Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology (review)

At once a personal history, a history of psychoanalysis, and an experiment in scholarly form, Putnam Camp traces the genealogy of psychoanalysis in America by focusing on an Adirondack retreat at which Freud in 1909 was a somewhat reluctant visitor. Childhood memories of a picture of his father (wearing American Indian costume—in prewar Vienna, or was it Zurich?), and of his mother's "blue-blooded" reading of Hiawatha, lead Prochnik back to Freud, Ferenczi, and Jung, "with their knees knocking" en route to a summer "camp" presided over by the author's maternal great-grandfather, James Jackson Putnam. Freud and Putnam made an unlikely pair: "they came from opposite worlds, cherished polarized ambitions, and promoted seemingly irreconcilable visions of human nature." Against the image of Freud discovering "the biological conundrum" of individual consciousness, Prochnik, with the help of a discovered trove of family letters, depicts Putnam pursuing "self-transcendence" through "communal obligation." In Freud, Prochnik finds an ironist and materialist; in Putnam, a New England idealist, for whom psychology must be "an evolving theory of the soul." Prochnik remembers having wanted to "know who won their debate . . . so that he could be on the winner's side." Prochnik emerged as a Freudian, but what attracted him in psychoanalysis was what he calls its "radical skepticism"; and he acknowledges in both autobiographical and historical terms (he ends evocatively in a jasmine-filled Jerusalem garden) that Freud's vision is incomplete on its own. The "form of philosophy" that Putnam (and his great-grandson) would eventually embrace links the best of Vienna with Boston, pronouncing neither winner nor loser but suggesting the possibility of a "hybrid practice"—both clinical and lived.