Without doubt, the greatest single change that distinguished the intellectual atmosphere of the 1920's from that of the period before 1914 was psychology's leap into the center of attention. Here again, however, the way had been prepared in the prewar era. The social thought of the decade and a half preceding the outbreak of the war had been markedly subjective in character. In nearly all the major writings of this period, the common element had been an emphasis on unconscious mental processes, on criticism of one's own thinking, and on the doubtful character of knowledge about society. The war experience had further encouraged this tendency toward subjectivity and self-doubt. When all stable values had been thrown into question, the human psyche emerged as the one fixed point in an indeterminate universe.
The Freudian theory of psychoanalysis most clearly exemplified the new trend, but its preeminence did not pass unquestioned. The laboratory study of experimental psychology continued on its patient, cautious way, scarcely troubled by the philosophical quarrels of the Freudians and their foes. These latter included the Behaviorists, who followed the American J. B. Watson in stressing the relationship of internal feelings to the observable activities and the physiological structure of the individual--as opposed to the psychoanalytic practice of deducing unconscious thought and emotion from dreams, random remarks, and slips in speech. Behaviorism--in Europe at least--had only a passing influence; a more serious intellectual challenge to the teachings of Freud came from the German Gestalt school. These theorists, who were speculative philosophers rather than clinicians, held that the way to understand an individual mind was through the painstaking delineation of its whole form ( Gestalt) in an effort to grasp all the subtle connections linking the complexities and apparent contradictions that constituted a single, unique emotional life.
Nevertheless, it was Freud and his school who aroused the liveliest interest. The great Viennese psychiatrist was a little more than sixty and apparently at the height of his powers when the war came to an end. Four years later, however, he was stricken by a cancer of the mouth that necessitated operation after operation and that finally killed him in 1939, just after the outbreak of the second world conflict. This constant battle with illness severely limited Freud's ability to work--but he continued with stoical resolution in the two main areas of his earlier activity, the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and the publication of books and articles on psychological theory.
Most of Freud's time was devoted to clinical psychiatry, which he had revolutionized a generation earlier with his novel technique of free association. More and more, however, those who lay on the couch in his office and sought his help were not regular patients but fledgling psychiatrists who had come to Vienna to be trained in psychoanalytic method. In the half-decade before the war, psychoanalysis had become an international movement, and although the four years of the conflict checked this development, its growth was resumed after 1918 on a still larger scale. Besides Vienna, which remained the general headquarters, Berlin, Budapest, London, and New York were main centers of psychoanalytic teaching and practice. Paris, Rome, and the Latin and Catholic countries in general showed themselves much less receptive to Freudian ideas. It was in the German- and the English-speaking worlds that psychoanalysis became firmly established in the 1920's.
The foundation of new psychoanalytic institutes and the maintenance of contact between them necessitated a great deal of consultation and correspondence on the part of the founder himself. Freud also continued with his theoretical writing, but this began to change in character. The main structure of his theory, which he had begun in 1899, with his Interpretation of Dreams, was now finished. In contrast to the volumes which presented and explained the central ideas and the method of psychoanalysis, Freud's later writings were shorter and more speculative, and they showed greater concern for the social and historical implications of his theories. The most influential of these, Civilization and Its Discontents ( 1930), dealt with the restriction of instinctual expression that Freud found inevitable in civilized societies and forecast the inhuman behavior to which the authoritarian states of Europe would very shortly resort. The measured pessimism in this little book was echoed in two brief studies of religion: The Future of an Illusion, in which Freud voiced his confidence in a humanist and atheist morality, and Moses and Monotheism, his last work, in which he traced the tragic history of the Jews (his own ancestors) to their creation of the concept of a single deity.
Meantime the psychoanalytic movement continued to be shaken by internal splits and struggles which were themselves of an almost religious intensity. Just before the first war there had been two notable defections from the Freudian camp. One of these, led by Alfred Adler of Vienna, had tried to turn psychoanalysis away from its basic emphasis on the unconscious emotions of the individual and to direct it toward questions of conscious participation in group life. Adler's teaching offered a curious combination of stress on the will--a Nietzschean inheritance--and of socialist ideals of Marxian origin. In the 1920's its influence did not extend very far, and Adler's own death in 1937 robbed it of its chief. The real importance of ideas of this sort was to be apparent only a decade later, when the Second World War focused attention once again on the relation between individual psychology and the organization of society.
A more serious challenge came from the Swiss Carl G. Jung, who had once ranked as Freud's heir-apparent. In the years following the war Jung diverged further and further from the teachings, of his original master. Through his study of Oriental philosophy and religion, the Swiss psychiatrist concluded that there existed a vast "collective unconscious" in which the same mythsymbols kept repeating themselves in widely separated places and ages. By tapping the resources of these great "archetypes," Jung argued, people could reach a higher understanding of their emotional difficulties. Hence, although he did not profess a specific faith of his own, Jung urged on his patients and on his readers the therapeutic value of a return to religion. In this emphasis on the usefulness of faith--which contrasted so sharply with Freud's atheism-Jung made a notable contribution to the wider movement of return to religion in the postwar epoch.
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