“Psychology has stepped down from the university chair into the
marketplace” was how the New York Times put it in 1926. Another
commentator in 1929 was more biting. Psychoanalysis, he said, had
over a generation, “converted the human scene into a neurotic.”
Freud first used the word around 1895, and by the 1920s
psychoanalysis was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the United
States. How it gained such purchase, taking hold in virtually every
aspect of American culture, is the story Lawrence R. Samuel tells
in Shrink, the first comprehensive popular history of
psychoanalysis in America. Arriving on the scene at around the same
time as the modern idea of the self, psychoanalysis has both shaped
and reflected the ascent of individualism in American society.
Samuel traces its path from the theories of Freud and Jung to the
innermost reaches of our current me-based, narcissistic culture.
Along the way he shows how the arbiters of culture, high and low,
from public intellectuals, novelists, and filmmakers to Good
Housekeeping and the Cosmo girl, mediated or embraced
psychoanalysis (or some version of it), until it could be
legitimately viewed as an integral feature of American
consciousness.
General
Imprint: |
University of Nebraska Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
February 2013 |
Firstpublished: |
April 2013 |
Authors: |
Lawrence R Samuel
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 26mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
288 |
Edition: |
0 Ed |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8032-4476-4 |
Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8032-4476-2 |
Barcode: |
9780803244764 |
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