The Golden Age of Psychoanalysis

Rock star-like status was awarded to shrinks in the 1950s.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Key points

• The heyday of psychoanalysis in America was in the 1950s.
• Much attention was directed to both the personal and professional lives of psychoanalysts.
• Therapy has evolved considerably over the years, yet remnants of this era still exist.

Psychoanalysis—the approach to the mind, personality, psychological disorders, and psychological treatment originally developed by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century—reached its peak of popularity in the United States in the 1950s. Even though psychoanalysis made quite a mark when it arrived in the United States in the 1920s, many Americans of the post-World War II years were fascinated by this revolutionary form of therapy, much in part a function of the conformist, repressive cultural climate of the times.

One big question those not in the psychoanalytic business often wondered was whether emotional illness was somehow contagious, i.e., if analysts could possibly catch their patients’ problems. Could a normal person endure a nearly constant barrage of anxiety, guilt, depression, and perversity without being affected by it? Psychoanalysts themselves believed they were immune from such a thing, and that the range of emotions to which they were routinely exposed was not only expected, useful, and interesting but essential steps toward their patients’ recovery.

Feelings directed their way were, after all, not really about them but about other people in their patients’ lives, with the analyst vicariously taking the blows through the process of transference. The 300 or more hours psychoanalysts themselves spent on the couch as part of their training was a big help in their ability to not take things too personally, having walked in their patients’ therapeutic shoes. Outside the office, however, it was a completely different matter. Analysts were probably just as vulnerable to emotional issues in their personal lives as the average man or woman on the street.

Still, being a psychoanalyst (often referred to as a “shrink,” short for “headshrinker”) was hardly a piece of cake. Understanding patients, especially their provocative behavior, required an extraordinary amount of effort and delicacy. The analyst had to remain open to patients’ problems and be sympathetic to them in order to fully comprehend the situation but also maintain a certain detachment and objectivity, a fine line to walk.

Despite their years of training, retaining what was called in the trade “free-floating attention”—the ability to remain receptive to anything and everything the patient said or did—was particularly challenging. For one thing, simply keeping one’s concentration for 50 minutes a number of times a day without using the selectivity aspect of normal listening was draining. As well, dealing with patients’ accusations, bouts of silence, and occasional attempts at seduction were also no fun, as were the times when they were late or did not pay their bills.

Many believed psychoanalysis to be more difficult than medicine, in fact, the former not having the step-by-step, almost formulaic approach to diagnosis and treatment that physicians employed. Feelings, memories, and emotions were a lot more ephemeral and mercurial than organs, tissue, and bone, after all, with one patient’s set of issues often completely different from another’s. As a vital tonic for their own mental health, a good number of analysts took not just August off as vacation but July as well, but even this apparently wasn’t enough R&R for some. Although there were no firm statistics to cite, anecdotal evidence suggested that an unusually high percentage of male analysts suffered heart attacks at an early age, a result of the tension that came with the job.

In 1957, Mademoiselle magazine did yeoman’s duty by interviewing 16 female psychoanalysts, finding a variety of reasons why they went into the field. (Women comprised a surprisingly high 19% of the 702 members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and were often presidents of local societies and institutes.)

Many of the women, as for their male counterparts, turned out to have had less than happy childhoods; their careers apparently consciously or unconsciously served as a way to understand and cure themselves. Loneliness and uneasiness with other people when they were young was not uncommon, as was stress, anxiety, and an inability to express their feelings. (Freud himself suffered from a variety of neuroses as a young man including depression, moodiness, indigestion, migraine headaches, and fear of open spaces.) Only in the field of psychoanalysis could the presence of some kind of inner discomfort and desire to get rid of one’s own problems be considered better credentials for prospective analysts than believing it was a good career to go into.

Demand for analysts far exceeded supply these years, meaning one could not only make decent money—$20,000 to $25,000 on average (roughly $225,000 to $280,000 in today’s dollars), the magazine estimated—but choose how many hours a week to work. As well, analysts often had a father or grandfather who was a physician, this sparking their interest in medicine and in healing people, whether their ailments were physical or mental. A strong streak of curiosity, of course, was a staple characteristic for psychoanalysts, the possibility to hear in detail what people really think almost irresistible to those thinking about entering the field.

While psychoanalysis is no longer all the rage, many of the dynamics associated with the therapeutic process remain relevant today.