Psychoanalysis and Consumer Society

Freudian introspection aimed to foster the individual's capacity to live an authentically personal life, yet it wound up helping to consolidate consumer society...Psychoanalysis remained marginal to European psychiatry until after Wrofl War II, when Americans brought it back to Europe, but it became central to American culture almost immediately. The reason was the weakness of traditional authority in the United States and the widespread belief in the power of the individual mind to overcome "external" difficulties. In that context, American psychoanalysis became intensely popular. As a result, it was caught up in a process that emphasized personal empowerment, self-regulation, and individual charisma. As we shal see, the actual practice of analysis was less important than its cultural impact. Ultimately American analysis came to mean almost the opposite of the self-reflective exploration of internal limitations that characterized its European counterpart.

From the intermittently fascinating Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, by Eli Zaretsky.