Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, especially in the German-speaking countries, were dominated more by a complete lack of conscience than any attempt to refine or understand it. Nevertheless, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different from his, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society, whether the source of concern was economics, science and technology, race, or man’s fundamental nature as revealed in his psychology. The early 1930s were dominated by theories and investigations exploring the discontents of Western civilisation.

  The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in Modern Man in Search of a Soul was that ‘modern’ society had more in common with ‘archaic,’ primitive society than it did with what had gone immediately before – i.e., the previous phase of civilisation.4 The modern world was a world where the ancient ‘archetypes’ revealed themselves more than they had done in the recent past. This explained modern man’s obsession with his psyche and the collapse of religion. The modern condition was that man knew he was the culmination of evolution – science told him so – but also knew that ‘tomorrow he will be surpassed,’ which made life ‘solitary, cold, and frightening.’5 Further, psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche (which Jung clearly thought had happened), only offered a palliative. Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become ‘organised’ and used to help millions at a time, like Catholicism, say. And so, the participation mystique, as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. It set Western civilisation, a new civilisation, apart from the older Eastern societies.6 This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, contributed to neurosis, and to general anxiety.7

  For fifteen years, Karen Horney practised in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.8

  Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included ‘The Dread of Women’ and ‘The Denial of the Vagina’). But she was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and ‘deeply ignorant’ of modern anthropology and sociology (she was right). Psychoanalysis had itself become split by this time into a right wing and a left wing. What may be characterised as the right wing concentrated on biological aspects, delving further and further into infantile experience. Melanie Klein, a German disciple of Freud who moved to Britain, was the leader of this approach. The left wing, which consisted in the main of Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, was instead more concerned with the individual’s social and cultural background.9

  Horney took the line that ‘there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.’10 What is regarded as neurotic in one culture may be normal elsewhere, and vice versa. For her, however, two traits invariably characterised all neurotics. The first was ‘rigidity in reaction,’ and the second was ‘a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.’ For example, a normal person by definition becomes suspicious of someone else only after that person has behaved badly toward them; the neurotic ‘brings his or her suspicion with them at all times.’ Horney didn’t believe in the Oedipus complex either. She preferred the notion of ‘basic anxiety,’ which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterised as a feeling of ‘being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.’11 Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. This usually occurs in families where the parents have their own unresolved neuroses, initiating a vicious circle. By definition, the neurotic personality has lost, or never had, ‘the blissful certainty of being wanted.’12 Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with achievement: the neurotic striving for affection; the neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.13

  The most contentious part of Horney’s theory, for nonpsychoanalysts, was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of, in particular, contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (‘never give a sucker an even break’) and good neighborliness on the other (‘love your neighbour as yourself); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (‘keeping up with the Joneses’) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions; between the creed of unfettered individualism and the ever more common curbs brought about by environmental concerns and more laws.14 This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are ‘isolated and helpless.’15 Many would agree that they feel isolated and helpless, and maybe even neurotically so. But Horney’s theory never explains why some neurotics need affection, and others power, and why some become submissive. She herself denied that biology was responsible but never clarified what else might account for such large differences in behaviour.

  Horney’s feminism was new but not unique. The campaign to gain women the vote had exercised politicians in several countries prior to World War I, not least in Austria and Great Britain. Immediately after the war other matters had taken priority, both economically and psychologically, but as the 1920s passed, the status of women again became an issue.

  One of the minor themes in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is the easy effortlessness of the men who led Britain into war, and their casual treatment of women. Whereas all the men in the book have comfortable sets of rooms from which to embark on their fulfilling lives, the women always have to share, or are condemned to cold and draughty houses. This was a discrepancy Woolf was to take up in her most famous piece of nonfiction, A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. It appears that being turned away from an Oxbridge college library because she was a woman propelled her to write her feminist polemic. And it is certainly arguable that the greatest psychological revolution of the century has been in the female sensibility.16

  By 1929 Virginia Woolf had published six novels. These included Jacob’s Room, in the miracle year of 1922, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando in 1928. Her success, however, only seems to have made her more unsettled about the situation most female writers found themselves in. Her central argument in the 100-page essay was that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’17 Her view, which was to be echoed by others in different ways later in the century, was that a writer ‘is the product of his or her historical circumstances and that material conditions are crucially important’ – not just to whether the books get written but to the psychological status of the writer, male or female. But women were the main focus of her attention, and she went on to show how, in Britain at least, until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, a married woman’s income legally belonged to her husband. There could be no freedom of the mind, she felt, without freedom of circumstance. This meant that prior to the end of the seventeenth century there were very few women writers, and those who did write often only dabbled in it. Woolf herself suffered, in that the boys in her own family went to boarding school and then to university, whereas she and the other girls were educated at home.18 This brought several consequences. Female experience was underreported in fiction, and what experience was reported was inevi
tably distorted and/or restricted to certain kinds. For example, she felt that Jane Austen was not given access to the wider world that her talent demanded, with similar restrictions applying also to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her [Browning] irreparable damage as an artist.’19

  Though she felt feminist anger, Woolf was very clear that such anger had no place in fiction, which should have larger ambitions for itself, and she criticised earlier writers, like Browning and Charlotte Brönte, for giving way to that anger. She then moved on to consider the ways in which the female mind might complement the male mind, in an effort to show what literature has lost by the barriers erected against women. For example, she considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous mind, with male and female qualities coexisting in harmony, to be open to all possibilities. She makes no case for the superiority of either sex, but rather for the mind that allows both sympathies equal access. She actually wrote that it is ‘fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’20 She herself described A Room as a trifle, but she also said she wrote it with ardour, and it has certainly been a huge success. One reason is the style. When the book was published, in October 1929, it was reviewed in the Sunday Times of London by Desmond MacCarthy, who described it as ‘feminist propaganda’ but added ‘yet it resembles an almond-tree in blossom.’21 Woolf’s style is conversational, intimate. She manages to be both angry and above anger at the wrongs done to women writers, and would-be women writers, in the past. She devotes pages to the lunches she has eaten at Oxbridge colleges – where she says the food is much better in the women’s colleges than the men’s. And she makes it matter. Of course, Virginia Woolf’s fiction should be read alongside A Room of One’s Own. She did help emancipate women not only by her polemic but also by her example.

  Psychoanalysts and novelists were not the only people analysing the shortcomings of civilisations. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and reporters were all obsessed by the same theme. The 1930s were an especially fruitful time for anthropology. This discipline not only offered implicit comparison with, and criticism of, the capitalist way of life, but provided examples of more or less successful alternatives.

  Franz Boas still dominated anthropology. His 1911 book The Mind of Primitive Man made clear his loathing of nineteenth-century ideas that took for granted the inherent superiority of white Westerners. For Boas, anthropology ‘could free a civilisation from its own prejudices.’ The sooner data from other civilisations could be gathered and assimilated into the general consciousness, the better. Boas’s powerful and passionate advocacy had made anthropology seem a thrilling subject and an advance on the outmoded ethnocentrism of previous decades and the vague biologism of psychoanalysis. Two of Boas’s students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, produced highly influential studies that further undermined biologism. Like Boas, Mead and Benedict were interested in the link between race, genetics (still an infant subject) and culture. Mead had a master’s degree in psychology, but like many others she found anthropology more alluring and had been inspired by Ruth Benedict. Reticent to the point where her fellow students thought her depressed (they hated what they called her ‘castor oil’ faces), Ruth Benedict began to inspire respect. She and Mead eventually formed part of an influential international network of anthropologists and psychiatrists which also included Geoffrey Gorer, Gregory Bateson, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erik Erikson, and Meyer Fortes.

  For Boas anthropology was, as Mead later put it, ‘a giant rescue operation’ to show the importance of culture.22 Boas gave Margaret Mead the idea that made her famous while she was still in her twenties: he suggested she study adolescence in a non-Western society. It was a clever choice, for adolescence was arguably part of the pathology of Western culture. In fact, adolescence had been ‘invented’ only in 1905, in a study by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (a friend of Freud).23 His Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education referred to over sixty studies of physical growth alone and portrayed adolescence ‘as the period in which idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.’24 In other words, it was psychologically crucial. Boas was sceptical of the idea that the problems of adolescence were purely or largely biological. He felt they must owe as much to culture as to genes.25

  In September 1925 Margaret Mead spent several weeks in Pago Pago, capital of Tutuila, the chief island of American Samoa in the southwest Pacific Ocean.26 She stayed at a hotel made famous by Somerset Maugham in his 1920 story ‘Rain,’27 learning the basics of the Samoan language before launching on her field study.28 Mead told Boas that from her preliminary survey she proposed to spend her time on Ta’u, one of three small islands in the Manu’a group, about a hundred miles east of Pago Pago. This was ‘the only island with villages where there are enough adolescents, which are at the same time primitive enough and where I can live with Americans. I can eat native food, but I can’t live on it for six months; it is too starchy.’29 A government steamer stopped at the islands every few weeks, but she thought that was too infrequent to spoil the island’s status as an uncontaminated separate culture; the people of Ta’u were ‘much more primitive and unspoiled than any other part of Samoa…. There are no white people on the island except the navy man in charge of the dispensary, his family, and two corpsmen.’ The climate was far from perfect: year-round humidity of 80 percent, temperatures of 70–90 degrees, and ‘furious rains’ five times a day, which fell in ‘drops the size of almonds.’ Then the sun would come out, and everything on the island, including the people, would ‘steam’ until they were dry.30

  Mead’s account of her fieldwork, Coming of Age in Samoa, was phenomenally successful when it appeared in 1928. Her introduction to the book concluded with an account of what happened on the island after dark. In the moonlight, she wrote, ‘men and maidens’ would dance and ‘detach themselves and wander away among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.’31 She described ‘horseplay’ between young people, ‘particularly prevalent in groups of young women, often taking the form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.’ She said she was satisfied that, for these girls, adolescence ‘represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly development of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions…. To live as a girl with as many lovers as possible and then to marry in one’s own village, near one’s own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.’ Samoans, she insisted, had not the faintest idea of ‘romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity.’32 At the same time, the concept of celibacy was ‘absolutely meaningless.’33

  Samoa, or at least Ta’u, was an idyll. For Mead, the island existed only in ‘pastel tones,’ and she assumed that the picture was true for Samoa as a whole. In fact, this generalisation was inaccurate, for the main island had recently, in 1924, seen political problems and a killing. In Ta’u Mead was isolated and treated very well, the Samoans nicknaming her ‘Makelita’ after one of their dead queens. One of the reasons why Coming of Age in Samoa was so successful was that when her publisher, William Morrow, received the first draft of the manuscript, he suggested that she add two chapters explaining the relevance of her findings for Americans and American civilisation. In doing so, she stressed ‘Papa Franz’s’ approach, emphasising the predominance of culture over that of biology. Adolescence didn’t need to be turbulent: Freud, Horney, and the others were right – Western civilisation had a lot to answer for. The book was welcomed by the sexologist Havelo
ck Ellis; by Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist and the author of The Sexual Life of Savages; and by H. L. Mencken. Mead quickly became the most famous anthropologist in the world.34 She followed Samoa with two more field studies in the early 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In these books, one critic remarked, Margaret Mead took a ‘diabolical delight’ in stressing how little difference there is between so-called civilised man and his more ‘primitive’ cousins. But that was unfair. Mead was not uncritical of primitive societies, and the whole thrust of her books was to draw attention to variation in cultures. In New Guinea, children might be allowed to play all day long, but, she said, ‘alas for the theorists, their play is like that of young puppies or kittens. Unaided by the rich hints for play which children of other societies take from the admired adult traditions, they have a dull, uninteresting child life, romping good-humoredly until they are tired, then lying inert and breathless until rested sufficiently to romp again.’35 In Sex and Temperament, in which she looked at the Arapesh, she found that warfare was ‘practically unknown,’ as was personal aggression. The Arapesh had little in the way of art and, what she foundest oddest of all, little differentiation between men and women, at least in terms of psychology.36 Moving on from the Arapesh to the Mundugumor, on the Yua River, a tributary of the Sepik (also in New Guinea), she found a people that, she said, she loathed.37 Only three years before, headhunting and cannibalism had been outlawed. Here she recorded that it was not uncommon to see the bodies of very small children floating, ‘unwashed and unwanted,’ down the river.38 ‘They are always throwing away infants here,’ Mead wrote. Babies that were wanted, she said, were carried around in rigid baskets that they couldn’t see out of and which didn’t let in much light. The children were never cuddled or comforted when they cried, so that for Mead it was hardly surprising they should grow up feeling unloved or that Mundugumor society should be ‘riddled with suspicion and distrust.’ In the third society, the Tchambuli, fifty miles up the Sepik River, the familiar roles of men and women in Western society were reversed. Women were the ‘dominant, impersonal, managing partners,’ and men were ‘less responsible and emotionally dependent.’39 Mead’s conclusion, after this ‘orgy of fieldwork,’ was that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’