Freud, Murder, and Fame: Lessons in Psychology’s Fascinating History

by Todd C. Riniolo

  Summary

  Freud’s American trip was an extremely important step for his theories to gain a larger professional audience in the United States. Prior to his 1909 Clark University lectures, his name recognition was limited in this country to just a relatively small number of academic psychologists and medical professionals. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened to Freud and psychoanalysis if the Clark University celebration had not been rescheduled.

  Chapter 7: THE POPULARIZATION OF FREUD IN AMERICA: HOW POPULAR WAS HE?

  The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the popularization of Freud and psychoanalysis leading up to the summer of 1924. There is little doubt that Freud became famous with certain specialized groups of Americans, but that is different than obtaining widespread popularity with the general public. It should be noted that Freud was worried about psychoanalysis becoming contaminated in America, and this concern was justified.[4] Also, I will present two issues related to Freud and money that are not widely known. Specifically, Freud’s failed public relations campaign and his role as a marriage counselor provides additional evidence that Freud had not yet obtained widespread name recognition with the American public leading up the Leopold and Loeb trial during the summer of 1924.

  When Did Freud Become a Household Name in America?

  Unfortunately, it is not possible to exactly pin down when Freud crossed over to becoming a true household name in America. Surveys about what the public knew about psychoanalysis, psychology, and related topic areas had not yet occurred. However, the available evidence indicates that Freud obtaining widespread fame occurred sometime shortly after the Leopold and Loeb trial. Even those who may subsequently disagree with my interpretation about the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial for Freud’s popularization with the American public, have all pointed to documentation shortly after the summer of 1924 as evidence of Freud’s extensive popularity. For example, Freud made his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine (October 27, 1924), approximately 6 weeks after the sentencing of Leopold and Loeb. Also, Freud was offered a large sum of money in 1925 (reported as much as $100,000) by one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, Sam Goldwyn, to write or advise on the making of a love story for the big screen, which Freud ultimately declined (Gay, 1988). As Burnham (1979, p. 129) points out, “By the late 1920s not only was H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury being read in the most respectable circles, but the mythical “everyone,” friendly or hostile to psychoanalysis, was supposed to know about repression and the Oedipus complex. By 1925 Americans could be expected to understand such popular songs as the one suggesting a good subject to avoid: “Don’t tell me what you dream’d last night, For I’ve been reading Freud!””

  As documented by the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends in 1933 in Recent Social Trends in the United States, magazine stories about psychoanalysis peaked during the years following the trial after interest in Freud had slightly declined and leveled off in the preceding years (Hart, 1933). Most authors who have written about Freud’s popularity have pointed to these types of data fragments as evidence that Freud was now a household name. As Gay (1988, p. 454) notes, it was not only Freud’s name that became widely know at this time, but “his photograph showing a stern, carefully dressed elderly gentleman with penetrating eyes and the inevitable cigar, became known to millions.”

  Freud’s popularity with the general public continued even after media coverage about him substantially declined with the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression in America (Hart, 1933). For example, in an editorial published by the New York Times (February 22, 1931, p. 41, Maladies and Malingering), the Times would note that Freudian terms such as fixation and complex had become part of everyday language, and it was common for everyday people to provide Freudian explanations of others personality characteristics. It was not just academics and intellectuals that were familiar with Freud at this point, but the general public as well. Freud was truly famous.

  Freud’s Increasing Popularity

  There appears to be multiple factors that contributed to the increasing popularization of Freud in America, which initially occurred in specialized groups. As pointed out by Hale (1971, p. 398), “The most important single reason for popularization was the growing interest of physicians.” The medical community was interested in psychoanalysis as a method of treatment for patients showing a variety of psychological illnesses (i.e., Freud’s work was personally relevant to physicians as a method of treatment). This increased interest appears to be a direct result of the exposure Freud received from his American trip in 1909 (see Chapter 6), and the subsequent organization of psychoanalytic institutes that arose in America to promote psychoanalysis.

  Eric Caplan makes a compelling case that Freud’s acceptance in the United States owes a debt to the Emmanuel Movement, which was a “talking cure” type of treatment initially started as a joint undertaking between Episcopalian ministers and Boston physicians. This movement occurred in the United States just prior to Freud’s American trip, and ultimately set the stage for the positive reception that psychoanalysis received. As Caplan (1998a, pp. 306-7) has written:

  More significant than the content of Freud’s ideas was the context in which they were received. The fundamentally positive reception of psychoanalysis in the United States during the second decade of the twentieth century was largely attributable to a host of factors that had little to do with the substance of Freud’s theories. The allure of psychoanalysis derived in large measure from the unprecedented combination of popular and professional enthusiasm for mental therapeutics that existed at the time of its introduction in the United States. Had Freud delivered his lectures just 3 years earlier in, say, 1906, chances are great that they would have received little fanfare.

  Caplan’s historical interpretation points out the importance of contextual variables that contributed to Freud’s gaining popularity (i.e., it was not inevitable). For further information about the Emmanuel Movement, see Caplan’s (1998b) Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy.

  A second major influence in Freud’s gaining popularization was “The analysts themselves, organized and militant, eager to spread the gospel, co-operated enthusiastically with journalists” (Hale, 1971, p. 398). Some young intellectual patients also became “major publicists for psychoanalysis” (Hale, 1971, p. 399). Both the analysts and patients have been described by a number of historians as being similar to a religious movement. While there is much merit to this analogy, the early believers also shared characteristics of “true believers” of a political movement. They not only presented their beliefs in an extremely idealistic light, but also set out to personally attack and/or discredit those who challenged the intrinsic worth of their views.

  Yet, Freud’s work was peripheral to the vast majority of Americans until about 1915 (Burnham, 1991). Freud’s work as presented in media reports, which consisted primarily of magazine articles, did not reach a large enough audience and was not sufficiently relevant enough to most Americans. However, things began to change in 1915. Freud’s work became popular with a specific and influential subgroup, American intellectuals. As Burnham (1991, p. 120) notes, “Clearly something was happening in 1915. In the thinking of a critical number of Americans, psychoanalysis had reached such importance that they actively published on the subject and found receptive editors and readers, whether lauding psychoanalysis or attacking it. Learning about psychoanalytic ideas became an urgent matter among leading thinkers.”

  Burnham (1991) makes an important interpretation about 1915, which is consistent with the way human memory works (see Chapter 8). Burnham (1991) persuasively argues that psychoanalysis became “personally relevant to American intellectuals…” (p. 121). We are much more likely to pay attention and ultimately store information that is able to be retrieved when it has personal meaning. Why was psychoanalysis now relevant for the intellectual community as a whole, as opposed to simply a metho
d to treat hysterical patients or a way to interpret dreams? As Hale (1995, pp. 57-8) writes, “psychoanalysis offered a sweeping criticism of traditional sexual mores and virtues. It supplied theory and rhetoric for the attack: the overwhelming importance of the sexual instinct and the evils of “repression.” Psychoanalysis also supplied therapy for the internal conflicts rebellion engendered. Finally, it is not too much to see in the adoption of psychoanalysis an attempt to establish a new, universal, and iconoclastic image of man, one that became associated with varieties of “modern,” “liberal,” social, and cultural reform and that supplied a new faith for those who had repudiated traditional religious doctrines.”

  Freud and psychoanalysis were now relevant to a larger segment of society than just academics and the medical community. Intellectuals were attempting to spread the message to a wider audience. Yet, popularization at this point included “little sensationalism, and it was written primarily by intellectuals for well-read people if not also intellectuals” (Burnham, 1991, p. 126). The “vulgarization” for and by the public at-large would come later.

  It is interesting to read through some of the early magazine articles that Burnham points out above. For example, Max Eastman’s (1915a) initial article introducing Freud and psychoanalysis in Everybody’s Magazine. The article is a glowing account, as Eastman, who was the type of intellectual to whom psychoanalysis was now relevant, describes “psycho-analysis” as “a kind of “magic” that is rapidly winning the attention of the most scientific minds in the world of medicine” (p. 743). The article also exposes the reader not only to Freud, but to other important relevant figures who are given a description with a picture (Carl Jung, Smith Ely Jelliffe, G. Stanley Hall, A. A. Brill, and William A. White). This article was written for an intellectual audience.[5]

  An article in Good Housekeeping Magazine (“Diagnosis by Dreams”) by Peter C. Macfarlane (1915) was written for a much more general female audience, and is also a glowing endorsement of “psycho-analysis.” The article starts as follows (p. 125):

  Here is hope for every woman—and every man—who because of the pressure of unconscious forces is living less than a full, free life. Few reach maturity without discords having been struck upon the delicate strings of the soul, and these discords later rise up to nag and vex. By tracing present symptoms back of memory, back to their lodgment in the subconscious mind, the practitioner is able to effect a cure. Women, who are perhaps the chief sufferers, are here for the first time offered a readable analysis of the new science.

  A couple of important issues should be mentioned regarding the popularization of Freud and psychoanalysis that began in 1915. First, as perhaps should be expected, the early popularizations that attempted to spread the message to a larger audience, while avoiding sensationalizing the sexual aspects of Freud’s theories, were typically glowing accounts about psychoanalysis. These accounts tended to exaggerate claims about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis that “added a miraculous dimension drawn from the folklore of happiness and success that had pervaded pre-Freudian therapies and mind cures” (Hale, 1971, p. 400). For example, in the Good Housekeeping Magazine article by Macfarlane (1915) mentioned above, the author tells the reader about a healthy 39 year-old mechanic, who had a wife and family, but one morning woke up blind. Yet, through the process of dream interpretation while undergoing “psycho-analytic” treatment, the man’s blindness “totally disappeared, and he went back to his work a well man” (p. 130). Eastman’s (1915a, pp. 742-3) initial article “Exploring the Soul and Healing the Body” in Everybody’s Magazine also provides a miraculous example (this type of example would be perpetuated by further authors):

  Let me illustrate this with another story, that of a friend of mine who was cured of fainting spells in the psycho-analytic hospital at Zurich, Switzerland. He is a young man of muscular body and vigorous health, and he never had any chronic trouble except these sudden attacks of nausea and swooning, which no doctor of medicine could explain. At the hospital in Zurich he was asked to relate to the physician the whole story of his life, omitting nothing that he could remember, no matter how trivial. And he was asked also every morning to relate the dreams he had dreamed the night before. And by piecing together all the significant things he related in the course of a several months’ confessional, and by interpreting his dreams in a manner I shall explain later, the physician managed to bring my friend to realize for himself what it was in his mind that was unconsciously causing the trouble.

  He had been in love with a girl and engaged to her. She had broken the engagement. In doing so she had told him that she hoped, if he were ever sick or in trouble, he would tell her, and she would come to him. He had gone away and tried to forget her, and, so far as he consciously knew, he had succeeded. But unconsciously he was thinking of her all the time, and he was recoiling from all other interests and activities, and longing to be with her. And this unconscious longing found expression in fits of sickness—perhaps just because she had told him that she would come to him if he were ever sick or in trouble.

  And the best part of the story is, that after the day my friend told his physician that he understood this unconscious cause of his fainting spells, the fainting spells absolutely never returned.

  Finally, one last “miraculous” example in the “Mr.-er-er-Oh! What’s his name?” article (Eastman, 1915b, p. 98), as it will provide a transition for the next issue to be discussed.

  Dr. Jung describes the case of two sisters who fell in love at the same time and under equally auspicious circumstances; but when it came to the question of marriage one of them took the plunge and lived a happy life with her lover, while the other, after a scene of tears and hysterical fright, provoking anger in him, was finally carried away to a health resort, irritable, depressed, jealous of her sister, and suffering from a nervous intestinal trouble.

  In process of curing her of this trouble Dr. Jung learned that she had been an excessively sensitive child, the favorite of her parents, and that she had always had a peculiarly passionate attachment to her father. It was this “father image” which, dwelling still in her unconscious mind, absorbed all her power of loving and made her recoil, in spite of herself, from the natural course of life which her sister pursued.

  Some Limitations of Freud’s Popularity Spreading

  The above articles contain some case examples with rather spectacular outcomes. Yet, it is important to keep in mind several issues when evaluating whether or not this amount and type of media coverage was sufficient to make Freud a household name with the general public. First, most Americans at that time did not read the magazines that had articles pertaining to Freud (magazines tend to have specialized readerships). While the popular magazines that Freud was featured in certainly had large readerships, the mechanic from Scranton and the carpenter from Mobile did not regularly read Good Housekeeping Magazine. Newspapers were at the time the primary way to reach the general public, but Freud received very limited coverage in them (see Chapter 8).

  One thing that has struck me as odd when reading about the media coverage that Freud and psychoanalysis received is how some historians have interpreted the media coverage to be more widespread than it actually was with the general public. For example, the media coverage of Freud’s American visit has been described as far-reaching despite the fact that it was limited to some local newspapers and one national magazine. I would interpret this in the context of making Freud a household name as limited, especially when contrasted against media coverage that is truly widespread, like what the Titanic received in 1912 and in the subsequent years after the tragedy. As a concrete example, from 1915 to 1918 (4 years in which Freud’s popularity started to increase substantially within the intellectual community), according to the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, there are only 8 articles about Freud, which averages out to two a year (there were 31 on psychoanalysis, which is less than 8 articles per year). I do not mean to gloss over this coverage as unimportant, as it helped F
reud obtain name recognition among certain segments of the American public. However, this amount of media coverage should not be interpreted as blanketing the nation and automatically exposing everyone to Freud and psychoanalysis.

  Second, Freud was not always the sole focus of the articles pertaining to psychoanalysis and miracle cures, as the above case involving Jung illustrates. As Hale (1995, p. 27) notes, Freud was often presented as “merely the first among equals.” Freud was often lumped in with Jung, Adler, and other analysts. In fact, in Eastman’s article that first exposed Freud and psychoanalysis to the readers of Everybody’s Magazine, the reader is led to believe that Freud, Jung, Jelliffe, G. Stanley Hall, Brill, and White were equally important members of a single unified movement. This would have the likely effect of further diluting the potential for widespread name recognition as a single name standing alone is more likely to make an impression that one of several names mentioned together. By this time, Freud had already broken with Jung, and Hall (who was not a clinician) would eventually become more of an advocate of Alfred Adler, who also already had a bitter split with Freud. Intellectuals who were attempting to spread the message about Freud and the effectiveness of psychoanalysis often did so in a way that Freud himself would not have approved of (e.g., being lumped in with Jung and Adler).

  Third, it is difficult to know how personally relevant Freud would have been to the average American who was not interested in political upheaval or sexual liberation, but busy working long hours and raising a family. The average work week back in the early portion of the 20th century included working on Saturdays for most people as time for leisure activities was more limited in comparison to today. Likewise, not all Americans would be interested in the latest “mind cure” to be discussed. Psychoanalysis was not the first “mind cure” with equally spectacular results written about in national magazines (Hornstein, 1992), and certainly would not be the last.