Secrets of the Soul--A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (review)

Almost every new interpretation of the history of psychoanalysis claims from the outset that none of its predecessors has placed the subject within its accurate social, political, and cultural context. Yet each one of these histories, from Freud's own through those of Schorske and Roudinesco, has crafted a distinctive way of traversing precisely this arena, as well as the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions between individual human behavior and the larger social environment.¹

Enter Zaretsky's enviably researched study of psychoanalysis. According to Zaretsky who has written previously on modern cultural history of the family, capitalism, and psychoanalysis, no one has been able to grasp psychoanalysis in its entirety because an explicit sociocultural framework in which to understand its opposite—that is, ourselves as individuals distinct from family and society—has been missing. To fill this gap, Zaretsky proposes that psychoanalysis was "the first great theory and practice of 'personal life.'" His definition reframes psychoanalysis and offers a postindustrial, deep sense of identity that resonates with the dawning of modernism (1880s–1920s). It is distinct from the family and totally individual; each person carries his or her own unconscious system of symbols and narratives "apparently devoid of socially shared meaning" (6). Attempting to show both the cause and the effect of this idea, the author sets Freud's life and his writing against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of the psychoanalytic movement itself, the Enlightenment philosophers of Europe, the French surrealists, antisemitism, Jacques Lacan, New York jazz, fascism, the Cold War, and the 1960s.

The first chapters link Freud's best-known themes with Zaretsky's ideas on culture, self, and family (with nods to Schorske and Jencks, to name but two of the book's repertoire of international idea makers) before becoming a sequence of good pieces of information—literary, theoretical, and cinematographic—that unfortunately do not cohere.² The bits of information are appealing in themselves: for instance, Wyndham Lewis mocking Sherwood Anderson, Herbert Marcuse on Henry Ford, and Talcott Parsons joining Grete and Edward Bibring to study the ambiguous development of self-control in response to collapsing external authority. Nevertheless, the text falls short of a unified argument for Zaretsky's theory about the emergence of a Freudian "post-family," postmodernist (but not postmodern), and powerfully personal unconscious, or even for psychoanalysis as modernism.

Although a chapter on Ford tantalizes with hints that factory organization stimulates individual identity, Zaretsky generally disappoints in his attempts to present the depth of exchange between psychoanalytic and social considerations. Those who do not need to be persuaded will be satisfied with exactly what the book delivers. Alas, despite Zaretsky's effort to be dispassionate and historiographically inclusive, this book is unlikely to settle the confrontation of nearly mythical proportions between those who try to explicate the history of psychoanalysis within a sociocultural dynamic and those who focus reverently on Freud as genius tout court.