1. References to more straightforward, descriptive accounts of the mentalhygiene movement will be found below. The oversimplification of motives and historical process characteristic of so much recent revisionist work is described by Banner, Lois W., “Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation,” Journal of American History, 9, No. 1 (06 1973), 23–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Muraskin, William A., “The Social-Control Theory in American History: a Critique,” Journal of Social History, 9, No. 4 (Summer 1976), 559–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My comments are based upon the judgment that history is typically characterized by complexity and unintended consequences rather than neat cause-effect relations and utilitarian calculi, that is by a preference for a tragic or ironic mode of interpretation to a progressive one. The styles of historical interpretation have been expounded in the great and highly complex book by White, Hayden V., Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar, which appears to have the ironic (or tragic) implication that there are no rationally entailed grounds for preferring a more complex to a simpler view of history.

2. General studies of psychoanalytic influence, usually focusing on the period before 1925, when the ideas were not yet so domesticated as to be part of the woodwork, include Hale, Nathan G. Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the U.S. 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971)Google Scholar, the most massive and thorough; Burnham, John C., “Psychoanalysis in American Civilization Before 1918,” diss. Stanford Univ., 1958Google Scholar; and Burnham, , Psychoanalysis in American Medicine (New York: International Universities Press, 1967)Google ScholarPubMed; Matthews, Fred, “Americanization of Sigmund Freud,” Journal of American Studies 1 (04 1967), 39–62CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Also Zinberg, Norman, “Psychoanalysis and the American Scene: A Reappraisal,” Diogenes, No. 50 (Summer 1965), 73–111Google Scholar. Burnham's important article, “The New Psychology: From Narcissism to Social Control,” in Change and Continuity in 20th Century America: The 1920's, eds., Braeman, John et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar, endeavors to see psychoanalysis in the context of other mental phenomena and institutional demands.

Psychoanalysis, or more broadly psychiatry, was not the only vehicle for the spread of an organismic, therapeutic model in American thought. For the parallel, sometimes overlapping transformation of sociological thought, see my Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill Queens Univ. Press, 1977)Google Scholar, especially Chap. 6.

The area of psychiatry itself in which the newer scientific model of personality clashed most vividly with older religious and legal models was of course forensic psychiatry, which cannot be dealt with here. However, like anyone concerned with this subject I am heavily indebted to Rosenberg, Charles E.'s The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar, which illuminates areas far beyond its apparent focus of attention.

A certain tendency to deflate the significance of psychoanalytic ideas has appeared in recent scholarship. See, for example, Graham, Patricia Albjerg, Progressive Education: from Arcady to Academe. A History of the Progressive Education Association 1919–1935 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967)Google Scholar, which finds relatively little overt psychoanalytic influence on its subject. The journal Progressive Education did however devote one issue (December 1934) to mental hygiene.

The nascent argument that Freud didn't really matter very much may reflect the positivist mentality in one of its quantitative manifestations. One tries to determine the extent of Freudian influence by counting the frequency of his name or of some very specific concepts like repression or sublimation. But ideas cannot be treated as billiard balls; they are more akin to fields of force, in which something presented under one label may energize or inject something else that crystallizes into a stimulus to thought or action in a field apparently remote from the starting point. The life of the mind is less logical or naming than it is a kind of psycho-logic or law of free analogy or of elective affinities, in which energy crosses between parallel or converging lines of thought.

3. The phrase “Kingdom of good adjustment” comes from an unpublished paper by Sol Cohen, of the Graduate School of Education, UCLA: “The Kingdom of Good Adjustment: Psychoanalysis and Education in the 1920's and 1930's.” The term “therapeutic” here derives from two sources: the customary psychiatric or general-medical usage—a process of treatment designed to heal—and the elusive usage in Philip Rieffs brilliant Spenglerian tract, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1965)Google Scholar. Rieff does not define the term, but uses it as a noun, to refer to what he sees as the modal personality type of the modernized world in the late twentieth century. Roughly he means a combination of narcissist, hypochondriac, and cultural anthropologist; and sees this modal post-historic personality as the result of several generations of internalizing psychiatric norms and the special selfconsciousness of the analyst-patient, the “clinical gaze” which enjoins its human occupant to inspect all actions for latent content, and ask others (and himself), what did you (or I) really mean by that? Earlier, I had hoped to use the concept of the therapeutic as an organizing principle for the less radical or consolatory adaptations of psychoanalysis, but it seems to be more a point of view than a specific cluster of ideas. Anything is therapeutic in the sense that it passes the time en route to the grave with a minimum of conscious meaninglessness.

4. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, standard edition, XXI (London: the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), pp. 59–145Google Scholar. “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” standard edition, IX, pp. 179 ff. American mental hygienists divided over even this smidgeon of liberation; a poll in 1920 on the advice to give on sexual intercourse outside marriage showed some of the psycho-analysts urging liberalization but the majority of doctors standing firm for celibacy. Watson, John B. and Lashley, K. S., “A Consensus of Medical Opinion upon Questions relating to Sex Education and Venereal Disease Campaigns,” Mental Hygiene, 4 (10 1920), 769–847.Google Scholar

5. Berger, Peter L., “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis,” Social Research, 32 (Spring 1965), 26–41Google Scholar, a brilliant and tough-minded piece to which I am much indebted. Berger's flat assertion of sociological imperialism at the end is too simple; most people need to believe in the truth of their ideas, and canons of logic, evidence and poetic resonance are arguably not wholly spun off from the functional needs of society. Berger also bypasses the sense in which the sociological mode of thought itself may serve as a consolatory world view; see Matthews, , Quest for an American Sociology, Chap. 1.Google Scholar

6. On the efforts to study the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy and to disentangle the factors mentioned, see Kernberg, Otto F. et al. , Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (Topeka, Kan.: Menninger Institute, 1972)Google ScholarPubMed; Strupp, Hans H., “The Assessment of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,” Psychoanalytic Review, 61 (Summer 1974), 247–56.Google Scholar

On the related but distinct endeavor to test psychoanalytic concepts experimentally, a dense summary of work through 1970 is in Kline, Paul, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory (London: Methuen, 1972)Google Scholar. One of the concepts given reasonably convincing support is anality, the foundation stone, as it might be put, of scholarship as of other styles of accumulation and rending. A quick, brilliant, glancing effort to put the whole issue of theory and therapy, their relations and changing effectiveness over time, into historical perspective, is by Levenson, Edgar A., The Fallacy of Understanding. An Inquiry into the Changing Structure of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1972).Google Scholar

7. This is a vast subject, and the very simplified and antimedicalist precis here might be supplemented first by two longer summary accounts. Peter Sedgwick connects the work of Szasz, Foucault, Goffman and Laing in “Mental Illness is Illness,” Salmagundi, 20 (Summer-Fall 1972), 196–224Google Scholar. (His rejection rests on the argument that physical illness as a concept has the same conceptual vaguenesses as mental illness, but no one doubts the utility of a medical model in such cases.) A lucid treatment by a younger psychiatrist friendly to the antimedicalists, framed by therapeutic experience which led to his own “radicalization,” is in Foudraine, Jan, Not Made of Wood. A Psychiatrist Discouers his Profession (New York: Macmillan, 1974), esp. pp. 308–70Google Scholar. For part of the voluminous bibliography of the controversies, see the notes in both Sedgwick and Foudraine.

Friedenberg, Edgar Z., R. D. Laing (New York: Viking Press, 1974)Google Scholar, is a fair-minded account which tries to add some historical dimension to the intraprofessional warfare.

While Erving Goffman is the most famous name associated with the sociological exposition of personality traits as role-playing, the labeling theory of deviance as defined by society (or authority) is an enterprise rather separate from his work. See Scheff, Thomas J., Being Mentally Ill: a Sociological Theory (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1966)Google Scholar; Nanette J. Davis has written an appraisal in “Labelling Theory in Deviance Research,” Sociological Quarterly, 13 (Autumn 1972), 447–74.Google Scholar

8. See Jahoda, Marie, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (New York: Basic Books, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Levenson, , Fallacy of UnderstandingGoogle Scholar, supplies impressionistic evidence for the contraction of expectation in the era of Fritz Perls.

9. Geertz, Clifford, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193–233Google Scholar, quotation 220. Szasz's numerous works, which are weakened by a naive if brave notion of theoretical validity, include The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)Google Scholar and The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)Google Scholar. Some of the issues involved in distinguishing between irresistible objective demonstration and deliberate appeal to sentiment are raised by Martin, Albro's Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads, 1897–1917 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Although discussing an apparently remote area, Martin is concerned with one of the processes involved here, the attempt to depoliticize controversial decisions and give them to boards of neutral, disinterested experts.

The most succinct exposition of the conflicting views of personality and responsibility held by traditional Christianity and the common law, on the one hand, and modern psychiatry, on the other, is in Rosenberg, , Trial of the Assassin GuiteauGoogle Scholar, cited above, note 2. Burkhart Holzner has suggested that some scientific models, like that of Darwin applied to human affairs, will have an intrinsic ideological effect, in that their metaphorical power will infallibly suggest that certain value choices are superior to others. See Holzner, , Reality Construction in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1968), pp. 143–46.Google Scholar

10. This idiosyncratic definition of “ideology” attempts to avoid the imputation of bias or distortion noted as characteristic in Clifford Geertz's seminal essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” cited above. Geertz's argument that ideologies arise in problematic situations as necessary, and necessarily dramatized, guides to remedial action seems clearly true. See Calhoun, Daniel, The Intelligence of a People (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar, Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar

11. The last quotation is from Rosenberg, Charles E., No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 98Google Scholar. For a fuller treatment of the variant meanings of common sense, see Oxford English Dictionary. Compact Edition (Oxford, 1971), p. 484Google Scholar. The mutual reinforcement of such variants as “good sound practical sense,” “the general sense, feeling or judgment of mankind, or of a community,” and “the plain wisdom which is every man's inheritance” provides a powerful defense against any challenge to collective wisdom. C. S. Lewis offers a valuable historical account of the concept in Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961). pp. 146 ff.Google Scholar

The issue of what is universal and what is parochial in any system of common sense is related to that of the relativity of mental disorder—see the recent spirited defense of universality in Murphy, Jane M.'s “Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-cultural Perspective,” Science, 191 (03 12, 1976), 1019–28CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and works cited. The questions are complex, and a fuller statement will be needed before any degree of confident appraisal is possible. Murphy's work does seem to suggest that while some category of mental illness is universal and that certain types of behavior would be so categorized in widely different societies, the modern West greatly extended the range of behaviors that would be so categorized.

A general defense of the range and objectivity of commonsense beliefs, which exploits psychological theory and data, is in Isaacs, Nathan, The Foundations of Common Sense (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949)Google Scholar.

On commonsense philosophies, see Grave, S. A., “Common Sense,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed., Edwards, Paul (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), II, pp. 155–60Google Scholar. For the Scottish commonsense philosophy in the United States, three recent accounts are especially valuable in suggesting its role as a censor of ideas that might tend to undermine moral and social consensus: Meyer, Donald H., The Instructed Conscience (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), esp. pp. 341–58Google Scholar; and Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), esp. pp. 27–49Google Scholar. Howe's suggestive account shows the conscious use of Scottish philosophy as an insulation against metaphysical or religious doubt that might undermine faith in the givens of social order; it also delineates the loss of faith in these doctrines when the slavery controversy brought serious ethical conflict to every citizen. The commonsense defense worked when the most serious challenge was the existence of Hume's and Hobbes's writings, but not when unavoidable moral conflict permeated daily life.

Hannah Arendt's ambitious sketch toward a history of the concept of common sense, which, put crudely, suggests that the notion changed after Descartes to a more subjective power whose vulnerability created new anxieties and a strain for conformity of belief, is in The Human Condition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 249–58.Google Scholar

12. The variant senses of “enthusiasm” and “mania” are set out in Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition, p. 876 and p. 1715Google Scholar, where the Emerson and Martineau statements are given. Like many later terms originally clinical, like “paranoia” and “schizophrenia,” “mania” had been generalized into common use for any excessive expression of focused enthusiasm, as in “railway mania,” but seems to have retained a bit of the medical odium.

The image of the Yankee as enthusiast has been treated in a well-known historical literature, including Cross, Whitney R.'s The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1950)Google Scholar, and its sociocultural and psychosexual dimensions in works of literary history like Fiedler, Leslie's Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966)Google Scholar and Anderson, Quentin's The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971)Google Scholar. Psychoanalytically informed studies of the heroes and/or creators of this vernacular romantic individualism often tend to read like clinical case studies. Two very intelligent and suggestive psychobiographies, Miller, Edwin Haviland's Melville (New York: Braziller, 1975)Google Scholar, and Raymond Dante Gozzi's undeservedly unpublished “Tropes and Figures: a Psychological Study of David Henry Thoreau” (Diss. New York University, 1957)Google Scholar both seem extended applications of Goethe's dictum: classicism is health, romanticism illness. Freud himself was skeptical if not hostile toward religious enthusiasm, transcendental aspiration, and it is a difficult question whether psychoanalytic analyses are value-neutral or carry a built-in preference for the calm and classical. Quentin Anderson has noted the impeaching tendency of a psychoanalytical approach to Thoreau, “Thoreau on July 4,” New York Times Book Review, 07 4, 1971, pp. 1 ff.Google Scholar

13. This capsule account attempts to suggest a relation between the concern of physicians and psychologists with nervous intensity and the more general concern to temper American intensity and moral seriousness with poise, grace, and self-restraint—to supplement morals with manners. On the critique of “American Nervousness,” as its best-known critic, George M. Beard, called it, see Rosen, George, Madness in Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar, esp. Chap. 6; Rosenberg, Charles E., “George M. Beard and American Nervousness,” in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 98–108Google Scholar. On the popular literature of mental hygiene before the formation of Beers's organization, see Sicherman, Barbara, “The Paradox of Prudence: Mental Health in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History, 62 (03 1976), 890–912CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and her invaluable “The Quest for Mental Health in America,” Diss. Columbia University, 1967. Channing's praise of blandness is from Howe's invaluable study of Harvard moral philosophy, The Unitarian Conscience, p. 300Google Scholar. See also James, William, Talks to Teachers on Psychology (New York, 1899).Google Scholar

It might be objected that nineteenth-century moral philosophy and twentieth-century writings on mental hygiene are distinct genresA. close study of tracts on right conduct would be required to establish the continuity empirically, but a comparison of Howe's Harvard moralists with the literature of mental hygiene discussed below should suggest the striking similarities in content, audience, and function. It was the Scottish School that coined the term “psychology” and made the study of normal mental functioning so central in American philosophy, whence it separated out in the late nineteenth century to become an autonomous discipline and one of the contributors to the mental hygiene movement. Some hints as to continuity of message through the change from religious and epistemological to scientific framework may be found in the work of the emigre Harvard moralist of the Eliot years, Munsterberg, Hugo, Psychology and Social Sanity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1914).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. The Ives canon now has two worthy books, written from sharply different viewpoints: Wooldridge, David, From the Steeples and Mountains (New York: Knopf, 1974)Google Scholar; and Rossiter, Frank R., Charles lues and His America (New York: Liveright, 1975)Google Scholar. Wooldridge's imaginative account deals seriously with Ives's music. Most of all, Wooldridge in his persona as author re-creates Ives's jaggedness and loathing for the effeminization that he saw in submission to convention. Thomson, Virgil, “The Ives Case,” American Music Since 1910 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), pp. 22–30Google Scholar, offered a more skeptical judgment, attempting to separate vision and enthusiasm from ultimate achievement. The use of genteel to mean rule-bound, overly euphonious, is in some conflict with Rossiter's extremely suggestive work, where the term implies a rigid code of moral standards and a condemnation of Bohemianism. The remarkable contrast between Wooldridge's and Rossiter's portraits of Ives is worth close study by anyone tempted to risk a biography. See also the reminiscences in Perlis, Vivian, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar. On Beers, Norman Dain's suggestive Dictionary of American Biography account (Supp. 3, 1941–45, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), pp. 50–52, and the often revised A Mind That Found Itself (see note 18 below).

15. This interpretation of the shifting expectations about the proper location of power is now identified with Robert Wiebe's important The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar, but two earlier and more concentrated studies in professionalization were Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959)Google Scholar, and Roy Lubove's trenchant The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as Career, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar; the latter has been especially helpful here. The Hays interpretation of conservation (which he has generalized elsewhere) has seemed to me exaggerated in that the limits of the study helped mold an interpretation by excluding related areas from the focus of attention—sentimental preservationism of the Thoreau-Muir variety played a considerable role. The Haysian model does seem to fit the mental-hygiene movement more exactly, in that the contribution or even the assumed presence of a progressive public of disinterested and concerned citizens seems to disappear under the weight of a pyramid of expertise ranging from the psychiatrist down through guidance clinicians to the classroom teacher who has listened to hygiene lectures. Many of these, relatively speaking, were laypersons; but all had received some training and held some institutional position. One reason for the professionalization here may have been the lay awe and distaste for the whole subject, which encouraged the assignment of the subject to experts. The popularizations of hygiene may contradict, of course, what has just been said, but on the whole they seemed to have been intended to urge the laity to cultivate hygienic attitudes and recognize the importance of expert care in more serious cases, not to engage in discussion and debate to clarify issues and reach consensus on the classic model. What was there to discuss? Only Ted Baxter could be against mental health. On public attitudes, the spread of the movement seems to be about the only available evidence before the appearance of autotherapeutic books on best seller lists after 1945. For the later period, see Nunnally, Jim C. Jr., Popular Conceptions of Mental Health: Their Development and Change (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961)Google Scholar; and Gurin, Gerald et al. , Americans View Their Mental Health (New York: Basic Books, 1960).Google Scholar

16. A useful primer on the Chicago milieu in social ethics and psychology is Rucker, Darnell, The Chicago Pragmatists (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969)Google Scholar; a ponderous effort to place it all in historical and geographical context, along with the related architectural movement is Duncan, Hugh D., Culture and Democracy (Totawa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1965)Google Scholar. The broader movement to escape the bounds of individual isolation through the construction of intersubjective theories is perceptively treated in Wilson, R. Jackson, In Quest of Community, 1860–1920 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar. Coughlan, Neil, Young John Dewey (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar treats Dewey and Mead intensively along what I think are parallel lines.

The books mentioned in the text are Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902)Google Scholar; Dewey, John, The School and Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1899)Google Scholar; Dewey, , Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).Google Scholar

17. This account is drawn from a variety of sources, the most perceptive and candid of which is Lidz, Theodore, M.D., “Adolf Meyer and the Development of American Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 123 (09 1966), 320–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lidz's combination of candor and understanding is quite rare in a field where the facade of impersonal scientific rationality is common. See also Ritvo, Lucille B., “Meyer, Adolf,” Dictionary of American Biography (Supp. 4, 1946–1950, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), pp. 569–72Google Scholar; Lief, Alfred, ed., The Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1948)Google Scholar; and Grob, Gerald M., The State and the Mentally Ill (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), esp. pp. 270–300Google Scholar. My treatment of Meyer may exaggerate his formality and verbal awkwardness, but these qualities do seem to have affected his actual work with patients as distinguished from his appreciation of its importance and his emphasis on life histories. It has been molded by the character of Doctor Dohmler in the most vivid fictional account of the psychiatric world and of modern man as therapist-patient, Fitzgerald, F. Scott's Tender Is the Night (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934)Google Scholar. Zelda Fitzgerald had been seen by Meyer in Baltimore, rather unsuccessfully; Dohmler appears as a man of nobility and vast erudition but also of a certain bleak and helpless wisdom.

18. The letters—Meyer's “To Whom It May Concern” of October 27, 1907, and Farrand to Beers of April 25, 1908—are in Beers, Clifford W., A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography, 25th Anniversary Edition with additions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), pp. 262–64, 269–70Google Scholar. Few would disagree with Farrand's concluding observation; but my goal here is to suggest the way in which the profession of medical psychiatry, like other groups with a coherent perception of their own role, made over the nascent movement to project its mentality onto the largest possible slice of experience. The reference to former patients as troublemakers probably reflects a controversy over involuntary incarceration that took place around the turn of the century. See White, William Alanson, The Autobiography of a Purpose (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), pp. 88–89.Google Scholar

19. Dain, Norman, “Beers, Clifford,” Dictionary of American Biography (Supp. 3, 1941–45, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973)Google Scholar. This abbreviated account is based on the later editions of A Mind That Found Itself, which was treated as the official history of the movement and regularly brought up to date until after Beers's death; on the periodic reappraisals of the movement which appeared in Mental Hygiene, the official journal, and sometimes also in A Mind That Found Itself, and on the bulletins of the state societies in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The latter, for example, shows a donation of $150,000 from Katherine Choate Iresa from 1928 to 1931. It also suggests the importance of community-chest participation as a vehicle for the liberation of directorate from membership. Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene Annual Report, 1933–34 (Boston, 1934)Google Scholar. The Connecticut Society had 650 members in 1920, somewhat fewer in 1930 to judge from dues paid. See Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene: 12th Annual Report (New Haven, 1920), p. 19Google Scholar; and 22nd Annual Report (New Haven, 1930), p. 15Google Scholar. Ridenour, Nina, Mental Health in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is intelligent though brief, and is about the organized movement rather than the population's level of inner conflict—a perhaps revealing slip.

20. On the earlier crusades for hygienic reform, which by 1910 had established a model of organized private action to reduce the ravages of disease, and a favorable attitude toward them among influential publics, see the invaluable overview by Rosen, George, A History of Public Health (New York: MD Publications, 1958)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. On the links with eugenics and criminology, see Haller, Mark, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), esp. pp. 65–75, 96–117Google Scholar; Healy, William, The Individual Delinquent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1915)Google Scholar. Healy's article, “Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychologists, Psychiatrists,” Mental Hygiene 6 (04 1922), 248–56Google Scholar, included one of the earliest warnings against off-the-cuff labeling of individuals on the basis of tests or brief interviews. On Healy's career and ideas, see Lubove, , Professional Altruist, pp. 64–68, 89–91.Google Scholar

The activity of the Gluecks in criminology and forensic psychiatry is reflected in Glueck, Bernard, “Concerning Prisoners,” Mental Hygiene 2 (04 1918), 177–218Google Scholar and Glueck, Sheldon, Law and Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1962)Google Scholar. On Salmon, whose intuitive sense of psychodynamics and tireless promotional activity made him a central figure until his death in 1927, see Earl D. Bond, M.D., with the collaboration of Komora, Paul, Thomas W. Salmon, Psychiatrist (New York: Norton, 1950)Google Scholar. Salmon's most influential article was probably “The Care and Treatment of Mental Diseases and War Neuroses (“Shell Shock”) in the British Army,” Mental Hygiene 1 (10 1917), 509 ff.Google Scholar

21. Beers, , The Mental Hygiene Movement (New York: National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1923), p. 343Google ScholarPubMed. Also quoted in Groves, E. R. and Blanchard, P., Introduction to Mental Hygiene (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), pp. 40–41Google Scholar. The assumption that changes were due only to the screening process was characteristic.

22. Both the standard modern accounts—Lubove's Professional Altruist and Kathleen Woodroofe's valuable comparative study From Charity to Social Work in England and the United States (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), esp. pp. 112–47Google Scholar —take rather jaundiced views of “the psychiatric deluge” (Woodroofe), because of the increasing inequality implied by the therapeutic relationship, in which client is assumed to be less rational and informed than expert. Woodroofe assumes a relation between the individualism of a psychiatric perspective and the political conservatism of the 1920s; this is arguable. Fatigue with the massive, unselective charting of the client's situation called for in Mary Richmond's case method (Social Diagnosis, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1917Google Scholar) may have had more direct impetus, together with the widely diffused news of shell shock and its therapy. The weariness and search for gimmicks that an underpaid and ambiguous role might engender should not be overlooked. Pop psychiatry with its notion of quick catharsis offered a magical cure, as the movies would later discover. More generally, 1910–20 saw a search for deep explorations in many areas, to remedy the felt insufficiency of utilitarian models. (Future historians may dub the half century from 1915 to 1965 an “age of attempted profundity,” bracketed by the preferred parsimonious utilitarian accounts of action.) Walter Lippmann is probably the bestrecalled example among intellectual journalists. See May, H. F., End of American Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959)Google Scholar; Burnham, John C., “The New Psychology,”Google Scholar in Braeman, , Change and ContinuityGoogle Scholar. On Southard, see Gay, Frederick P., The Open Mind: Elmer Ernest Southard 1876–1920 (Chicago: Normandie House, 1938)Google Scholar. A revealing reminiscence of the psychiatric deluge is Hamilton, Gordon, “A Theory of Personality: Freud's Contribution to Social Work,” in Ego Psychology and Dynamic Casework, ed., Parad, Howard J. (New York: Family Service Association of America, 1958), pp. 11–37.Google Scholar

23. See Southard's articles “The Movement for a Mental Hygiene of Industry,” Mental Hygiene 4 (01 1920), 43–64Google Scholar, and “The Modern Specialist in Unrest,” ibid., 550–63. For the main lines of development after Southard's death in 1920, see Mental Hygiene, passim., and the bulletins and reports of the Massachusetts Society, especially Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene Report, 1933–34 (Boston: The Society, 1934)Google Scholar. The Mayo School's summa was of course Roethlisberger, F. J. and Dickson, W. J., Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939); see especially pp. 314–15.Google Scholar

In simplest terms, mental hygienists and industrial psychologists shared the model of man as an energy system with a tendency toward steady states of equilibrium at low tension. But the Mayoites treated most worker grievances as nearer the ego or rational level, so that the milder therapy of attention, better lighting, or human relations would suffice. Mayo himself owed much to psychiatry as well as sociology, but his sources were French, Emile Durkheim and Pierre Janet, the precursor and rival of Freud. See Mayo, Elton, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933)Google Scholar; The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Boston: Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard Univ., 1945).Google Scholar

As Grace Adams pointed out in her Menckenesquely perceptive send-up of the movement, Hugo Munsterberg had offered a screening process called psychotechnics to business as early as 1912. Further exploration is needed to see to what extent Munsterberg had anticipated the later hygienic approach. It is probable that Southard, a disciple of Royce (who did on occasion teach in the college), would have known of a colleague's work in those less differentiated days. See Adams, Grace, “The Golden Age of Mental Hygiene,” American Mercury, 23 (05 1931), 93–102.Google Scholar

24. Menninger, Karl's The Human Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930)Google Scholar was also a Literary Guild selection, and editions by two other publishers appeared within two years. Full bibliography here would equal the length of this paper. Burnham's Normal Mind will be discussed later. Publications and foci of attention can be followed in the quarterly issues of Mental Hygiene, and in the annotated bibliographies issued by the NCMH and The Child Study Association.

Karl Menninger deserves a careful biography; the journalistic account by Winslow, Walker, The Menninger Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956)Google Scholar is an intelligent work; focused upon the career of the father, C. F. Menninger, it also illuminates his sons' personalities and the formation of their cluster of psychiatric institutions in Topeka. Karl Menninger had been a loyal student of Southard at Harvard, though he later departed from the master's erudite, eclectic opposition to psychoanalysis, to become a respected theoretician and perhaps the most influential popularizer of Freudian ideas. A biographer will, however, have to face a problem inherent in this subject. Menninger tells of the advice Southard gave him, to write down everything he observed and work it up for publication. Like other hygienists, he took the advice seriously. See Hall, Bernard H., M.D., ed., A Psychiatrist's World: The Selected Papers of Karl Menninger, M.D. (New York: Viking Press, 1959), esp. pp. 835–55.Google Scholar

25. Winslow, C.-E. A., Dr. P. H., “The Mental Hygiene Movement and Its Founder,”Google Scholar in Beers, , A Mind That Found Itself, p. 308Google Scholar. The quotation is from a summary of Wickman, E. K., “Children's Behavior and Teachers' Attitudes,” Mental Hygiene News (Conn.), 8 (02 1929)Google Scholar. The Norwood study is described in Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene Reports 1937–1938 (Boston: The Society, 1938).Google Scholar

One of the great gaps in our knowledge of the century of pedagogy is “Who taught what to whom, and what was retained?” The only extended account of a secondary-school course so far discovered comes from the second great growth era just after World War II. See Bullis, H. Edmund and O'Malley, Emily E., Human Relations in the Classroom, Course I (Wilmington: Delaware State Society for Mental Hygiene, 1948)Google Scholar; Course II (1948); Course III (1951). These reflect the usual (and inevitable) voluntarization of what in classical psychoanalysis would be seen to operate in a less conscious fashion. If one “faces life” from an early age, repression will not occur. The superiority of the “democratic way of life” was due, in part, to its fostering of healthy family life. Given the environmentalist theory of personality, such injunctions were not illogical.

26. Carnegie, Dale, How to Win Friends and Influence People (28th ed., New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937)Google Scholar. The first edition dates back to 1936.

The Adler quotation states the root injunction of the movement simply: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.”

27. There was much medical hostility to the Emanuel clinic; the Bach cantatas that Emanuel featured in the seventies represented a less controversial form of relevant therapy. See Green, John G., “The Emanuel Movement 1906–1929,” New England Quarterly, 7 (09 1934), 494–535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Donald Meyer's trenchant and wide-ranging The Positive Thinkers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar, surveys much of this literature and finds it pathetic. His treatment should be compared with William James's classic account of the Religion of Healthy-mindedness, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902)Google Scholar. An interesting question is to what extent it is fair to describe the mental-hygiene movement as a scientific, institutionalized expression of James's healthy-mindedness? There appear to be differences, but do they derive largely from the hygienists' success in entrenching themselves inside institutions and thus having the power to impose their therapy? That is, that their science was taken seriously because of a bureaucratic victory? This is one of the areas where the bracketing of truth-value may affect an interpretation seriously. Still, if science continues down the skids, Freud may yet be replaced by Mary Baker Eddy or Ralph Waldo Trine as martyr for truth and methodology.

28. Fishbein, Morris, M.D., and White, William A., M.D., eds., Why Men Fail (New York: Century, 1928)Google Scholar; Fosdick, Harry Emerson, On Being a Real Person (New York: Harper, 1943)Google Scholar; and Jackson, Josephine A. and Salisbury, Helen M., Outwitting Our Nerves, 2d. ed. (New York: Century, 1932).Google Scholar

29. Ellenberger, Henri F., The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 608Google Scholar. Ellenberger is the first scholar with the courage to do justice to Adler's importance. Adler's writings are often sloppy and banal, but (like Jung at times) he had the courage of his own common-sense distrust of Freud's desire to universalize, rigorize and scientize psychoanalytic doctrines. Adler, then, often reacted crudely away from Freud in directions that later theorists would take with more sophistication and elegance. They would then avoid giving him credit, as he was bad intellectual company. Many examples of American writers who take what seems an Adlerian direction could be collected. Gordon Allport and other Harvard personalists, with the theory of the functional autonomy of motives designed to circumvent the Freudian emphasis on plasticity only in childhood, come to mind. For bibliography see Evans, Richard I., Gordon Allport: The Man and His Ideas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971)Google Scholar; Allport, 's own Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1955)Google Scholar is an excellent introduction to the context of the debates.

The influence of Rank was concentrated around Jessie Taft's Philadelphia School of Social Work; see her biography Otto Rank (New York: Julian Press, 1958)Google Scholar, and Robinson, Virginia P., Jessie Taft. Therapist and Social Work Educator: A Professional Biography (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. The phrase “social and mental health” is from Groves, Ernest R. and Blanchard, Phyllis, Introduction to Mental Hygiene (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), p. 440Google Scholar. The brief sketch of the interlocking circles of the hygienic model of interpretation is drawn from the works cited in the following notes, and especially from Kingsley Davis's penetrating, astringent critique, “Mental Hygiene and the Class Structure,” Psychiatry 1 (02, 1938), 55–65.Google Scholar

31. Groves, and Blanchard, , Introduction to Mental HygieneGoogle Scholar and Groves, Ernest R., Moral Sanitation (New York: Association Press, 1916)Google Scholar. It should be noted that a hygienic model strictly defined (those measures needed to preserve health) is not necessarily identical with a sanitary model (the centrality of cleanliness, fumigating the environment to sterilize it of germs); but the latter model was pervasive and its imagery very often underlay the arguments of hygienists. On its prevalence in the rhetoric of the progressive period, see the discussion of Benjamin Ide Wheeler in Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University 1865–1910 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965).Google Scholar

32. Burnham, , Normal Mind, pp. 28–31Google Scholar. More self-conscious than most, Burnham went on to derive “integration” semantically from integer, a number not broken into fractions, and from “integrity,” a quality of “a man with no break in his character.” The principal citation was to Sherrington's Integratiue Action of the Nervous System; W. B. Cannon was referred to, and cited on the way in which knowledge allows self-mastery; his work on fear encouraged the mastery of fear in himself (ibid., p. 403).

33. The chief citations here are to Royce and Taine. Morton Prince's work, oddly, is not mentioned; perhaps the backwoods Yankee Burnham was dry. One may ask how someone with this perspective would employ psychoanalysis. It filled in the detail of mental mechanisms on the abnormal peripheries and in such “psychoses of development” as the inhibitions or resistances of youth, which in maturity will disappear, by demonstrating the importance of parapraxes it reminded normals that all shared in the danger of disorganization; and it had contributed much to mental hygiene by showing the great importance of normal emotional and instinctive life in early childhood, the persisting evil results that may come from any unfortunate emotional shock, even in the days of infancy, and the danger from abnormal domestic relations—undue dependence on father or mother, undue repression by the parents, or the like. Thus the analysts provided evidence for the centrality of moral sanitation: “opportunity for normal reaction to emotional or instinctive stimuli should be furnished” due to the serious and lasting consequences of lack of opportunity. Defenses were substitutions of an acceptable substitute for a normal reaction that for some reason could not be expressed (ibid., pp. 42, 53, 15–16).

34. Ibid., pp. 40–42. One could go on (as Burnham did for some 650 pages); but the essential points have been exemplified. The use of “normal” in a way that is both descriptive of a model of functioning and a statement of an ideal is characteristic of the hygienists, as has been noted by such critics as Davis, Kingsley, “Mental Hygiene and the Class Structure,” Psychiatry, 1 (1938), 55–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Whether this double usage proves their theory either meaningless or a rationalization, as Davis thought, or indeed whether it is possible to avoid such overlapping, might be argued, since the “highest” or “most normal” group here is the one with the greatest ability to survive in the struggle for existence. In this case, as often with hygienists, what was probably an ethical ideal held for its own sake—Christian love, democratic cooperativeness—could be clothed in the language of scientific ethics. The Darwinian framework—survival value as ethical test—was so pervasive as perhaps not to distinguish the hygienists from everyone else. The harmonizer and evoker of talent as the “highest kind of group leader” anticipates the later studies of “democratic” as against “authoritarian” groups and leadership styles, associated with the name of Kurt Lewin and his students in Iowa.

35. Groves, and Blanchard, , Introduction to Mental Hygiene, pp. 98–99, 187–93.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 258–69. The proper view of industry was as an interpersonal system: “a special type of human relationship … workers together in a common enterprise.” Among adults, power relations were forgotten, or held constant, in a kind of Simmelian formal sociology of interaction. This was a notable trait of most American sociology of the period. Psychopathy, industrial and otherwise, replaced the older label of moral insanity used for the person who appears organized but chronically and often violently violates the norms. Space does not allow a history of the concept from moral insanity through the efforts to define psychopathy to its transvaluation by Norman Mailer as the “white Negro” that anticipated the later challenges to such categories.

There may be a kernel of truth in the assumption that the abnormal personality is contagious; Leslie Farber in his perceptive The Ways of the Will (New York: Basic Books, 1966)Google Scholar has described how the psychiatrist who works with schizophrenics over long periods tends to develop some of their flamboyance and emotional exaggeration. This, however, is an ambiguous line of argument for hygienists to follow, since it may end in rediscovering the romantic perception that sanity is dull and bland.

37. Menninger, , “Changing Concepts of Disease”Google Scholar (address to American College of Physicians, 1948), in A Psychiatrist's World, ed., Hall, pp. 670–71Google Scholar. An unusually minimalist definition is by George K. Pratt, M.D. (author of “Your Mind and You”), in Morale: The Mental Hygiene of Unemployment (3d ed., New York: NCMH, 1935), p. 7.Google Scholar

What mental health is. The modern conception … may be summed up as the adjustment of one's self to inner and outer strains in a manner that will be reasonably satisfactory, both to the individual and to the customs of the society in which he lives.

The maximalist definition came to be used tn a humanitarian fashion, as an injunction to tolerance and understanding, but that usage, whether or not one considers it desirable, does not affect an argument for its significance. Prophylaxis involved symptomatic scrutiny as a general duty. If one were to attempt a reformulation of the Szasz critique (see notes 7 and 9) in terms of Chicago psychology, it would begin by suggesting that the hygienic mentality may intensify, and in a sense create, the symptoms that it sensitizes people to search for. Rieff, cited above. A counterattack on Rieff seems to be developing in the nonromantic sector of the left, as part of its repudiation of the Laingian reversal of madness and sanity. See Christopher Lasch, “Ten Years of Salmagundi,” Salmagundi, No. 31–32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976), 7.

For a review of conceptions of health in the mental-hygiene movement, see Jahoda, Marie, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (New York: Basic Books, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Positive” mental hygiene was the term developed for this Utopian usage. The works of Rene Dubos on the concept of health are basic to this discussion and to the entire paper. See esp. The Mirage of Health (New York: Harper; 1959).Google Scholar

38. Simon, Walter M., European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1963)Google Scholar. In a very general sense, of course, the Comtean medical model of society with its attendant expert therapists derives from Plato. Groves, and Blanchard, , Introduction to Mental HygieneGoogle Scholar, Chap. 1; a straightforward review of early American books on mental hygiene is Deutsch, Albert, “The History of Mental Hygiene,” in 100 Years of American Psychiatry, eds., Hall, S. K. et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 325 ffGoogle Scholar. See also Ray, Isaac, M.D., Mental Hygiene (1863; rpt. New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1968)Google Scholar; Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 18–33Google Scholar; and Nelson, Benjamin, “Self-Images and Systems of Spiritual Direction in the History of European Civilization,” The Quest for Self-Control: Classical Philosophies and Scientific Research, ed., Klausner, Samuel Z. (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 49–103Google Scholar. Comte's use of the phrase hygiene cerebrale is found in his letters; see those to J. S. Mill, in Auguste Comte, Correspondance Générale et Confessions, Tome II, Auril 1841-Mars 1845 (Paris: Mouton la Haye, 1975), p. 20Google Scholar. In that context it refers to his avoidance of the periodical press because of its ephemeral nature.

39. Simon, , European Positivism, pp. 9, 29Google Scholar; and Andreski, Stanislav, ed., The Essential Comte (London: Croom Helm, 1974), pp. 10–11Google Scholar. On Comte's influence in nineteenth-century America, see Bernard, L. L. and Bernard, Jessie, Origins of American Sociology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1943).Google Scholar

Much of the significance of psychiatry beyond the purview of the mentalhygiene movement lies in the way it legitimated a Comtean model of Society as the Patient (by Lawrence K. Frank, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1948)Google Scholar etherized upon an operating table for the therapies of cientificos. Harold Lasswell (Psychopathology and Politics, 1930; new edition, New York: Viking Press, 1960Google Scholar) is the most famous name. Whether any system could reconcile and do justice to all possible points of view is of course one of the grand questions; Hegel thought that his did, one assumes; modern phenomenologists and sociologists of knowledge might advance more modest claims along the same line, though as with Berger above we have noted the self-limitation involved in the latter's “bracketing.” The principles of scientific scholarship themselves serve a “hygienic” function in this Comtean sense, and there are many examples of quarrels over whether some realm of claimed or postulated experience should be put within or without the pale; Freud's unconscious energy charges, and more recently Rhine's ESP, are familiar examples. I owe the point about open-mindedness and its limits to Laurence Veysey.

40. Allen, Frederick H., M.D., Mental Hygiene Survey of the State of California, 1930, A Report Prepared at the Request of the State Legislature in Chapter 39 of the Statutes of 1929 … (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1930), p. 14Google Scholar. (Italics added) How many California legislators in the era of Sunny Jim Rolph read or understood this can only be surmised.

41. The criticism as middle-class is by Davis, , “Mental Hygiene and the Class Structure.”Google Scholar On the communalist perspective, see works cited in note 16. C. Wright Mills traces changes in the external constraints on personality in white-collar occupations in White Collar (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951)Google Scholar as had Robert and Helen Lynd in rich novelistic detail a generation earlier in Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929)Google Scholar, and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1937).Google Scholar

On earlier styles of heroic models in American magazines, see the illuminating (and quantitative) study by Greene, Theodore P., America's Heroes. The Changing Models of Success in American Magazines (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).Google Scholar Greene notes a rapid shuffling of cards of heroic identity from 1900 to 1920, with a bureaucratic hero who bears some resemblance to the hygienic type emerging during World War I.

42. Meyer is quoted in Winters, Eunice E., “Adolf Meyer's 2½ Years at Kankakee,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 40 (09–10 1966), p. 457.Google ScholarPreston, George H., M.D., Director, Report of the Boston Mental Hygiene Survey, 1930 (Boston, 1930), p. 7.Google ScholarKracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 286Google Scholar, as quoted by Jay, Martin, “The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer,” Salmagundi, No. 31–32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976), 80.Google Scholar The second quotation is Jay's summary of Kracauer. Isaacs, , Foundations of Common Sense, p. 52Google Scholar, makes a similar point. Charles E. Rosenberg offers the subtlest account of Victorian sexual codes in “Sexuality, Class and Role,” in No Other Gods, pp. 71–88.Google Scholar See also the collection of essays edited and introduced by Howe, Daniel Walker, Victorian America (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).Google Scholar

43. White, William A., “The Meaning of the Mental Hygiene Movement,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 175 (08 24, 1916), 264–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Another example of inefficiency, not labeled neurotic perhaps because the subject was not from the respectable classes, was the son of a drunken father who grows up hating authority: “He hates the social institutions which form the controlling situations in which he lives; and such people become the rabid type of antisocial or anarchistic persons … and they shoot and destroy.” This image, of the radical as compulsive destroyer, gave scientific benediction to the conviction that lay-inspired change was likely to be irrational. At one point he granted that not all social inefficiency was insanity, but it all had a touch of mental disorder and was meat for the hygienists.

It should be noted that White was, by all reports, one of the great asylum superintendents in the records of the profession; he did attempt to provide a controlled environment in which the patients could thrive up to their own limits. White was a man of vast erudition, who had read deep in Spencer and acknowledged him in his memoirs. His more or less autobiographical works include the posthumously published William Alanson White: Autobiography of a Purpose (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938)Google Scholar; Twentieth Century Psychiatry: Its Contribution to Man's Knowledge of Himself (Salmon Memorial Lectures) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1936).Google Scholar His fullest statement on mental hygiene proper was The Principles of Mental Hygiene (New York: Macmillan, 1917).Google Scholar

44. Wilbur, 's speech is in Mental Hygiene News (Conn.) 12 No. 7 (11–12, 1932)Google Scholar: he had given an address of that title at the 1930 conference and I assume it is the same one. Virtue and Corruption have been delineated by Bernard Bailyn and now in the massive treatment of Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 506–52.Google Scholar An example of an antebellum thinker conceiving of civic virtue as the result of psychological restraints inculcated through education may be found in Horace Mann's lecture of 1844, “The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government,” Lectures on Education (Boston, 1848), pp. 117–62.Google Scholar There is of course another model of democratic politics which has become popular since the 1940s, that of interest-group pluralism. One of the tasks ahead in this project is to investigate possible connections between that pluralistic model and the various critiques of mental illness mentioned in the preface. As of 1930. however, the classic public of citizens was still the dominant mode, and I suspect that most academics of all political persuasions still adhered to it. A few examples from the literature of hidden challenges to rationality: Cleckley, Harvey, M.D., ed., The Mask of Sanity (3d ed., St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1964)Google ScholarPubMed; Piro, Louis J., “Constitutional Psychopathic Inferior State,” Mental Health Bulletin (Penn.) 29 (04 15, 1951), 9–15.Google Scholar (Piro was aware of the vagueness and cultural loading of the concept.) The classic denunciations of Mom are by the journalist Wylie, Philip, A Generation of Vipers, 20th ed. (New York: Rinehart, 1955)Google Scholar; and the psychiatrist Strecker, Edward M., Their Mothers' Sons (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1946)Google Scholar; but the notion was common by the late 1920s, and Howard, Sidney's play The Silver CordGoogle Scholar gave it a name in 1926. Sievers, W. David, Freud on Broadway (New York: Hermitage House, 1955), p. 77Google Scholar, counted several dozen plays in which the theme appeared.

45. The literature of Whiggism and the Adams dynasty is corpulent. Persons, Stow's Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar has stimulated this line of thought, though partly in reaction against his interpretation. On Boston and the civic ideal, see Green, Martin, The Problem of Boston (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1966).Google Scholar The connecting link after about 1870 was civil service reform; a brief treatment is in Welter, Rush, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (1962; rpt. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 202–5.Google ScholarTyack, David, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 131–40Google Scholar, has noted the centrality of the notion that “successful men were disinterested” among the structural reformers of the Progressive Era. This is a fairly direct transmission from earlier intuitive sociologies of self-government, though in the twentieth century the capacity of judicial disinterestedness came to seem a result of advanced professional training as well as a healthy personality. Since 1960, of course, the notion has come under sharp attack (though rarely careful critique) as radical pluralism replaced socialscientific absolutism among new cohorts of the educated.

46. Works on American liberal ideas in the twentieth century include Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Random House, 1955)Google Scholar; Goldman, Eric F., Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952)Google Scholar; Aaron, Daniel, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951)Google Scholar; Graham, Otis C. Jr., An Encore to Reform (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and others too numerous to list here. The best-known critique of the kind of mental classification involved here is Filene, Peter, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 20–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although Filene's target was the notion of progressivism as a movement, the critique has tended to be generalized by professional readers to all larger categories; it has become an emblematic gesture of the Volkswagen generation of historians who enjoin us to think small and think concretely rather than in the inflated, generalizing style of the previous generation. The injunction is always sound as a caution, but if applied ham-handedly to the history of the symbol-creating and symbol-enveloped animal it will draw as much blood to as little purpose as earlier swingeing uses of Occam's razor in social sciences.

47. On zoning and other functional analogies to mental hygiene in town planning, see the overview by Scott, Mel, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969).Google Scholar On segmentation and the fear of social contamination, see Wiebe, Robert, The Segmented Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975)Google Scholar, and Sennett, Richard, The Uses of Disorder (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar, and The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).Google Scholar

48. An extremely perceptive treatment of Dewey and Mead that stresses the sources of their secular theories of community in religious yearnings and doubts is Coughlan, Neil's Young John Dewey: an Essay in American Intellectual History.Google Scholar The interpretation of progressivism as a drive for scientific techniques to preserve traditional values is associated with Noble, David W., The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958).Google Scholar

The excellent study by Friedman, Martin, Charles Sheeler (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1975)Google Scholar, is marred only by a “sixtyish” tendency to take the painter to task for pastoralizing the industrial landscape; yet Sheeler's is the most vivid artistic realization of a widespread mentality of the years from 1900 to 1965.

49. The Murphy quotation is from A Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930), p. 331.Google Scholar Both the preliminary 1913 article and the full development of Jung's theory are in Psychological Types, trans., Baynes, H. G. and Hull, R. F. C., Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971).Google Scholar Jung's octogenarian complaint of misunderstanding is in Evans, Richard I., Conversations with Carl Jung (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 67–71.Google Scholar See Groves, and Blanchard, , Introduction to Mental Hygiene, p. 54Google Scholar, for the entry for Jung's typology. This abbreviated account of the popularization of theory is necessarily oversimple; not all American uses of Jung's character types were as pejorative as suggested here, and of course the Jungian schema itself was far more complex. However, the tendency was marked, and the level of sophistication in most texts studied markedly below that of Gardner Murphy; this became a genuinely popular concept and as such was often treated as a contrast like that between black and white billiard balls.

50. Wallin, J. E. Wallace, Personality Maladjustments and Mental Hygien (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935).Google ScholarMorgan, John J. B., The Psychology of Abnormal People; with Educational Applications (New York: Longmans, Green, 1928).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Morgan was associate professor of psychology at Northwestern. Other early uses of Jung's typology were reviewed by Freyd, Max (of the J. Walter Thompson Co.), “Introverts and Extroverts,” Psychological Review, 31 (01 1924), 74–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Hale, , Freud and the Americans, p. 359Google Scholar; and Pillsbury, Walter B., An Elementary Psychology of the Abnormal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), pp. 99–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Storr, Anthony, C. G. Jung (New York: Viking Press, 1973), esp. pp. 57–73.Google Scholar A more popular and colorful elaboration of this point is in Stern, Paul J., C. G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet (New York: George Braziller, 1976), pp. 155–64Google Scholar, which seems to relate Jung's sympathy with introversion and his own alleged mental disturbance.

52. Adolf Meyer's theory of the reaction type prone to dementia praecox is found in several papers published between 1905 and 1910 and reprinted in his Collected Papers, II, pp. 421–70Google Scholar: “Remarks on Habit Disorganizations in the essential Deteriorations, and the relation of Deterioration to the Psychasthenic, Neurasthenic, Hysterical and other Constitutions” (1905); “Fundamental Conceptions of Dementia Praecox” (1906)Google Scholar; “Relationship of Hysteria, Psychasthenia, and Dementia Praecox” (1907, 1912)Google Scholar; “The Dynamic Interpretation of Dementia Praecox” (1909)Google Scholar; “Nature and Conception of Dementia Praecox” (1910).Google Scholar In “Constructive Formulation of Schizophrenia” (1921; pp. 471–76)Google Scholar, Meyer adopted the newer name, and in “The Evolution of the Dementia Praecox Concept” (pp. 477–86)Google Scholar he traced the evolution of the diagnostic entity toward his own Deweyite functional position.

The Jefferson quotation is from his Autobiography, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds., Koch, Adrienne and Peden, William (New York: Modern Library, 1944), p. 104.Google ScholarTaylor, Richard, Destruction and Reconstruction. Personal Experiences of the Late War (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1968), p. 246.Google Scholar

53. Aside from the influence of Adolf Meyer, that of Freud himself should also be noted. He had employed the term “introversion” to delineate a process that did suggest pathological tendencies. See Strachey, James et al. , ed., Standard Edition … Freud, XII (1911–1913) (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1958), pp. 102, 125.Google Scholar Although American references to the term almost always cited Jung, it is possible that its newly pejorative context derived in part from familiarity with Freud's different and relatively passing use. As is well known, Freud was a firm believer in the sufficiency as well as necessity of the world view of scientific positivism, and tended to see both religious belief and philosophical concern as neurotic symptoms.

Aside from these influences, and the conviction of Deweyan progressives, noted earlier, that Victorian individualism was morally pathological, there is another very general possible influence on the reworking of Jung's typology, in the revision entailed by change of intellectual context, when a concept is taken from one system of ideas and rephrased in another. Jung's ideas were taken from his own intellectual milieu and used as a concept in the radically different milieu of American academic psychology, which toward its behavioristic extreme visualized personality as a system with a tendency to achieve equilibrium by initiating action during which it expends energy and returns to a state of inertia. The popularization of the term inhibition may suggest the potential of such abstract systems for crystallizing, if not molding, the attitudes of laymen.

54. An insight into the aims of one of the greatest innovators of abstract painting is in Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art; and Painting in Particular (1947; rpt. New York: Wittenborn, 1972).Google Scholar Musil was quoted by Scott, Nathan A. Jr., in his first Noble Lecture, “The Poetry of Civic Virtue: The Example of Auden,” Harvard Univ., 03 22, 1976Google Scholar.

The best starting point to supplement this elementary glance at a complex subject is probably in two surveys, Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958)Google Scholar, for some leading European trends, and May, Henry F.. End of American Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959)Google Scholar, for transatlantic reception and early reaction. “Common sense” in this paper is not quite what May called “innocence” (lack of reflective distance from one's own beliefs) but there is a relation. For modernism in the arts, the most vivid realization of the transformation of perception and some of its sources is in the first chapter of Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971).Google Scholar On Breton, a good summary of the large literature is in Fowlie, Wallace, The Age of Surrealism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Rubin, William S., Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, 1968)Google Scholar; and Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967).Google Scholar These are authoritative works, and they include Freud's (alleged) last words to Dali on the failure of these artists to tap the unconscious. It is now often claimed that the drive to shatter common-sense perception through abstract art merely provided striking backgrounds for corporate entrance halls, that the modernists' style of abstraction could be assimilated nicely to the Comtean mentality. They, however, more often thought of themselves as shatterers of idols, not repairmen with glue. A relation can be seen, however, between mental hygiene and the universalist, abstractive tendencies of some schools of modernist art and architecture. See Martin, Jay, “Cultural Transplants,” Commentary, 49 No. 3 (03 1970), 78–85.Google Scholar Much of the variety of the challenge can be organized around the revaluation of the primitive, with its associated rise of cultural relativism as well as of admiration for nonclassical styles. E. H. Gombrich has recently pointed out that art theorists earlier in the nineteenth century had warned against an appreciation of the primitive arts precisely because classical canons of taste had an ethical function (“The Tides of Taste,” Times Literary Supplement, 02 27, 1976, p. 211).Google Scholar The general impact of the anthropological awareness was noted by Alfred Kroeber in 1928: “our culture happens to have finally reached the abnormal—and possibly pathological—point where it is beginning to be culturally introspective, and lay itself on the dissecting table alongside a foreign or dead culture.” See Kroeber, “The Anthropological Attitude,” American Mercury, 13 (04 1928), 490–96.Google Scholar The most thorough exploration of the Freudian vision of reality and the reality principle is Ricoeur, Paul's, in Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1970).Google Scholar

55. Fite, Warner, “Psychoanalysis and Sex Psychology,” Nation, 113 (08 10, 1916), 127–29Google Scholar, a review of the translation of Jung, 's Psychology of the Unconscious.Google Scholar The fear of abstract art as a symptom of mental disorder that served as an agent of cultural subversion became a staple of middlebrow culture later in the century. One finds it in a 1946 film, Crack-up: Pat O'Brien plays an embattled art expert defending the verities of classical perception against a cohort of snobs and phonies who want to put abstract art over on the people.

56. White, William A., “Extending the Field of Conscious Control,” Mental Hygiene, 4 (10 1920), 857–65.Google Scholar

57. This treatment is based upon a variety of sources, including my own close watching of films of the 1930s and 1940s, and extremely helpful conversations with Garth Jowett and Robert Sklar. Three diversely excellent new works have helped to make film history terra cognita: Jowett, 's Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976)Google Scholar; Sklar, 's Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975)Google Scholar; and Rhode, Eric's A History of the Cinema From its Origins to 1970 (London: Allen Lane, 1976).Google Scholar The Rhode and Sklar volumes offer more sharply-etched personal visions of the content and historical significance of the movies, but Jowett's comprehensive and thoroughly-documented review is unique and irreplaceable as a survey of events and of contemporary commentary upon Hollywood and its product. All three authors note Hollywood's sudden fascination with the unconscious in the 1940s. Otherwise, there is relatively little writing on the influence of psychiatry upon film content. See Spears, Jack, “The Doctor on the Screen,” Films in Review, 6 (11 1955), 437 ffGoogle Scholar; Starr, Cecile, “Psychiatry without Jargon,” Saturday Review, 37 (07 10, 1954), 32–34Google Scholar; Kahn, Gordon, “One Psychological Moment, Please,” Atlantic, 178 (10 1946), 135–37Google Scholar; and Dworkin, Martin S., “Movie Psychiatrics,” Antioch Review, 14 (Winter 1954), 484–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A revealing tiny tempest over the proper use of psychiatry in films took place in the mid-1940s: Fearing, Franklin, “The Screen Discovers Psychiatry,” Hollywood Quarterly, 1 (01 1946), 154–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fearing, , “Psychology and the Films,”Google Scholaribid., 2 (January 1947), 118–21; Kubie, Lawrence S., “Psychiatry and the Films,”Google Scholaribid., 2 (January 1947), 113–17; and De Voto, Bernard, “The Easy Chair,” Harpers, 194 (02 1947), 126–29.Google Scholar

On the influential Welles films, see Bordwell, David, “Citizen Kane,” in Focus on Orson Welles, ed., Gottesman, Ronald (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 103–22Google Scholar; Farber, Stephen, “The Magnificent Ambersons,”Google Scholaribid., 123–28; and Cowie, Peter, A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles (South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973), esp. pp. 34–40Google Scholar.

Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings (London: Faber, 1967), pp. 152–55Google Scholar, reflects intelligently on the special appeal of Freudian concepts for Americans, given their desire for abstract categories to interpret experience.

58. Quigley, Martin, Decency in Motion Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar See also Quigley's review of objectionable movies, including Queen Christina of 1934Google Scholar “which registers with voluminous and unnecessary detail the fact of a sex affair…. Its portrayal of the queen is dangerous because queens have authority, acceptance” (ibid., p. 37). Jack Vizzard's important memoir of his life and ideas as a censor is See No Evil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).Google ScholarJowett, , Film, pp. 246–56Google Scholar, is the best brief account of the Legion of Decency and the rise of the Breen office.

59. Rhode, , History of the Cinema, p. 394.Google Scholar On the complex and disputable mental operations involved in selecting out the persona of an actor from the inevitable variety of roles he plays, see Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 26–29.Google Scholar Cavell's discussion of Bogart as a dandy (pp. 55–57) is one of many efforts to define the unique quality of this persona. A chronological account of Bogart's career is in Michael, Paul, Humphrey Bogart: The Man and His Films (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).Google Scholar

60. The quotations were transcribed during screenings. This film (entitled Le Violent in France) has received little comment, but see Bastid, Jean-Pierre, “Le Lyrisme Nicholas Ray,” Etudes Cinematographiques, 2, Nos. 8–9 (1961), 17–51.Google Scholar Other Bogart films, like Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, display a style of argument about America's involvement in world affairs, which equates isolationist feelings with unhealthy introversion and internationalism with responsible self-confidence. This is too general to indicate any specific input from popular psychiatry, but reflects the mood it had helped to verbalize. And that best-selling popular teacher of human relations, Overstreet, Harry A. (1875–1970)Google Scholar of CCNY and innumerable branch-library shelves, did employ this root metaphor of introversion-isolation versus extraversion-confidence-outreach on every level from the personal to the international.

61. Southard's phrase, above, note 23. A brief summary of some of the recent work that reaffirms a degree of human resiliency and relates the anxious environmentalism of early child psychologists to their attempt to capture public attention is in Skolnick, Arlene, “The Myth of the Vulnerable Child,” Psychology Today, 11 (02 1978), 56–65.Google Scholar