The Couch and the Cold War

“Its deliberations will, I’m sure, advance and improve our knowledge, methods and skills for the betterment of the nation’s mental health.”

President Eisenhower, speaking of psychoanalysis, in a message of greeting to the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1956

In April 1950 at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York, Harold Kelman, president of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, made a rather bold statement before a group of his colleagues. Psychoanalysis was not just a treatment for distressed individuals, Kelman proposed, but something that could help human beings achieve world peace, the field thus capable of making perhaps the ultimate contribution to society. “Sick people do sick things, and war is a sign of sickness,” he said as the moderator in a discussion on “Psychoanalysis and Moral Values,” the field’s ability to alter individuals’ irrational behavior more important than ever as the Cold War heated up. By undermining distorted vales, psychoanalysis could help a person find “a hierarchy of genuine moral ideals which would have obligating powers for his life as an individual and in his relatedness to the group in which he lives,” Kelman stated, this the foundation for keeping the superpowers from blowing each other up.

Kelman’s talk reflected the growing role of psychoanalysis in the country as “the American century” unfolded. Given new energy during World War II, psychoanalysis was clearly in ascent, its presence across American society beginning to surpass that of the 1920s when the field established itself as one of the key markers of modernity. Over the course of the 1950s psychoanalysis would assume a new identity that mirrored the rise of the middle class to become to become an integral part of the American Way of Life, the desire to understand oneself at the deepest level possible now a permanent feature of our national ethos.