Understanding psychoanalysis at the turn of the centuries

Freud withheld publication of The Interpretation of Dreams until 1900. His aim was to signal his ambition that psychoanalysis should play a decisive role in the new century. From its tenuous beginnings in an elite Männerbund (or inner circle) of analysts around Freud in Vienna, Berlin and London, by the time Freud died in 1939, psychoanalysis had become a global movement. Even before the inauguration of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1910, psychoanalysis's founding postulate of the unconscious had begun capturing the imaginations of film-makers, ad-men and the avant-garde. The embrace of Freudian ideas by the avant-garde in the first decades of the last century inaugurated a wider process that would see psychoanalytic motifs saturate popular culture by the 1950s. Despite repression at the hands of both Soviets and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s, clinical psychoanalysis was practised between the wars in the United States, Italy, Holland, France, Turkey, Palestine, Argentina, India and Japan. In the United States, psychoanalysis was from the 1920s closely integrated into the medical establishment. So entrenched a facet of the post-New Deal state did it become that by 1941, when the United States entered World War II, the Surgeon General's Office required every military doctor to know its basic principles. In the 1950s, more than half of the university chairs in psychiatry in the new world were held by analysts (Kirsner 2004: 345).