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By Root 1990 0

writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: “the theater of the absurd.” Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.

The Freudian mania in the American culture, apart from the practice of psychotherapy itself, also filled a real need in the forties and fifties: the need for an ideology, a national purpose, an application of the mind to the problems of people. Analysts themselves have recently suggested that the lack of an ideology or national purpose may be partially responsible for the personal emptiness which sends many men and women into psychotherapy; they are actually looking for an identity which therapy alone can never give. The religious revival in America coincided with the rush to psychoanalysis, and perhaps came about for the same reason—behind the search for identity, or for shelter, a vacuum of larger purpose. It is significant that many ministers now spend much of their time in giving psychotherapy—pastoral counseling—to members of their congregations. Do they thereby also evade the larger questions, the real search?

When I was interviewing on college campuses in the late fifties, chaplains and sociologists alike testified to the younger generation’s “privatism.” A major reason for the early marriage movement, they felt, was that the young saw no other true value in contemporary society. It’s easy for the professional social critic to blame the younger generation for cynical preoccupation with private pleasure and material security—or for the empty negativism of beatnikery. But if their parents, teachers, preachers, have abdicated purposes larger than personal emotional adjustment, material success, security, what larger purpose can the young learn?

The five babies, the movement to suburbia, do-it-yourself and even beatnikery filled homely needs; they also took the place of those larger needs and purposes with which the most spirited in this nation were once concerned. “I’m bored with politics…there’s nothing you can do about it anyhow.” When a dollar was too cheap, and too expensive, to live a life for, and your whole society seemed concerned with little else, the family and its loves and problems—this, at least, was good and true. And the literal swallowing of Freud gave the illusion that it was more important than it really was for the whole of suffering society, as the literal parroting of Freudian phrases deluded suffering individuals into believing that they were cured, when underneath they had not yet even faced their real troubles.

Under the Freudian microscope, however, a very different concept of family began to emerge. Oedipus conflict and sibling rivalry became household words. Frustration was as great a peril to childhood as scarlet fever. And singled out for special attention was the “mother.” It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for almost everything. In every case history of troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American, could be found a mother. A frustrated, repressed, disturbed, martyred, never satisfied, unhappy woman. A demanding, nagging, shrewish wife. A rejecting, overprotecting, dominating mother. World War II revealed that millions of American men were psychologically incapable of facing the shock of war, of facing life away from their “moms.” Clearly something was “wrong