Freud in New England

By Alan Lawson, Boston College

The story of how Freudian psychology came to America is commonly told in terms of European emigre psychoanalysts residing in upper West Side Manhattan who analyze anxious Americans, dominate the practice of psychiatry, and apply Freudian concepts to social and literary issues.

But the title that commands me here is "Freud in New England", not New York, and I intend to carry out my duty literally. Thus we must go back to the time before those New York emigrees arrived, a time when Sigmund Freud made his only trip to America . He did so in answer to an invitation in 1909 from G. Stanley Hall, the noted psychologist and president of Clark University, to join other prominent European and American scholars in giving a series of lectures to commemorate Clark's 20th anniversary. Freud hesitated briefly, partly from a frugal reluctance to lose income from his practice in Vienna for several weeks , but at a deeper level because he shared the standard prejudice of the European intelligentsia that America w as an outpost of crude materialism, religious oppression, and shallow thinking.

Freud was flattered by Hall's invitation, but he liked to say that he really decided to accept because he had always wanted to see an American porcupine. Behind the joke Freud remembered that in the 1880s, when he was desperately poor and unappreciated, he had considered emigrating to America . Now, porcupine or not, he had the satisfaction of going as an honored and curious guest.

Freud's trepidations persisted, nonetheless. As his liner entered New York harbor, his fellow invitees and disciples, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, exclaimed that they were bringing enlightenment to the New World. Freud replied glumly that they were really bringing the plague.

The tour of the city that followed was an ordeal. Freud had a bout of indigestion in a restaurant and fainted. When he revived, he, Jung, and Ferenczi went for a walk in Palisades Park, where Freud accidentally peed his pants. Jung, in true overdeterminist Freudian style, seized on one of Freud's own insights to claim that the indiscretion showed Freud was an ambitious man who wanted to call attention to himself. Freud protested that he just didn't have time to get to one of those subterranean palatial marble men's rooms Americans fancied.

Then, cleaned up, tired, and jangled, the three travelers boarded a train for the wilderness city of Worcester, where the local newspaper had hailed their coming with bumptious good humor. "Conference Brings Savants Together: Long-haired Type Hard to Discover " was the title of one feature story. Another, assuming a happy outcome, declared "Men with Bulging Brains have Time for Occasional Smiles."

Everything was jovial at the Hall home, where Freud and his companions stayed. Jung wrote to his wife that the place was "furnished in an incredibly amusing fashion", with boxes of cigars everywhere, pitch-black servants in dinner jackets , windows that reached the floor, doors open- - including even the bathroom and front door - people running freely in and out, and, beyond, an English lawn that was also open - vast and unfenced. As for their hosts, Jung wrote that Professor Hall "received us with the kindest hospitality. He has a plump, jolly...and extremely ugly wife" who "took over Freud and me as her 'boys' and plied us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so that [soon] we began...to recover."

The formal proceedings were equally upbeat. Freud's lectures were well attended and occasioned no objections such as he had suffered in Europe, even when he ventured his theory of infantile sexuality in the fourth lecture. Much to Freud's delight, the famous William James attended one of the lectures. Afterward they went for a walk and James , wrapping his arm around the shoulders of Freud's American apostle, Ernest Jones, proclaimed that Freud's insights represented the future of psychology.

The celebration climaxed in the awarding of honorary degrees. Jung remembered Freud receiving his with tears of long delayed gratification glistening in his eyes. Then it was off with the family of James Jackson Putnam, Boston's leading psychotherapist, to the Adirondack camp Putnam had bought with William James. In that remote Arcadia, Freud cheerfully wrote his wife, the group balanced discussions of the Clark sessions with hiking and picnicking. He mentioned an "amazing" new board game Putnam's 12year old daughter played with him, and added that his guides even found a porcupine for him to inspect. 

On the return trip Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi excitedly discussed forming an international association that would build on the encouraging Clark experience. Once he was home, Freud drafted Putnam to head the American Psychoanalytic Association and began a correspondence with him that expressed warm mutual regard, while revealing fundamental distinctions between the concepts Freud wanted the international association to enforce and characteristic impulses of his American allies.

There were three major factors in the American situation at the time of the Clark conference that prompted a favorable response to Freudian concepts. First, Freud's call for psychologists to help free people from repressive religious and sexual taboos squared with the revolt in America against Puritanical religion and genteel prudery and with the progressive reform movement that grew out of that revolt. Second, Freud's emphasis on the subconscious and the will comported with the American effort, led by James, to move psychology from being strictly a laboratory science that understood mental illness to be the result of genetic and physical defects toward consideration of subjective mental states as causes of behavior that was subject to improvement. Finally, Americans like James and Putnam favored the subjective side of psychology for the way it fitted with the religious and transcendental beliefs in which they had been steeped. They turned primarily to Ralph Waldo Emerson for guidance about the links between individuals, nature, and overall cosmic reality. They admired the social gospel attempt to use Christian precepts to help those who were crushed by modern life. And they welcomed a variety of healers into the psychoanalytic fold, while defending the right of other purveyors of mind cures, like the fast growing number of Christian Scientists, to offer mental remedies for physical ills. 

Out of that combination of American attitudes and Freudian guidance grew what was termed the Boston School of psychotherapy. It was an activist, communally focused movement. Putnam sought to make his patients realize the curative value of serving others and broadcast that view in numerous books and articles. At the Massachusetts General Hospital he combined forces with the physician Richard Cabot to create the first corps of psychiatric social workers, who brought much needed help to the growing population of immigrants and other disadvantaged people in distress. In numerous ways, both as therapists and citizens, practitioners in the Boston School devoted themselves to campaigns for civic improvement , while preaching the therapeutic importance of people living for one another.

Freud's circumstances were much more limiting. Unlike James, Putnam, and Cabot, who belonged to some of New England's most prominent families and acted within an open democracy, Freud was a non-religious Jew living in an increasingly anti-Semitic, decaying aristocratic society that he was moved at least once to describe as his "prison." Widely criticized for his unconventional views and with no opening for civic activism, Freud constructed his psychology as a closed, fortified system, devoted to personal, not social, change that offered his patients the hope of tolerable relief from their suffering of the same limited sort that was available to him.

The correspondence between Freud and his main American ally, Putnam, strikingly reveals the gap in status and opportunity, and thus of understanding, between Vienna and New England. I have offered some key passages on the handout, which I only have time to excerpt briefly here. Perhaps the prime exchange to cite was occasioned by Putnam's preparation of an address to be given at a conference in Weimar in 1911 that he entitled "The Importance of Philosophy for the Further Development of Psychoanalysis."

Putnam avowed:

"I consider that no patient is really cured unless he becomes better and broader morally, and, conversely, I believe that a moral regeneration helps towards a removal of the symptoms. ... I wish to show that...the current psychoanalysis implies (at least) a narrow, and so an incorrect because incomplete, view of human life and motive...and fails to recognize that mind, consciousness, reason, emotion, will, are not merely products of evolution but underlying causes of evolution."

Putnam later wrote to Freud about what a sane and worthy life entails.

"... the individual is not to be thought of as existing alone, but should be considered as an integral part of the community in which he lives, and eventually of what must remain for him an ideal or idealized community....The interests of the community are implied in every one's motives and emotions, and sublimation consists in making these implicit interest explicit - i.e. in thinking out one's social obligations consciously and in the largest sense."

"Of course, it is also true that in my belief the sense of these social bonds, as well as of a certain power which the individual gets by virtue of his belonging to the community, is something not derived from experience, but innate - i.e., a sort of endowment of the mind as such...."

Freud's response expressed a misunderstanding that when Putnam spoke in transcendental terms of moral improvement he was referring only to the sublimation of basic impulses, not to the conviction Putnam held that persons were attached to a universal life force beyond the self. 

"Here I must disagree," Freud began. "Psychoanalytic theory really does cover this."

If we are not satisfied with saying, 'Be moral and philosophical' it is because that is too cheap and has been said too often without being of any help. Our art consists in making it possible for people to be moral and to deal with their wishes philosophically. Sublimation, that is striving toward higher goals, is of course one of the best means of overcoming the urgency of our drives." 

Freud went on to say that sublimation was irrelevant for most patients, who have, as he put it, "inferior endowments and disproportionately strong drives. They would like to be better than they can be, yet this convulsive desire benefits neither themselves nor society. It is therefore more humane to establish this principle: 'Be as moral as you can honestly be and do not strive for an ethical perfection for which you are not destined.' Whoever is capable of sublimation will turn to it inevitably as soon as he is free of his neurosis. Those who are not capable of this at least will become more natural and more honest."

In another letter to Putnam Freud dissociated himself from philosophy altogether.

"As you know, I comprehend very little of philosophy and with epistemology...my interest ceases to function. I quite agree with you that psychoanalytic treatment should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual. Our difference is of a purely practical nature. It is confined to the fact that I do not wish to entrust this further development to the psychoanalyst. ...Analysts themselves are far removed from the ideal which you demand of them. As soon as they are entrusted with the task of leading the patient toward sublimation, they hasten away from the arduous tasks of psychoanalysis as quickly as they can so that they can take up the much more comfortable and satisfactory duties of the teacher and the paragon of virtue."

Putnam continued to press his case, and when he sent Freud a copy of his book, Human Motives (1915), which stressed a transcendental basis for morality, he received an essential admission from Freud.

"...there is one point on which I can agree with you. When I ask myself why I always have striven honestly to be considerate of others and if possible kind to them...I really have no answer....Why I - as well as my six adult children - are compelled to be thoroughly decent human beings is quite incomprehensible to me. Let me add the following consideration: if knowledge of the human soul is still so incomplete that my poor talents could succeed in making such important discoveries, it seems likely that it is too early to decide for or against hypotheses such as your."

World War I and mortality interrupted the correspondence, and no more letters were exchanged after 1916. On November 4, 1918, a week before the war ended, Putnam succumbed to heart failure. Understanding Putnam's deepest allegiance to a transcendental ideal, his daughter found consolation in the fact that on a beautiful sunny afternoon the day before he died, her father had been able to make a last pilgrimage to Emerson's home in Concord.

Freud lived on, his outlook darkened by the war, to write somberly of narcissism and the death instinct. He also looked with repugnance on the United States , furious at how Wilson, the hypocritical Puritan, had betrayed Germany at Versailles and how his theories were being vulgarized in American popular culture. Writing to Ernest Jones, Freud concluded, " America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake..."

Yet Freud remembered America more fondly in his autobiography as the place where he emerged into the light.

"In Europe I felt as though I were despised, but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream...psychoanalysis was not a delusion any longer; it had become a valuable part of reality."

And then there was his honorary degree - the only one any university ever conferred on Freud during his long life.

To William James, whom he had been so glad to meet, Freud offered this homage.

"I shall never forget one little scene that occurred....He stopped suddenly...saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris.....He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death."

Perhaps Freud also recalled his time in the Adirondacks - the exhilarating talk of psychoanalysis' future, the picnics, the "amazing" board game, even the porcupine.

Possibly, too, Freud may have had a twinge of remorse, if he happened to remember that he was the man who brought the plague to America.

Key Excerpts from the Correspondence of James Jackson Putnam with William James and Sigmund Freud

Putnam to James (1910): "And so some sort of absolute must be assumed, and likewise a progress towards it. And if we prize 'morals', or love then the universe must have a moral pole and individual effort must be of value....The alternative is surely between a gross materialism and a truly personalistic universe with love and hope in it from the start. And if 'in it' then an essential part of its eternal structure."

Putnam to Freud in preparation for Putnam's talk at the Weimar conference of 1911, "The Importance of Philosophy for the Further Development of Psychoanalysis.": "I consider that no patient is really cured unless he becomes better and broader morally, and, conversely, I believe that a moral regeneration helps towards a removal of the symptoms. ... I wish to show that...the current psychoanalysis implies (at least) a narrow, and so an incorrect because incomplete, view of human life and motive...and fails to recognize that mind, consciousness, reason, emotion, will, are not merely products of evolution but underlying causes of evolution.

Freud's reply to Putnam: "Here I must disagree. Psychoanalytic theory really does cover this. It teaches that a drive cannot be sublimated as long as it is repressed....This is the goal of psychoanalytic therapy and the way in which it serves every form of higher development. If we are not satisfied with saying, 'Be moral and philosophical' it is because that is too cheap and has been said too often without being of any help. Our art consists in making it possible for people to be moral and to deal with their wishes philosophically. Sublimation, that is, striving toward higher goals, is of course one of the best means of overcoming the urgency of our drives." Freud goes on to say that sublimation is irrelevant for most patients because they have "inferior endowments and disproportionately strong drives. They would like to be better than they can be, yet this convulsive desire benefits neither themselves nor society. It is therefore more humane to establish this principle: 'Be as moral as you can honestly be and do not strive for an ethical perfection for which you are not destined.' Whoever is capable of sublimation will turn to it inevitably as soon as he is free of his neurosis. Those who are not capable of this at least will become more natural and more honest."

"We still know too little about the human soul. Only when this knowledge is greater, will we learn what is practicable in the field of ethics, and what we can do in the way of education without doing harm."

After Putnam delivered his paper, Freud described it to a colleague as a "decorative centerpiece; everyone admires it but no one touches it." Even worse, Freud added, Putnam's aim to act "in the service of a particular philosophical outlook on the world...and urge...this upon the patient in order to ennoble him...[is] after all...only tyranny, even though disguised by the most honorable motives."

Freud to Putnam (1912): "As you know, I comprehend very little of philosophy and with epistemology...my interest ceases to function. I quite agree with you that psychoanalytic treatment should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual. Our difference is of a purely practical nature. It is confined to the fact that I do not wish to entrust this further development to the psychoanalyst. ...Analysts themselves are far removed from the ideal which you demand of them. As soon as they are entrusted with the task of leading the patient toward sublimation, they hasten away from the arduous tasks of psychoanalysis as quickly as they can so that they can take up the much more comfortable and satisfactory duties of the teacher and the paragon of virtue."

Putnam to Freud in response, disclaiming a metaphysical intent: "The point to which I refer is this: the individual is not to be thought of as existing alone, but should be considered as an integral part of the community in which he lives, and eventually of what must remain for him an ideal or idealized community....The interests of the community are implied in every one's motives and emotions, and sublimation consists in making these implicit interest explicit - i.e. in thinking out one's social obligations consciously and in the largest sense."

"Of course, it is also true that in my belief the sense of these social bonds, as well as of a certain power which the individual gets by virtue of his belonging to the community, is something not derived from experience, but innate - i.e., a sort of endowment of the mind as such....If I understand you, you would believe that all this community and ideal community notion is something which is a projections from experienced relations between the infant and his entourage." "In conversation with Mr. Royce [Josiah Royce, the Harvard idealist philosopher], he has recently made the point, which seems to me a good one, that in so far as the psychoanalyst creates new social tensions, he should feel bound to deal with them in a suitable fashion. Otherwise, the patients might feel, as I once said, as Dante would have felt if Virgil had deserted him somewhere on he slopes of the Mount of Purgatory."

Freud to Putnam on the occasion of receiving Putnam's book, Human Motives (1915), which stressed a transcendental basis for those motives: "I found a passage which, I must admit, applies to me: 'To accustom ourselves to the study of immaturity and childhood before proceeding to the study of maturity and manhood is often to habituate ourselves to an undesirable limitation of our vision....'

I recognize that that is my case....Probably I must have made use of this limitation in order to be able to observe what had been hidden from others. Let that justify my defense.

But there is one point on which I can agree with you. When I ask myself why I always have striven honestly to be considerate of others and if possible kind to them...really have no answer...Why I - as well as my six adult children - are compelled to be thoroughly decent human beings, is quite incomprehensible to me. Let me add the following consideration: if knowledge of the human soul is still so incomplete that my poor talents could succeed in making such important discoveries, it seems likely that it is too early to decide for or against hypotheses such as yours."

A Select List of Sources Concerning Freud in New England

Freud's Life and Thought
Freud and the New England Scene