A Slice of New York before it became the Big Apple

Gabriel Byrne as Paul Weston in In Treatment

Did you know that even middle and upper-class New Yorkers no longer pay to lie on the couch and bare their souls several times a week?  Psychoanalysis is on the wane. Paul Weston's once a week therapy sessions as shown in consecutive episodes of "In Treatment" is much more the name of the game these days. But it wasn't always like this. According to Lewis Aron and Karen Starr, the authors of a new book exploring the history of psychoanalysis, there was a time in the US, post-World War II when psychoanalysis enjoyed a golden age. Celebrities - most famously Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen were patients, and the whole field of advertising and public relations was being transformed by Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, using psychoanalytic thinking. Movies - the first medium which had the potential to manifest our dream scenarios, were similarly influenced.

I lived in New York at the end of that so-called Golden Age - just before the Women's Movement and Gay Liberation started questioning all those seemingly incontrovertible psychoanalytic interpretations about us. In the space of a few years, the vaginal orgasm was declared a myth, the lived experiences of childhood were reasserted i.e. incest was not always a fantasy, homosexuals were not necessarily latent paranoiacs, nor lesbians castrating females and the designation of homosexuality as a perversion, was also eventually forced to bite the dust.

 The New Left gets old! SDS veterans starting "New SDS" in 2006

I was a member of an "affinity group" - Crazy Horse. We were young professionals of the New Left - part of an umbrella organization (MDS) set up by members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Our theoretical heroes were Ernest Mandel, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse. I had arrived in New York on the eve of 1968 influenced by the Old Left - the Congress Movement and Trotskyists in Cape Town. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the Jewish members of this group travelled from their apartments in New York to their parents on Long Island for the Jewish holidays. Or even more surprising, someone couldn't make a meeting because they had an appointment with their analyst! This was probably happening more than I knew.

In those days I thought you couldn't observe religious festivals and be on the Left - and you definitely couldn't attend therapy or analysis which was sure to interpret your outrage about racism or the Vietnam War as something to do with your adolescent rebelliousness. Besides the Personal was Political - the Revolution would sort out whatever problems we thought we had.

Binary thinking, which Aron and Starr point out characterized psychoanalytic attitudes in those years, was also evident in the New Left: if you were not part of the solution, you were part of the problem.

A week at the People's Coffeegrounds

So, as the 70's approached, we went off to try to be part of the solution. Some of Crazy Horse went to live in a collective in Queens to do working class organizing, the rest of us ran a coffee-house on the Upper West Side, holding discussions every evening. Other comrades went on brigades to cut cane in Cuba and a few in Weatherman started making bombs in their New York apartments. Repression got heavier, rebellion went Underground and feminism came into its own.

Less than ten years later, many feminist critics of rigid psychoanalysis had become therapists themselves - me among them. About a third of Crazy Horse members also did as far as I can tell. The reasons were probably as multilayered  as we all were. I realised we had to delve deeper into our conditioning to become the men and women we expected ourselves to be. New branches of psychoanalysis sprang up. The relational school is one of them. Now even these are in trouble. Analysts and therapists are finding that they have to market themselves - a recent article by Lori Gottlieb in the New York Times explores some solutions to the current crisis in the profession.

Dr Joseph Schwartz, author of "Cassandra's Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis", writes in response:

It's good.I particularly liked your colleagues going home for the Jewish holidays. So New York. The picture is great. Nearly tells the whole story. 
I would say that relational Psa didn't just spring up out of Mitchell and Greenberg ("Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory", 1983) but was an outgrowth of the William Alanson White Institute on W 74th Street home of the NYC Sullivanians aka the interpersonalists aka the Washington school - Clara Thompson et al.  Dating back to the 1920s.  On the other hand it's certainly no coincidence that it emerged in the 60s when everything was up for grabs including Sullivan's aversion to the human inner world as formulated by the US Freudians. 

In the period following the Golden Age, colleagues observed that in the Golden Age  you couldn't be a chair of a department of psychiatry unless you were a psychoanalyst. After, you couldn't be a chair of a department of psychiatry if you were a psychoanalyst!  And remember the fight that the psychologists had to be admitted to psychoanalytic trainings.  Feh. Edward Shorter wrote an incredible anti-semitic anti- Psa, book calling it a Jewish phenomenon. 

I personally would have been more hostile to Weatherman in your blog. Bunch of upper middle class spoiled brats I say. Everyone else was having a revolution and they wanted one too. Like getting a new car for Christmas -or Hannukah.