Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [376]
I’m fed up. A whole year I’ve been at this—a mixed-up, miserable, wasted year. And for what? Nothing. Not a goddam thing. One of these days I’m going to find the guts to walk out on you and not come back. Why should I come back? You do nothing for me, nothing. Year after year, you just listen. How many years do you want? Who the hell do you think you are? How can you do it?—changing no one, curing no one, raking in the money and spending your weekends in Bermuda, too gutless to admit that you’re selling false merchandise. There’s more humanity in my garbageman than in you.28
Occasionally an analyst might even let a patient who was unable to voice his or her thoughts lie silent on the couch for the whole hour, or even a number of hours, without trying to help the patient break through—yet would charge for the time spent. Humorists and satirists made this seem a common occurrence, although it was actually very rare. Apart from a sense of obligation to help the patient, most analysts would have found such hours of silence unendurable.
What were they like, these formidable authorities who could exert such power over their patients while remaining aloof and seemingly uncaring? Some, outside their clinical hours, played a role that they gradually came to believe was their real self: wise, philosophic, penetrating of gaze, given to ruminative silences, formal, witty, fiercely competitive, and easily wounded—in short, as much like Freud as possible.29 But in truth they were no more all of a piece than are physicists, violinists, or plumbers. Psychoanalysts came (and still come) in all models, ranging from the glacial to the warm, from the austere to the amiable, from the strong to the weak. Nonetheless, some qualified observers were able to make a few generalizations about them. Arthur Burton, a lay analyst who edited a volume of short autobiographies by analysts, said that many of them feel special and lonely, are wise rabbinical teachers (even the non-Jews among them), possess certain so-called feminine qualities (“mothering,” intuition, sensitivity, emotionality), and tend to be both agnostic and liberal.30
A very different picture was painted by the author and educator Martin Gross in a vitriolic assault in The Psychological Society (1978). He portrayed psychoanalysts as aloof, money-grubbing, arrogant, addicted to oneupmanship, brainwashers of their patients, exaggerators of their results, and either self-deluded believers or self-aware charlatans. There might have been a modicum of truth in his charges, but by and large nonpartisan surveys and studies of psychoanalysts portrayed them far more positively.31 By the 1950s, moreover, many of them were shifting toward ego analysis, adopting some of the neo-Freudian emphasis on realistic interaction with their patients, and dealing actively not only with the patient’s unconscious and the past but also with his or her conscious processes and present problems.
Still, the many disadvantages of psychoanalysis, even in modified form, and the development of briefer, less costly treatments, brought about a decline in its prestige and popularity during the 1960s. There were also larger reasons for its loss of status. As Glen O. Gabbard, then at the Menninger Foundation, wrote in 1990, “The post–World War II enthusiasm for psychoanalysis as a panacea for social problems led to a bitter disenchantment in the 1960s”32—unjustly, since psychoanalysis had never been presented as a remedy for social ills but only for individual problems. Scores of articles in professional journals and popular magazines spoke of the “crisis in psychoanalysis,” of its “status decline,” and of the lack of evidence that it was an effective treatment. Summing up, Dr. Judd Marmor, an eminent psychoanalyst, wrote that “the handwriting is on the wall for all to see. Psychoanalysis is in serious danger.”
That was in the 1960s, and psychoanalysis has not yet disappeared. But for many years it dwindled steadily in prestige and use. By the late 1980s Helen Fischer, administrative