over the nature of feminine psychology.19

Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1885, of Dutch and Norwegian parents, she married Oscar Horney, an attorney, in 1909 and produced three children before she was divorced. She received the MD at the University of Berlin in 1913, after which she became interested in psychoanalysis. She was analyzed by Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs, opened a private practice, and around 1919, joined the faculty at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Eventually, she would also ascend to membership and educational responsibilities in the International Psychoanalytical Association.

With regard to her primary professional accomplishments, however, during the next 13 years she produced a series of papers on the psychology of women which demonstrated that she was far in advance of her time in declaring the independent status of women’s psychosexual development. Her ideas also showed that she differed significantly from Freud on concepts disciples such as Helena Deutsch and Karl Abraham thought so basic that Horney was eventually shunned from the society.20

Freud had very little to say about the psychology of women, except to solidify the images of dependence, motherhood, and male sex object, by maintaining that the feminine personality develops from penis envy. All young girls suffer neurotically from not having the visible male organ of power, according to Freud. Elaborating on Freud’s thesis, Abraham further explained that the girl invents the theory of castration to explain why she has no male organ. Her childhood explanation is that she once had one, but it was cut off; the vagina is the remaining wound. Eventually resolving herself to the fact that she will never receive a penis, the young girl is able to substitute the wish for a penis with the desire to have a child by the father. The child develops an intense rivalry with the mother for the affections of the father, but these feelings go underground during the latency period. Eventually, these affections emerge again in adolescence as the search for an appropriate male object, in all likelihood one that reminds her of her father.

Helena Deutsch, being one of the key women in Freud’s inner circle who defended this orthodox view, took Abraham’s discussion one step further. She maintained that the woman must be masochistically subjected by the penis in order to discover her own vagina and that while sexual orgasm occurs for the male at copulation, it occurs for the female only at the moment she gives birth.21

Horney, always referring to her extensive clinical experience, tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with the reality of the feminine. Females, she maintained (still in Freudian terms), have their own independent experience of sexuality surrounding their genital organs. But these experiences empower rather than debilitate them. She also believed that Freud’s formulation was offensive to women as well as contrary to biological science. Moreover, Freud seemed to be viewing the psychosexual development of males and females from the masculine point of view. Freud believed so much in the primacy of the phallus that the experience of the male sets the standard for what the female will do as the appropriate follower. Thus he had said, “We deal only with one libido, which behaves in a male way.”22

Horney, on the other hand, following the philosopher and sociologist, Georg Simmel, and the psychoanalyst, Georg Groddeck, made a case for the explanation that we live in an atmosphere that is so thoroughly masculine that the radically different culture of the feminine is misinterpreted and ignored. “It seems to me,” Horney concluded, “impossible to judge to how great a degree the unconscious motives for the flight from womanhood are reinforced by the actual social subordination of women.”23 Since much of psychoanalysis was based on clinical observations of the neurotic personality, the psychology that Horney went on to develop called, as well, for a more intensive study of healthy women.

By 1932, Horney’s position among the orthodox had naturally become quite strained. Freud was also to have characterized her as “able,” but “mean,” a comment that was no doubt a virtual kiss of death for any further chances of advancement within the psychoanalytic community in Europe. As well, the political situation in Germany was becoming increasingly unstable, and while a non-Jew, and not in danger on that account, her biographer notes that to Horney it was obvious that the world around her, which she loved so dearly, was rapidly disintegrating. Just at that same time, as if a breeze from above, when Franz Alexander called from the United States to invite her to become associate director of the newly founded Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, she accepted.

Horney, accompanied by her daughters, went to Chicago, where she spent 2 years at the Chicago Institute, working under Alexander, her former student from Berlin. She planned the analytic training program, taught courses to staff and candidates, for 5 hours each day carried on a patient practice, and managed to pass the state medical license exam with distinction. She also renewed her acquaintance with Erich Fromm, who came as a visiting lecturer in 1933. Horney, with Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, had studied psychoanalysis together in Berlin. Now, according to her biographer, Horney became both intellectually and romantically involved with Fromm during his Chicago stay.24 Horney also became the gracious hostess. She entertained Karl and William Menninger when they came through from Topeka. She also met Harry Stack Sullivan during this time, a man whom she would interact with again in New York.

Psychoanalysis in the United States during the early 1930s was an internecine war. The New York and Washington-Baltimore Societies were each vying forcontrol of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which had recently declared its independence from the International Psychoanalytical Association over supervision and accreditation of candidates. The battle lines were drawn between the orthodox and the heterodox with regard to interpretation of Freud’s ideas and between the European-trained analysts and their American-trained counterparts. The prize was, of course, who would become the Freud of the New World. In the midst of this commotion, for a variety of reasons, Horney moved to New York in 1934.

There she was also an outcast because of her non-conformist attitudes toward Freudian thought. The New York Society, meanwhile, was the oldest psychoanalytic group in the United States, and, as many of its older members had been with Freud in Vienna, the New York group saw itself as the last bastion against all infidels. Nevertheless, Horney was accepted for membership. Her accreditation was recognized and she began to supervise candidates.

Her real reference group seems to have been elsewhere, however. Erich Fromm moved to New York the same year she did and, taking up together again, they became close companions. Through him she met the Christian theologian, Paul Tillich and his wife Hannah, and leftist thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. She also began a long and enduring relationship with the New School for Social Research, a veritable university in exile for European scholars fleeing Germany.

This was the era of the Zodiac Club and the years of Horney’s greatest flowering. Her psychology became more informed by sociological and anthropological factors. In her lecturing she became charismatic, speaking to the inner life of her listeners as much as transmitting and analyzing information.

Her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, became a best seller. It went through 13 printings in 10 years and her paperback editions sold over a half million copies. Although based on lectures to a lay audience through the New School, she had written it, she said, for “psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychosociologists, [and] social workers.”25 She presented a new definition of neurosis based, not on repressed infantile sexuality, but on the driving need for love and appreciation. Lack of love, she said, led to behavior that was impelled by anxiety and expressed in the manner of an “indiscriminate hunger.” Further, she believed that because emotional isolation was particularly widespread in modern America we suffer from a collective neurosis. The antidote was to develop warm and loving relationships, without overemphasizing the sexual component as the orthodox Freudians had done.

Her old student from Berlin and Chicago, Franz Alexander, gave the book grudging acceptance. John Dollard, the Yale sociologist, praised Horney for her “stubborn thinking through and literal realistic expression” of her patients’ character. Margaret Mead thought the emphasis on cultural determinants a “creative hypothesis.” In this new direction, Horney believed that the form of the neurosis was not universal across cultures but depends on its social circumstances. Even more horrifying to the orthodox analysts, she said that the Oedipus complex was not universal, but generated through cultural expectations and, moreover, a form of neurotic behavior in itself.

Such pronouncements caused much indignation in what remained of Freud’s circle. In London, Ernest Jones proclaimed that, by deemphasizing sexuality, Horney had uttered a “dangerous half-truth.” At the same time, American analysts castigated her for presenting Freud’s work in too offhand a way. Their inevitable conclusion was that she was merely expressing repressed anger at her own father, confusing Freud for him.

But then, as if the theoretical deviations she had made from orthodox psychoanalysis in the past were not enough, Horney’s work went through further refinements during the 1940s. She became convinced through her studies of social anthropology that the entire theory of psychoanalysis was not universal and value free but actually a culture-bound enterprise. She also called into question the necessity of deep interpretation. It was not always necessary, she thought, to enter into a protracted analysis of the patient’s past if the present was not clearly understood. She thus came to believe that there is not an inviolable connection between events of early childhood and present symptoms. There only was a connection when current problems in fact led back to some precipitating cause.

More books from her pen on such subjects brought her additional popular acclaim and professional censure. Among the most popular were Self-analysis and New Ways in Psychoanalysis.26 Finally, the political situation at the New York Institute became so tense over her further deviations that members such as Lawrence Kubie and Gregory Zilboorg, who controlled the education committee, conspired to revoke her status as a supervisor. When she was finally demoted to lecturer, she walked out, taking Clara Thompson and a band of students with her. As a result, the Karen Horney Institute for Psychoanalysis was founded, which continues to train analysts in the main themes of her life work: the psychology of women, social factors in the origin of the neurosis, and an experiential approach to clinical practice that is not rigidly confined by preconceived theories.

Then in 1951, Horney embarked upon the final excursion of her life, a 2-month, all expense paid trip to Japan, which had been underwritten by a grateful patient. She was accompanied by friends and family and led by 80-year-old D. T. Suzuki and his assistant Richard DeMartino. Horney lectured at the beginning of her stay, but the bulk of her time was spent traveling to Japan’s religious shrines, marveling at the gardens, practicing some meditation, and being exposed to Zen philosophy. It was a profoundly important experience for her personally and she endeavored while there and on her return to compare the psychologies of East and West.

The trip was important for three reasons. First, when upon initial application a visa was denied to her, she discovered for the first time that instead of a mild mannered and very apolitical psychologist, the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been tracking her as a communist sympathizer. Subsequently, when her dossier was released by the Freedom of Information Act, her biographer discovered that Horney was suspected of left wing sympathies because she had been actively helping refugees come into the United States during the 1930s, and she had been associated with the New School for Social Research, thought to be a subversive organization by paranoid zealots in the government. In addition, the post-mistress at her Maine retreat had kept the FBI constantly informed about supposed enemy agents with foreign accents coming and going to her home, as well as alleged Morse code communications sent and received to overhead planes.Horney was originally denied entrance to postwar Japan on the grounds that she would spread the word of communism there. Eventually, however, she was permitted entry because of contacts she had in the Immigration Office.

Second, her connections to Suzuki and her interest in non-Western forms of depth psychology make her a significant transition figure from the psychoanalytic underground to the American counterculture movement.

Third, the trip had religious implications of great peace and joy for her that went far beyond her professional work. It was a final moment to savor. Although she did not yet know it, she was harboring cancer in its advanced stages. Several episodes during that previous year should have been taken as warning signs, but she ignored them at the time. She died in 1952, just 4 months after her return from Asia.

Erich Fromm

The man who was the most successful in getting the message of the new psychology across to the Western world was Erich Fromm, Hassidic mystic, Marxist, psychoanalyst, psychologist of religion, and interpreter of our contemporary angst. A recent analysis of Fromm divides his career into three parts: the period from 1929 to 1935, which was his Freudo-Marxist phase; 1936 to 1960, which marked his increasing preoccupation with religious and theological topics; and the final phase, 1960 to 1980, where he returned to Freud against the ever increasing tide of the human potential movement.27 In this, with regard to psychoanalysis, he has been characterized as the loyal opposition, although the orthodox analysts would never have conceded even that.

Fromm was born March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, the only child of a broken marriage. The father, a small wine merchant of modest means, was descended from a long line of rabbis and was very active in the Jewish community. He hoped his son would likewise become a rabbi, a fact which may have driven the young Erich toward an early interest in spirituality and away from aspirations of material gain.

As a child, Fromm received intense indoctrination into Talmudic studies. His most influential mentor was R. Nehemiah Nobel, a mystic, Goethe enthusiast, and neo-Kantian. According to one interpreter, Nobel-mixed conventional Talmudic instruction with mysticism, philosophy, socialism, and psychoanalysis, a curious combination of radicalism and orthodoxy, which Fromm seems to have adopted throughout the course of his own career. Through Nobel, Fromm became an ardent Zionist.

His most recent biographer recounts that, during this period, the two most traumatic experiences of Fromm’s early life were the suicide of a young relative whom he admired, and the carnage of World War I. In the first instance, Fromm became preoccupied with questions of love and death; in the second, he developed a deep mistrust for authoritarian forms of control and for social institutions that fostered aggression and conflict. These were themes he would develop for the rest of his life.

From Frankfurt, Fromm went on to study sociology in Heidelberg. Here, he became acquainted with Chabad Hassidism through the socialist and mystic, R. Salman Baruch Rabinkow. Rabinkow’s teachings spoke to the common people in terms of devotion and faith. He taught the inner Kabalistic symbolism of everyday activities, thus elevating simple acts to the level of religious observance. Meanwhile, Fromm continued with his academic studies and graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a doctorate in sociology.

He returned to Frankfurt in 1920 to edit a small Jewish newspaper, where he also became involved in establishing several secular Jewish study groups. Through these organizations he came into contact with such distinguished thinkers as Martin Buber and Gerschom Scholem. At the same time, he met Frieda Reichmann, a Jewish psychoanalyst, 10 years his senior and soon to be his wife, with whom he entered therapy. He went on to undergo supervisory training in Munich with Wilhelm Wittenberg and in Frankfurt with Karl Landauer. He followed these episodes with further psychoanalytic training under Hans Sachs and Theodore Reik in Berlin. Here, he also met Karen Horney, the woman with whom he would later become amorously involved in America.

Fromm married Frieda Reichmann in 1926. In 1927, with his new wife, Fromm returned to Southern Germany to begin clinical practice and to co-find the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. At this point in his life, he repudiated Zionism, gave up his religious observances, and declared himself a Trotskyite. Dividing his time between Frankfurt and Berlin, he became associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where he steeped himself in Marxist social science. While he co-authored a landmark study of authoritarianism among German workers by combining standard polling methods with projective techniques, his major theoretical contribution at this time was the application of psychoanalysis to an understanding of matriarchal societies. Toward the end of this period, he also separated from his wife after4 years of marriage.

In 1933 Fromm immigrated to the United States. He had been invited by Karen Horney to help launch the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, but differences between Horney and Alexander caused him to leave for New York after a year, where he opened a private practice and rejoined the faculty at the Frankfurt Institute, which had then recently re-located to Columbia University. This relationship lasted until 1938, when he had a falling out with leaders such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno. Fromm was in his thirties during this period, a lay analyst, avowed socialist, and a Jewish émigré who considered himself a psychoanalyst, but who opposed Freud’s sexual theories and Freud’s excessive patriarchal orientation. It was an odd combination that made him an outsider, especially in psychoanalytic circles. But it was the right combination for reaching the American public at the time.

He was undoubtedly helped along in no small measure by his association with members of the Zodiac Club because of the broadening influence that their discussions would have on his thinking. They were also a conduit, through which he would come to understand the pragmatic, eclectic, and pluralistic character of American popular consciousness.

His first literary success was Escape from Freedom,28 which came out in 1941 and subsequently went into 26 printings by 1965. He characterized this book as an attempt to show that totalitarian movements appealed to our deep-seated cravings to escape from the freedom we had originally won by overthrowing the feudal system of medieval times. Totalitarianism appealed because we were still not yet free enough to build a meaningful life based on reason and love. Hence in this incomplete state, we sought new security in submission to a leader, a race, or a state. Through this submission, we become automatons and enter willingly into acts of destructiveness. His great revelation was that the same seeds that led to the development of the Third Reich existed in the Free World, because the monopolistic character of industrialization always left the individual feeling insignificant and powerless. One solution, he believed, was to work for the collective mental health of our social relationships.

In an unprecedented editorial decision, Harry Stack Sullivan arranged in a special issue of Psychiatry for eight different reviews of Fromm’s book. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the journal, contributing were psychiatrists such as Thomas Gil and Ernest Hadley, anthropologists Ashley Montague and Ruth Benedict, the theologian Anton Boisen, the Baltimore analyst, Lewis Hill, and others. The orthodox analysts were, of course, annoyed with the work. Otto Fenichel, for instance, damned it with feint praise by saying that everything good in it was not new and everything new was not good. Nevertheless, coming on the eve of World War II, Fromm’s interpretation helped to answer why Nazism arose. It was a question being asked worldwide and Fromm gave one of the first authoritative answers. The normal, socially adjusted person fears the burden of individual freedom and to alleviate the alienation gravitates instead toward submission to an organized authority.

In subsequent books, almost equally popular, Fromm continued to analyze the problem of alienation in modern society. His innovation was to rely extensively on the basic principles of depth psychology, but to substitute Freud’s scheme of libido development for one related to the evolution of character in interpersonal terms. This new orientation he chose to call in 1955, “humanistic psychoanalysis,” by which he meant that:

The basic passions of man are not rooted in his instinctive needs, but in the specific conditions of human existence, in the need to find a new relatedness to man and nature after having lost the primary relatedness of the pre-human stage.29

Following Horney, Fromm’s prescription for pervasive illness of our culture was love, the only satisfactory answer to modern existence. His Art of Loving (1956)30 became another international best seller. The slim 112 page book went into 34 printings and was eventually translated into 17 languages, with over 1,500,000 copies sold in English alone. Practically no American female teenager alive between 1956 and 1970 was without a copy of this book. It was virtually emblematic of an era.

In it, Fromm examined love as art and theory, concluding that we experience different forms depending on the object. There is brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love, and love of God. This last was most revealing, because he cast his discussion into strictly secular terms, but spoke of spiritual love only in a theistic sense. God for him was generic, but his underlying assumptions after all rested with a neutered and secularized conception of God still embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It was prime example of the American shadow culture, because it was not orthodox Christianity, Judaism, psychoanalysis, or science, but actually a blend of all these stripped of their linguistic trappings. It was highly relevant for a modern American audience, but it was certainly irrelevant for an orthodox Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist or other non-Western, non-theistic religious person. Nevertheless, it did address the spread of industrialism and its effects on the emotional life of the individual, since this was essentially a Western movement.

It was a book of many paradoxes. While Fromm espoused reason as the final standard, he maintained that love and a psychology of the unconscious was the key to fixing the problem. He also mixed his metaphors when referring to Asian ideas, juxtaposing East and West in the same sentence. Consequently, although he referred to Zen in his prescription for how to love when he enjoined the development of concentration, patience, and supreme concern for the object loved, his source was a Western interpreter of Zen, hence a text not from the orthodox Zen canon but from the literature of American folk psychology.

He took up the religious theme again in works such as The Revolution of Hope (1968),31 not as popular as the rest of his works, but a clear statement again that we are trapped in meaningless work and compulsive consumption. The only answer is to reinstate the person and not materialism at the center of cultural existence. Under the steps to humanize a technological society, he called for psychospiritual renewal. He said, “Man’s development requires his capacity to transcend the narrow prison of his ego, his selfishness, his separation from his fellow man, and, hence, his basic loneliness. This transcendence is the condition for being open and related to the world….”32 Mixing up the traditions again into the same soup, in a footnote he suggested that this is a common goal not only of Judeo-Christian religion as well as Buddhism but also of Marxist ideology.

Here, in such a work, we have completed the cycle, having transformed psychoanalysis from an orthodox Freudian system into a prescription for living that again injects the iconography of the transcendent back into the discussion. Nevertheless, when the counterculture movement came in the 1960s, Fromm became one of its harshest critics, returning to a singular defense of Freud’s ideas. In 1959, he published Sigmund Freud and his Mission, in which he paradoxically reaffirmed Freud’s view that:

Belief in God is a fixation to the longing for an all protecting father figure, an expression of a wish to be helped and saved, when in reality man can, if not save himself, at least help himself, only by waking up from childish illusions and by using his own strength, his reason and skills.33

Reason and transcendence seem to clash in his thought, yet their juxtaposition was precisely the key to his success.

In addition to the fame afforded by his writings, Fromm continued to have both a professional career as a psychotherapist and a personal life. He had remarried in 1944, and in 1946 he became director of clinical training at the William Alanson White Institute until 1950, when he moved to Mexico. There he soon founded the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis. He traveled extensively in the Soviet Union during the 1960s preaching a popular form of Marxist Humanism. After his second wife died, he remarried again and moved to Switzerland in 1974. There, he died in 1980, by then somewhat forgotten by the American public.

Clara Thompson

Clara Mabel Thompson, American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1893 from a long line of Calvinist seafaring men and dutiful New England housewives.34 Her father was a self-made man who rose from the trade of tailor to become president of his own wholesale drug company. Her mother was a quiet but forceful housewife who created a loving family environment that made Clara’s early life carefree and untroubled.

Thompson was graduated from Brown University in 1916 with honors and entered Johns Hopkins Medical School. She spent one summer at the St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, where she came under the influence of William Alanson White, which probably inclined her toward psychiatry as her medical specialty. After completing her clinical requirements she took a 3-year residency at the Phipps Clinic under Adolf Meyer, but she terminated this arrangement in 1925 when she entered psychoanalysis against Meyer’s better judgment.

From Hopkins, Thompson went into private practice with the support of Harry Stack Sullivan, who had by then moved to Baltimore and was working at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. According to her biographer, Thompson and Sullivan had met in 1923. Thompson later described her relationship to Sullivan as the most important in her life. They continued to work closely together until Sullivan’s death in 1949. It was Sullivan who had encouraged Clara Thompson to go to Budapest and be analyzed by Sandor Ferenczi, which she began in 1928 and continued until 1933. Thompson was to return and teach Sullivan what she had learned. But Ferenczi had deviated from Freud so markedly by then that he was quite outside the psychoanalytic circle. He believed that patients had to be loved and accepted by the therapist if they were to get well, while Freud enjoined against any emotional involvement with the patient whatsoever. As a result, Thompson’s training later played against her in the eyes of the orthodox analysts when she went to New York City in 1933, where Sullivan had already moved. Here, she became an intimate in the Zodiac Club, fusing herself in many respects to Sullivan’s own career.

Club interchange was marred in 1943, however, by a major schism. Horney walked out of the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1941 after being demoted for her errant views, and with Clara Thompson and others set up the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Two years later Horney drummed Fromm out of the organization for being a non-MD, as she, herself, had been shunned by the New York Psychoanalytic Society. The suspicion was, however, that Horney’s personal relationship with Fromm had come to an end and the non-MD issue was the pretext for severing the ties that remained. Thompson and Sullivan resigned in protest and Thompson set up her own training institute with Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and his ex-wife Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Thompson made it the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry. This organization later became the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, which she headed from 1946 until her death in December, 1958.

In 1950, Thompson produced a masterful rendering of Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development,35 a review of theory and therapy from Freud’s early formulations up to the work of Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan. She noted particularly the manner in which psychoanalysis had become more social and interpersonal in the hands of the American interpreters. She reserved the finale of the book for an examination of Sullivan’s work and gave extensive comparisons between his theories and others in their little group. The work showed that psychoanalysis may have begun with Freud, but its finest reformulations had then recently emerged in the United States, especially around the work of Sullivan.

Her book was followed a year later by a symposium on Harry Stack Sullivan and his wide-ranging influence, held at the William Alanson White Institute. There, Thompson compared Sullivan to Freud and concluded that, while their approach to therapy was quite similar, their vision of personality was quite different. Sullivan believed that psychoanalysis was indeed appropriate with schizophrenics and that the bond that is established between therapist and patient, while interpersonal, is non-sexual. Freud believed that schizophrenics had decompensated so much that no direct patient–therapist relationship, and hence no free association, was possible. Sullivan maintained, however, that the patient’s bizarre symptoms were a non-verbal way in which the schizophrenic was trying to communicate, and these could be read like any other symbol system. Not what was hidden inside the person, he said, but what went on between people was the arena where psychopathology developed. Thus, for Sullivan, the social milieu of the hospital ward became sine qua non, the testing ground for the reconstruction of health.

In the same symposium, Gardner Murphy and others compared Sullivan’s work to the field theory of Kurt Lewin and the group work of J. L. Moreno, inventor of psychodrama. They outlined his extensive influence in social psychology, counting him as one of the seven greatest personalities to have shaped the field, and they showed his considerable influence on sociology in both theory and method. Indeed, Sullivan was responsible for hundreds of introductions between researchers in different disciplines and for providing a format through which psychoanalysis had become more extensively diffused throughout the social sciences.

Thus, the Zodiac Club played a major role in the history of psychoanalysis. One of the ways in which its members collectively did this was to shift the emphasis from sexuality to character development and from the patient’s past to the problems of the present. Such deviations from analytic doctrine were precisely the reasons why psychoanalysis was able to permeate further into popular American culture, as the lives of the more influential members show. Beyond their era, others were to follow who performed the same task but in ways that stretched psychoanalysis beyond its very limits.

Rollo May

Also a member of the Sullivanian group and one who pushed such limits was Rollo May (1909–1994), former minister turned philosopher, existential psychotherapist, and co-founder of the humanistic movement in psychology. The first son and second child of a family with six children, May was born, April 21, 1909, in Ada, Ohio and raised in Michigan. He graduated in 1930 with a BA from Oberlin College, and from 1930 to 1933 taught at the American University in Salonika, Greece and also studied briefly with Alfred Adler. He received the Bachelors of Divinity degree in 1938 from Union Theological Seminary, where he had come under the influence of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1938 he married Florence DeFrees and was ordained as a Congregational minister. But in the early 1940s, during a near-death struggle with tuberculosis, he lost his Christian faith and afterward resigned from the ministry. In 1949 he received the PhD summa cum laude from Teachers College, Columbia University, later receiving honorary doctorates from 10 or more institutions.

Turning to existentialism, under the profound influence of Paul Tillich, he absorbed the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, calling for recognition of both the creative and the demonic in our potential.36 Emphasizing the optimistic, eclectic, and pragmatic nature of a uniquely American perspective in the tradition of William James, May soon became a major force in the flowering of existential and phenomenological psychotherapies within the burgeoning movement of humanistic psychology. As Carl Rogers proposed the client-centered approach in therapy and Abraham Maslow emphasized the self-actualizing aspect of personality, May defined the psychotherapeutic hour as a living laboratory—the existential crucible—of personality change.

While he had already published The Springs of Creative Living (1940) and The Art of Counseling (1939), in 1950 he produced his much acclaimed, The Meaning of Anxiety (1950, revised 1977), which was the first book to examine the stress on the organism at the dawn of the Atomic Age. He followed with Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967, revised 1978), Dreams and Symbols (with Leopold Caliger, 1968), Love and Will (1969), Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (1972), The Courage to Create (1975), Freedom and Destiny (1981), The Discovery of Being (1983), Politics and Innocence (1986), The Cry for Myth (1992), and with Kirk Schneider, The Psychology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective (1995).37

His most historic work, however, he published in 1958 with Henri Ellenberger and Ernest Angel, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology,38 which later led to his being called the father of American existential psychology. Throughout most of his career he was associated with the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis in New York City. There, he served as professor of psychiatry and as a supervisory and training analyst.

Variously, May was also lecturer in psychotherapy at the New School for Social Research (New York City, 1955–1976) and visiting professor at Harvard (1964), Princeton (1967), Yale (1972), Brooklyn College (1974–1975), Dean’s Scholar at New York University (1971), and Regent’s Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz (1973). After moving to California in 1975, he resumed his private practice and served in various ancillary capacities at the Saybrook Institute and the California School of Professional Psychology.

Like so many others, May fielded his own theory of personality. In one sense, his stages of personality were really dimensions of consciousness.

There is first of all, the condition of Innocence. This is the stage where the infant has no developed ego and has yet to go through the process of socialization. It is pre-egoic, pre-self-conscious, and premoral. The main drive is to fulfill one’s basic needs. Then there is the stage of rebellion. This is the adolescent stage of developing one’s ego through an exaggerated self-consciousness that defines the individual as different from the adults. It is the yearning for freedom, but without the acceptance of responsibility. Then there is the ordinary state of the normal adult ego. One aspires toward adjustment to the norms of society. Freedom is possible but too demanding, so one reverts back to social conformity and submission to the rules of authority. Finally, May recognizes the creative state. It is one of existential authenticity, beyond even self-actualization. While it is the acceptance of one’s destiny, it is also the courage to be in the face of non-being.

May also proposed a theory of motivation based upon “the diamonic.” In his book, Love and Will, he described the diamonic as:

Any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex, eros, anger, rage, the craving for power are examples. The diamonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both…. When this power goes awry and one element usurps control over the total personality we have ‘diamonic possession,’ the traditional name through history for psychosis.39

Eros—love, is a diamon, as is the will. Love in its creative aspect is seen as all good, but its destructive side produces infatuation, blind attachment, and a pathological sense of entitlement. Similarly, the will allows us to reach out and overcome inertia, to affect novel responses, and to assert ourselves against all odds. Its destructive side produces the will to power, overbearing control over others, the insistence of one’s own way despite the weight of circumstances, and megalomaniacal behavior.

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

Also a member of the Sullivanian group was Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Born in 1890 in Königsberg, East Prussia, the eldest of five sisters, in the absence of any brothers, she was encouraged by her parents to attend medical school. She graduated from the University of Königsberg in 1914 with a specialization in psychiatry. During World War I she worked at the Institute of Kurt Goldstein, treating soldiers with injuries of the brain. Afterward, through Freud’s works, she was led to analytic training at Heidelberg. There in 1926 she met Erich Fromm, whom she married. Together, they founded the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of Southwestern Germany and opened an asylum for patient care. She separated from Fromm in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and made her way to the United States from France through Palestine, arriving in 1935. She became a part of Harry Stack Sullivan’s circle and joined the staff at Chestnut Lodge in Maryland. There she developed a technique of modified psychoanalytic therapy of schizophrenia, which she called “psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.” Rejecting Freud’s sexual theories, she opted instead for a more motherly approach to the therapeutic relationship, working long term with schizophrenics, a population Freud thought immune to the effects of dynamic psychotherapy. Her most important work was Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy (1950). A former patient wrote of her treatment under Fromm-Reichmann in a fictionalized account, widely read as I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. 40

Erik Erikson

Foremost among the American variants of psychoanalysis has been the work of Erik Erikson. Direct disciple of the Freud circle, he was analyzed by Anna Freud before he came to the United States and, after he arrived and left Harvard for Yale, became connected to Sullivan’s circle. On his own he went on to establish an entire new field of endeavor subsequently referred to as psychohistory.

Erikson was born, June 15, 1902 near Frankfurt, Germany. His parents were Danish, having themselves been brought up in Copenhagen.41 Little information exists on the father. The mother, widely read in Danish literature, was attracted to Kierkegaard and also read American writers such as Emerson. She was divorced before her son was born and when he was 3 years she moved from Denmark to Germany. In Karlsrhue, she met and fell in love with a Jewish physician. They married and afterward the boy was given the stepfather’s name, Homberger, which he later changed to Erikson.

Erikson thus grew up in somewhat fortunate circumstances for the times. He attended primary school until he was 10 and then the Gymnasium, where he studied scientific and technical subjects and also the standard round of Greek, Latin, and German literature. He graduated when he was 18 and instead of going off to the university wandered around Europe for a year. When he returned to Karlsrhue he enrolled in the Badische Landekunstschuke, an art school where he remained a year before attending the more famous Kunstakademie in Munich. While he drew and etched, his primary medium was wood, enormous pieces which, along with other artists, he was able to show in Munich’s fashionable Glaspalast.

Two years later, Erikson moved to Florence, still a wandering artist trying to find which road to take in the world. He had two important American friends in Italy, one, Peter Blos, a child psychoanalyst and writer, and the other, Oscar Stonorov, a Philadelphia architect turned sculptor. Later, after Erikson had returned to Karlsrhue and was preparing to teach art, Blos contacted him about a job teaching in a special school based on psychoanalytic principles.

Blos had been studying biology in Vienna and while there had met Dorothy Burlingame, a wealthy American woman with four children who was an analytic patient and close friends with Anna Freud. Burlingame had retained Blos to tutor her children in the sciences and drill them in German and during that time he, too, had come to know the Freud family. After 2 years had passed, although quite successful with the children, Blos began to have thoughts about leaving. BothMrs. Burlingame and Anna Freud conspired, however, to keep him on by offering him the opportunity to establish a school of his own. He agreed, under the condition that he have an assistant. The man he had in mind was a brilliant young artist friend of his named Erik Erikson.

The women agreed and after preliminary negotiations, Erikson accepted the invitation. A building was purchased and the children, largely American and English boys and girls, were recruited mainly from the families of parents who were either patients themselves, or psychoanalysts-in-training.

Blos and Erikson were given complete freedom to establish the curriculum. Their choice was a progressive, open atmosphere based on the responsibilities of equal citizenship for all. There were no grades and children were taught as individuals. Intellectual subjects, such as science, language, and geography, were taught, as well as the arts and all forms of creative expression. It became a living laboratory for innovative education as well as a proving ground for the new area of psychoanalytic child psychiatry.

Erikson also underwent an analysis of his own during 1927 and 1928. Having been granted a scholarship, he traveled daily to Freud’s home at Bergasse 19 to be seen by Anna Freud. At the same time, he studied clinical psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, Edward Bibring, Helene Deutsch, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris, and he also received training in the educational methods of Maria Montessori. He was one of the few men to graduate from the Lehrerinnenverein, the Montessori Teacher’s Association.

As well, in 1929 at a Mardi Gras Ball he met Joan Serson, a Canadian-American and teacher of modern dance who had been educated at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania in sociology. They married a few months later and within a short time produced the first two of their three children. In all, Erikson remained 7 years in Vienna. The result was that, despite the fact that he had no advanced degree, the artist gradually became a husband, father, teacher, and a practicing psychoanalyst, himself.

Perhaps the most important theoretical development during this period became Erikson’s interest in the spontaneous play of children. Between his own analysis and his work teaching, he became a pioneer in play therapy. Play, he found, was a means by which the symbolism of the unconscious could be expressed in children too small to engage in the traditional psychoanalytic method of free association employed with adults. Instead of merely getting the adults to recreate their past through analysis, it now became possible to study these developmental processes directly with children through the symbolism of play. These innovations were to have an important impact on the future development of child analysis.

In 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Erikson finished his analytic training and was advanced to full membership in the Vienna PsychoanalyticSociety. Afterward, he and his family left right away for Denmark. Through the help of Marie Bonaparte, herself an accomplished Freudian and member of the Danish Royal Family, Erikson tried to establish himself there. Circumstances were against him, however. Instead, through a chance meeting with Hans Sachs, close associate of Freud’s and then a training analyst in Boston, Erikson’s attention was drawn to America.

After some hurried arrangements, the Eriksons left for Boston and, having found suitable arrangements in an apartment on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, were settled in the New World by Christmas, 1933. Because of his status within the Vienna Psychoanalytic community, Erikson was afforded a superior welcome. He quickly found a half-time position at Harvard Medical School in psychiatry under Stanley Cobb and another half-time job with the personality theorist Henry Murray, working at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He also began consultation work with the Judge Baker Guidance Center and he opened up a private practice in psychotherapy on Marlborough Street in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

Erikson was now exposed to a new population of patients, and his horizons broadened considerably. In addition to his research with Harvard students, he came to treat American adolescents and the working class poor. Most of his research, however, began to focus not on neurotic children, but on moderately healthy college men. Meanwhile, his intellectual scope also expanded as he developed new relationships with such lights as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Scudder McKeel, Kurt Lewin, and Ruth Benedict, who all passed through Harvard during this time. Eventually a summary of his research appeared in the psychoanalytic literature and he became an important contributor to Henry A. Murray’s Explorations in Personality (1938).42

Erikson’s first stint in Cambridge lasted until 1936, after which he went to the Yale Institute of Human Relations. He soon became an instructor in psychiatry at Yale Medical School, and an assistant professor in the college. While at Yale, in addition to his family being enlarged by a third child, Erikson carried on research and became more deeply interested in anthropology. Here, he also came into contact with Harry Stack Sullivan and others already blending psychoanalysis with the social sciences.

Meanwhile, after his first year, through Scudder McKeel, Erikson arranged to spend time working with Sioux Indian children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. There he studied child-rearing practices, family relationships, and patterns of adolescent development. This work also allowed him to cast his psychoanalytic discussion of personality into a cross-cultural perspective.

“Observations on Sioux Education” appeared in print in 1939, just as the Eriksons left the East Coast for California.43 In San Francisco Erikson set up an analytic practice with children and in Berkeley he became associated with Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California. His focus was again on normal children and predictions he might make about their future course of development, but his subject cohorts also gave him a good look at racial and class differences that became readily apparent in the lives of the children he encountered from the poorer sections of Oakland and Berkeley. He also had the opportunity to study the Yurok Indians of Northern California.

The war was also on and as a part of his contribution; Erikson worked with the Office of Strategic Services and the Committee on Morale. He wrote on submarine psychology, the possibility of doing psychological research in internment camps, and the interrogation of prisoners, and he contributed various analyses of mental imagery in Hitler’s speeches. Some of his work on this last topic appeared in Harry Stack Sullivan’s journal Psychiatry and Murray and Kluckhohn’s pioneering volume Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, which is to say that more and more Erikson became an important contributor to the culture and personality movement in both psychology and psychiatry. At the same time, he was becoming a major re-interpreter of psychoanalysis in a social context.

The first of the epoch works of his career, Childhood and Society, appeared in 1950. In addition to the social and cultural aspects of personality, he presented his now famous longitudinal theory of personality development. It was a major revision of Freud’s original scheme of infantile sexual stages, but now writ much larger across the entire human life span. Erikson defined the life cycle in eight stages, each with its own developmental tasks that the person either succeeded or failed to achieve.

At the oral and sensory stage, the issues are trust versus mistrust. At the muscular and anal stage, the issues are autonomy versus shame and doubt. At the genital and locomotor stage, the issues are initiative versus guilt. During the latency period, the issues are industry versus inferiority. During puberty and adolescence, the issues are the establishment of basic identity versus falling into role confusion. In young adulthood, the issues are intimacy versus isolation. In adulthood they are generativity versus stagnation. And in the final stage of maturity, the closing years of life, they are ego integrity versus despair.44

Erikson followed with other works, but the one for which he is also most well known was Identity, Youth and Crisis (1968).45 His primary construct was the ego’s resolution of its place in its social context. Personality, the self, and the construct of the person, commensurate with the developing ego psychology of his time, was identity. Without a stable sense of identity, the individual went into an unstable identity confusion, which became popularly known through Erikson’s work as the identity conflict. Adolescents were particularly prone to it in the transition to young adulthood, but the era of the 1960s had more intense transformations going on with the young, largely having to do with shifting values in society, the rejection of white middle class goals, norms, and expectations and a movement toward experimentation with heretofore unheard of life styles on a wider scale than the dominant culture could fathom.

The concept first emerged in the clinical treatment of mental abnormalities experienced by war veterans. Erikson wrote:

Most of our patients, so we concluded at that time, had neither been ‘shellshocked’ nor become malingerers, but had through the exigencies of war lost a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity. They were impaired in that central control over themselves for which, in the psychoanalytic scheme, only the ‘inner agency’ of the ego could be held responsible. Therefore, I spoke of a loss of ‘ego identity.’46

Erikson developed this concept to apply not only to psychopathology but also to cases of exceptional abilities, such as the creative genius found in authors such as George Bernard Shaw and William James. It was also a phenomenon that could be identified with the striving of entire groups of people, such as Blacks involved in the American Civil Rights Movement. Erikson’s ideas burst upon the wider cultural scene just when psychoanalysis began to dominate clinical teaching in psychology and psychiatry and an expansive postwar period had begun in American culture, though 20 years later psychoanalysis itself had begun to wane. At the time, his was a new psychology of the whole person, the individual now understood in a cultural context, yet his ideas still had all the elements of the older more strictly Freudian psychology embedded within them.

Just before Childhood and Society broke upon the scene, however, Erikson became embroiled in a controversy with the Regents at the University of California over a loyalty oath they required renouncing all forms of communism. Erikson, of course, was no communist but he was more appalled at the fascistic tendencies he saw in the McCarthyite movement to root out not only suspected communists, but anyone else with deviant new thoughts. He avoided being fired over not taking the loyalty oath by publicly declaring that he had no allegiance to communism. But just as soon as the air had cleared, he wasted no time in resigning.

Through contacts at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, he was offered a position at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A rural village to be sure, but since the Riggs was a leading center of psychoanalytic training on the east coast, he accepted. He also began an exhausting schedule by commuting at the same time to Pittsburgh to teach at the Western Psychiatric Institute.

Over the next 20 years Erikson published numerous papers on psychoanalytic topics, received hundreds of letters, and lectured around the world, even spending an extended period at one point in India. Two of his several books that broke new ground during this period were Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi’s Truth (1969), massive biographical studies that established the term psychohistory as synonymous with the Eriksonian and psychoanalytic mode of interpretation.47

In the early 1960s Erikson returned to Harvard to teach in the Social Relations Department, an interdisciplinary program in the social sciences that had been started by Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons, and Henry Murray in 1946 to counter the trend toward reductionism in the laboratory sciences. There, Erikson taught enormously popular courses on the human life cycle and led a continuing seminar on the lives of great historic figures.

Eventually, he and his wife began to spend more and more time in California, but in the 1980s, they were drawn back to Harvard through the efforts of Dr. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where the Erik and Joan Erikson Center was established through the Cambridge City Hospital. This particular wing of the Psychiatry Department at Harvard had become a hotbed of radicalism in the late 1970s. While psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cognitive science continued to dominate the Psychology Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, vast innovations in psychology were still taking place in the various departments of psychiatry at the medical school that were associated with thedifferent teaching hospitals. At the Cambridge City Hospital, Charles Ducey, who had worked with Murray, and Daniel Brown, a clinical psychologist interested in hypnosis and Buddhist meditation, ran a seminar on cross-cultural approaches to psychoanalysis. Mitchell Weiss, who taught traditional outpatient psychiatry, was also a specialist in Indian Aryavedic medicine. John Mack, a tenured professor, was known for his psychological biography on Lawrence of Arabia and had started the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age. He was interested in promoting a dialogue between Russians and Americans and in studying children’s perceptions of “The Enemy.” He was also an est graduate and a friend of Werner Erhard, who gave the keynote presentation at the opening of the Erikson Center. Mack then entered into perhaps the most controversial work of his career, phenomenological accounts of alien abduction.48

Largely as a result of the Erikson Center and along with close personal support given by other faculty in comparative religions and the psychology of religion at Harvard, the Eriksons moved back to Cambridge. While Erikson and his wife became beloved personalities, his psychology has become worldwide. His model of developmental stages, for instance, ranks with those of Kohlberg and Piaget as permanent fixtures in the field of child development.

The most important point, however, is that as a psychoanalytic theoretician, as one who had known Freud and been directly analyzed in the old Vienna tradition, from the post war period to the present, Erikson had no rivals equivalent in stature in America. In a very real sense, out of all the other voices, and quite without meaning to, it was he who became the American Freud.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Köhler, W., & Winter, E. (1925). The mentality of apes. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

  2. 2.

    Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

  3. 3.

    The entire field was later rechristened behavior science and Skinner recommended at that point that we discard the outmoded word psychology.

  4. 4.

    Koch, S. (1992). Psychology’s Bridgman vs. Bridgman’s Bridgman. Theory & Psychology, 2(3), 261–290.

  5. 5.

    Stevens, S. S. (1951). Handbook of experimental psychology. New York: Wiley & Sons.

  6. 6.

    Boring (1929/1950).

  7. 7.

    Eagle, M. N. (1987). The psychoanalytic and the cognitive unconscious. InR. Stern (Ed.), Theories of the unconscious and theories of the self (pp. 155–189). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press; Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987). The cognitive unconscious. Science, 237(4821), 1445–1452; Shevrin, H., & Dickman, S. (1980). The cognitive unconscious: A necessary assumption for all psychological theory? American Psychologist, 35(5), 421–434; Piaget, J. (1973). The affective unconscious and the cognitive unconscious. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 21(2), 249–261.

  8. 8.

    Cartwright, D. (1979). Contemporary social psychology in historical perspective. Social Psychology Quarterly, 42(1), 82–93; Cartwright, D. (1948). Socialpsychology in the United States during the Second World War. Human Relations, 1(3), 333–352; Nicholson, I. (1997a). The politics of scientific social reform, 1936–1960: Goodwin Watson and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33, 39–60.

  9. 9.

    The dating of this distinction is purely arbitrary. Sociology, not yet even a recognized discipline at Harvard in the late 1890s, had been implicitly defined by at least two streams: growing railroad interests and their influence on defining economics in the field of business, and the fledging Social Gospel Movement emanating from Francis Greenwood Peabody’s course on the “Ethics of the Social Question,” originally offered in the Divinity School. Inner experience versus the social contract was not a new issue when applied to the emergence of depth-psychology.

  10. 10.

    Hale (1995).

  11. 11.

    Freud, S. (1913). The Interpretation of dreams (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York: The Macmillan Company; London: George Allen and Unwin.

  12. 12.

    Others included Arlow, Bornstein, Brenner, K. R. Eissler and R. Eissler, Greenacre, Hartmann, Isakower, Jacobson, E. Kris and M. Kris, Lewin, Loewenstein, Mahler, Nunberg, and A. Reich.

  13. 13.

    Hale, 1995, Vol. 1.

  14. 14.

    Horney (1937); Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

  15. 15.

    I have relied heavily on Perry, H. S. (1982). Psychiatrist of America: The life of Harry Stack Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, but also referred to Mullahy, P. (1973). The beginnings of modern American psychiatry: The ideas of Harry Stack Sullivan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

  16. 16.

    Perry, H. S. (1982). Psychiatrist of America: The life of Harry Stack Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  17. 17.

    Sullivan, H. S., & Mullahy, P. (1947). Conceptions of modern psychiatry. William Alanson White Memorial Lectures. Washington, DC: W. A. White Psychiatric Foundation.

  18. 18.

    Cantril, H. (1950). Tensions that cause wars, common statements and individual papers by a group of social scientists brought together by UNESCO. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

  19. 19.

    Natterson, J. M. (1966). Karen Horney, 1885–1952. In F. Alexander,S. Eisenstein, and M. Grotjahn Psychoanalytic pioneers (pp. 450–451). New York: Basic Books; Quinn, S. (1988). A mind of her own: The life of Karen Horney. New York: Addison Wesley.

  20. 20.

    The following discussion follows closely Quinn’s significant chapter, “Freud, Horney, and the Psychoanalytic View of Women,” pp. 205–241.

  21. 21.

    Quinn (1988).

  22. 22.

    Quinn, 1988, p. 233.

  23. 23.

    Quinn, 1988, p. 225.

  24. 24.

    Quinn (1988).

  25. 25.

    Quinn, 1988, p. 308.

  26. 26.

    Horney, K. (1942). Self-analysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Horney, K. (1939). New ways in psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

  27. 27.

    In the following section, I have followed closely the biographical chapter from Burston, D. (1991). The legacy of Erich Fromm (pp.1–29). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  28. 28.

    Fromm (1941).

  29. 29.

    Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, p. viii.

  30. 30.

    Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper.

  31. 31.

    Fromm, E. (1968). The revolution of hope, toward a humanized technology. New York: Harper & Row.

  32. 32.

    Fromm, 1968, p.135.

  33. 33.

    Fromm, E. (1959). Sigmund Freud and his mission, an analysis of his personality and influence. New York: Harper, p. 101.

  34. 34.

    Perry, H. S. (1980). Clara Thompson. In B. Sicherman, & C. H. Green (Eds.), Notable American women: The modern period. A biographical dictionary (pp. 680–683). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University.

  35. 35.

    Thompson, C. (1950). Psychoanalysis: Evolution and development. New York: Hermitage House.

  36. 36.

    May used the word diamonic.

  37. 37.

    May, R. (1939) The art of counseling. New York: Abingdon Press; May, R. (1940). The springs of creative living, a study of human nature and God. New York, Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press; May, R. (1950). The meaning of anxiety. New York: The Ronald Press Company (revised 1977, New York: W. W. Norton); May, R. (1967). Psychology and the human dilemma. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand (revised 1979, New York: W. W. Norton & Company and Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand); May, R., & Caliger, L. (1968). Dreams and symbols. New York: Basic Books; May, R. (1969a). Love and will. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R. (1972). Power and innocence: A search for the sources of violence. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R. (1975). The courage to create. New York: Bantam Books; May, R. (1981). Freedom and destiny. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R. (1983). The discovery of being: Writings in existential psychology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R. (1986). Politics and innocence. Dallas, TX: Saybrook Publishers, New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R. (1991). The cry for myth. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; May, R., & Schneider, K. J. (1995). The psychology of existence: An integrative, clinical perspective. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  38. 38.

    May, Angel, & Ellenberger (1958).

  39. 39.

    May, 1969a, p. 123.

  40. 40.

    See Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1950). Principles of intensive psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1960). Principles of intensive psychotherapy. Chicago: Phoenix Books; Also Hornstein, G. A., & Fromm-Reichmann, F. (2000). To redeem one person is to redeem the world: The life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. New York: Free Press. Also, Greenberg, J. (1964). I never promised you a rose garden. New York: New American Library.

  41. 41.

    This section relies heavily on Coles, R. (1970). Erik H. Erikson: The growth of his work. Boston: Little, Brown.

  42. 42.

    Murray, H. A., and the Workers at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. (1938). Explorations in personality: A clinical and experimental study of fifty men of college age. New York: Oxford University Press.

  43. 43.

    Erikson, E. (1939). Observations on Sioux Education. Journal of Psychology, 7, 101–156.

  44. 44.

    Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: W. W. Norton.

  45. 45.

    Erikson, E. (1968). Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: W. W. Norton.

  46. 46.

    Quoted in Nisbet, R. A. (1968, March 31). Review of Identity, youth, and crisis by Erik Erikson. New York Times.

  47. 47.

    Erikson, E. (1958). Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. New York: W. W. Norton; Erikson, E. (1969). Gandhi’s truth: On the origins of militant nonviolence. New York: W. W. Norton.

  48. 48.

    Until his recent untimely death, the late John Mack had been investigating claims of alien abduction. Mack, J. E. (1995). Abduction: Human encounters with aliens. New York: Ballantine Books.