How America Welcomed Freud

...Their main argument was that, especially in America, the medical profession had to protect itself and the public from quacks and impostors...

...He is one of the few people in a position to write a book of this kind, and in doing so he has creditably fulfilled his obligation to all children—legitimate and illegitimate—of psychoanalysis in the United States...

...So far, no schools of this type have been founded...

...The American analysts did not yield to Freud's wish to accept non-medical students for training...

...Although Freud had had a thorough training in neurology and psychiatry and felt himself to be a part of the scientific tradition of the German universities, he was rejected by the principal centers of psychiatric learning in Austria and Germany...

...contributor, "Psychoanalytic Quarterly" and other journals In no country has psychoanalysis made such an impact upon allied sciences and society at large as in the United States...

...Thus, it would have been unlikely for an American to have made the statement of a famous German pathologist that he had examined thousands of brain-sections under the microscope but had never discovered a soul...

...Oberndorf is inclined to emphasize the liberal tradition and the bent toward active optimism in the American climate as the reasons for more easily accepting new ways of thinking which promise improvement and progress...

...It might be mentioned, however, that other movements, Darwinism for example, encountered more resistance here than in Europe...

...Clarence P. Oberndorf is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and has practiced psychoanalysis for many decades...

...Oberndorf relates that Freud asked him about this problem with a tone of annoyance and impatience, and waved his replies aside with an abrupt "I know all that...

...It should not be forgotten, however, that Freud had hoped that eventually institutes would be created which would not only teach the student psychoanalysis, but would devote part of the curriculum to a kind of preanalytical training, akin to but different from pre-medical training, with emphasis on anthropology, folklore, mythology and literature...

...Oberndorf's book is a lively written record of a movement and will be of documentary value in the history of medicine in America...

...By contrast, a number of young American psychiatrists began to study and apply Freud's teachings shortly after the first professional recognition of Freud in Zurich...

...Oberndorf is hopeful about the future of analysis in America, but he has his doubts: "Psychoanalysis had finally become legitimate and respectable, perhaps paying the price in becoming sluggish and smug, hence attractive to an increasing number of minds which find security in conformity and propriety...

...Oberndorf's account of these struggles is of particular interest now that clinical psychology has appeared...

...Although he had suffered so much from the neglect and contempt that he encountered in the European academic world, he feared that the striving for progress and for popular appeal and the demand for optimistic solutions would endanger the scientific soberness of psychoanalysis, that propaganda would devour science...

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...Even a movement as unscientific as Christian Science may have prepared large parts of the population for psychoanalytic ideas...

...Instead, "Freudianism" has invaded the colleges and universities, and has been embraced by many groups in social work and education...

...Many of his early followers were students of literature, not of medicine...

...A real conflict between Freud and his American followers developed over the question of lay analysis...

...He shows that a number of psychiatrists, in the puritanical climate in which they lived, started to invade the spiritual borderland of mental conflicts, a territory previously reserved for the clergy...

...Freud, whose knowledge of America was limited, was not pleased about the spread of psychoanalysis in the United States...

...This book, written by one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in the United States, is of interest, therefore, to a wide range of persons interested in the social sciences...

...Oberndorf's account seems to show that the closeness of the American psychiatrists to theological thinking and tradition tended to make them more receptive to psychoanalytic thought than their European colleagues, grounded in Darwin and in cellular pathology...

...America, of course, possessed many different traditions...

...In the desire for tangible results, it is often overlooked that psychoanalysis has not provided simple solutions and that psychoanalytic insight into the development of the individual cannot, for example, be easily translated into rules for the bringing up of the child, as it often is...

...Oberndorf gives an interesting survey of American precursors of Freud's thinking in the early nineteenth century, in medicine as well as in literature...