PSYCHOLOGY

The development of experimental and clinical psychology had implications for diverse areas of U.S. social and intellectual life between 1870 and 1920; after 1910, psychological ideas and practices also influenced the American political and economic system. Currents of psychological theory and practice—most of which fall into the categories of philosophical, organic/somatic, experimental, psychometric, forensic, and psychoanalytic—appear in literary and popular texts throughout the period. Some writers incorporated new theories into their writings as information about these ideas became available in popular U.S. magazines and/or English translations of German and French texts; at times, these writers used multiple, potentially contradictory theories in the same texts or in the same period.

PRE-EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

Before the experimental methods of the German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) spread throughout U.S. universities (via Wundtian protégés such as Edward Titchener), the sources and implications of human mental activity were theorized by professors of philosophy, while mental pathologies—especially "nervous exhaustion," or "neurasthenia" (similar to the current-day diagnosis of depression with anxiety and assorted physical symptoms), and alcoholism—were treated by medical doctors and clergy. Even after Wundtian practices were becoming widespread, academic philosophers, physicians, and ministers were treated as public authorities on both normal and abnormal mental functioning. Organic (or "somatic") practitioners, usually medical doctors, believed that behavioral and cognitive disorders could be traced to problems with digestion, the blood, reproductive organs, or the central nervous system; the best-known theorists of somatic psychology were Silas Weir Mitchell (Wear and Tear [1871] and Fat and Blood [1877]) and George Miller Beard (American Nervousness [1903]). Mitchell (1829–1914) built his reputation treating traumatized Civil War soldiers with a combination of physical rest and mental inactivity; middle-class businessmen and housewives were later prescribed this regimen. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," a proto-modernist, feminist critique of Mitchell's treatment, vividly depicts the "rest cure" from the perspective of a middle-class housewife whose postpartum depression deteriorates into psychosis by the end of the text. Somewhere between the orientations of philosophical, medical, and religious psychologists, but operating on the cultural margins were practitioners of Christian Science (founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy) and New Thought (associated with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Horatio W. Dresser), two movements that emphasized individuals' abilities to influence the course of both physical and mental complaints through guided, positive thinking. In his novel The "Genius" (1916), Theodore Dreiser shows the novel's protagonist, Eugene Witla, and his estranged wife consulting a Christian Science practitioner in hopes of both healing Witla's mental anguish and steeling his frail wife against the demands of a high-risk pregnancy.

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

The philosophical exploration of everyday mental activity, begun in the eighteenth century by "common sense" thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Reid, started being challenged in the 1870s by the anthropometric laboratory methods of Wundt (University of Leipzig) and William James (Harvard). By measuring reaction times, visual and auditory perception, memory, and other neurologically based abilities, physiologically oriented psychologists tried to construct an objective, scientific base for the study of human consciousness. Though, for the most part, they avoided asking larger questions about the roots or purposes of complex human behaviors, their work was explicitly influenced by Spencerian philosophy and Darwinian theories of adaptation and natural selection. Especially between 1890 and 1910, the ideas of Wundtian psychologists were sometimes invoked in the scientific and popular press to justify racist, sexist, and imperialist public policies.

Intellectual unease with Wundtian psychology had less to do with some of its social/political uses than with a more general sense that the discipline (and the Spencerian/Darwinian theories that influenced it) had no need for the Christian underpinnings of American moral philosophy. For a genteel novelist like William Dean Howells (1837–1920), Spencerian determinism tended to emphasize biological and environmental determinism at the expense of human free will. Howells's late-career speculative fiction A Traveller from Altruria (1894), however, showed him embracing the implicitly Christian version of Spencerian thinking popularized by Howells's common sense philosopher friend, John Fiske. Altruria reflects Howells's hope that environmental determinism, exerted through socially just public policies, could, over many generations, improve the moral and ethical behaviors typical of the human species.

Wundtian psychologists like Titchener (Cornell), James McKeen Cattell (Columbia), Joseph Jastrow (Wisconsin), and Hugo Munsterberg (Harvard) trained university students to test and record each other's physical responses so that students could, in turn, compile anthropometric data from specific segments of their communities. The thousands of visitors to the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago tested by the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students spread public awareness of brass instrument psychology (so called because of the use of scientific instruments in the psychology of the time) and prepared Americans for the large-scale progressive-movement testing and measurement policies that would affect millions of schoolchildren, prisoners, immigrants, and workers in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), the California-born writer whose modernist language experiments would later bring her work artistic acclaim and public celebrity (as well as ridicule), was an undergraduate student of both William James (1842–1910) and Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) at the Harvard Annex (later called Radcliffe College) in 1893 and 1894. In her 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein would rightly claim that James—best known in literary circles for his description (in his 1890 Principles of Psychology) of consciousness as "a stream"—strongly influenced her personal and intellectual development. Her college compositions and early narratives such as "Melanctha" and "The Gentle Lena," however, show that she was preoccupied with mental normality and pathology, as well as by comparisons between "quicker" and "slower," or "bright" and "stupid" characters. These concerns reflect her "brass instrument" training under Munsterberg—and her subsequent medical school education at Johns Hopkins—more than the comparatively humanistic influence of James. Stein's mammoth novel The Making of Americans (composed between 1908 and 1911), by contrast, experiments with theories about what Stein called "bottom nature," which she developed in part after reading Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger's 1903 Sex and Character (translated into English in 1906). In her personal life, Stein took comfort in Weininger's patently misogynist ideas about homosexuality, which the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis, called "inversion": he argued that the "mannishness" of some lesbians made them superior to most heterosexual women, whose identification with and proximity to physical reproductive processes proved their intellectual inferiority. In letters and notebooks, as well as (in a more coded way) in published texts like Tender Buttons (1914), Stein expresses ambivalence toward the "messy" femaleness of women such as her sister Bertha and even her longtime partner, Alice Toklas.

Stein's uses of experimental psychology are noteworthy in part because the literary texts she produced with their help are also explicitly experimental. In Three Lives (1903) and The Making of Americans, she tests the implications of newer theories of consciousness, personality, and intelligence for narrative structure. Her narrative representations of individual emotional development over time (as in her depiction of Jeff Campbell in "Melanctha") reflect James's contention that, to the perceiving human mind, there is only the present moment: instead of describing Jeff's feelings for Melanctha as evolving toward and later away from love, Stein's narrator repeatedly presents discrete and absolute impressions of Jeff's attitudes, using words like "always" and "never." Likewise, her portrayal of Melanctha's friend Rose Johnson, which was influenced by Stein's medical school encounters with uneducated black women, echoes developing psychomedical discourses about the eugenic dangers presented by "feeble-minded" African Americans and immigrants. "Melanctha" opens with the death of Rose's baby from neglect, an event that is narrated without emotion and then "forgotten" until much later in the text, much in the same way that Rose "forgets" the baby itself. The disengaged, emotionally flat narrative style and chronology of "Melanctha" are presented as analogous to the underdeveloped, disordered mind of Rose Johnson, a woman whose inability to respond to Melanctha's emotional pain ultimately contributes to the death of the text's title character.

Though Stein's experimental work with psychological theories was unusual in the period, she was obviously not the first American writer to weave contemporary psychology into fiction. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown had infused Lockean ideas about perception and reason into Edgar Huntley (1799), whereas both Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1854) and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) referred at many points to phrenological theories of personality popular at mid-century. Insofar as the phrenological penchant for categories of thought and behavior may have influenced Whitman's development of a "cataloging" style, his use of contemporary psychology might also be said to be experimental in somewhat the same way as Stein's was. By the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. novels—like their realist counterparts in England and France—regularly incorporated what might be called "lay" or philosophical/psychological observations about region, social class, and gender into their closely focused treatments of individual thinking and perception.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FREUD'S 1909 CLARK UNIVERSITY LECTURES

Around 1910, as somatic psychology waned, the currents of experimental, psychometric, forensic, and psychoanalytic psychology flowed with increasing force into both literary and journalistic discourse. In the decade that followed this infusion, the English translation of Sigmund Freud's 1909 Clark University lectures would appear to have been the most influential psychological event in U.S. culture; as the examples of Howells, Mark Twain (1835–1910), Pauline Hopkins, Henry James (1843–1916), Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Frank Norris (1870–1902), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), and Jack London (1876–1916) attest, however, the literary importance of psychoanalytic theory needs to be assessed within the contexts of the psychological discourses (academic and otherwise) that had been developing over the previous two decades. In keeping with the hegemonic tradition of philosophical/theological psychology, a writer such as Mark Twain, for instance, refined realist techniques for representing consciousness in order to explore Huck Finn's uncertainties about the ethical bonds of friendship with a slave. In The Ambassadors (1903) and The House of Mirth (1905), likewise, James and Wharton narrated fictional minds capable of the most subtle moral equivocation in the areas of social class and marital politics. Within Pauline Hopkins's novel Contending Forces (1900), William James's ideas about double consciousness and spiritualism help explain her African American character's decision to pass as a white American. As Cynthia Schrager (1997) has shown, James's theory probably influenced African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois's own version of double consciousness, articulated in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk.

Writers who experimented with the extreme version of realism known as "naturalism"—a narrative form first practiced in the 1870s by the French novelist Émile Zola (L'Assommoir [1877], Germinal [1885])—tested the roles of heredity, environment, and individual choice for characters themselves functioning in settings of extreme poverty, physical danger, or moral ambiguity. For writers like Norris, Dreiser, and London, the growth of state-run institutions for "mentally defective" children and adults, combined with increased public awareness of educational and medical discourses about individual differences in intelligence, led to the creation of characters whose intellectual deficiencies limit their personal freedom and responsibility. The most famous of these characters was Norris's "slow-witted" dentist, McTeague (1899), a giant Irishman who functions more or less competently in a socially supportive environment, but who becomes a menacing, drunken "brute" when the state prevents him from practicing his trade. In his short story "Told in the Drooling Ward" (1914), London creates a borderline "feeble-minded" male who comments articulately on the politics of institutional life, but who clearly cannot survive beyond the walls of the state "home." Both Norris and London had personal connections to the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble Minded Children in Eldridge, California. Norris was the longtime friend of William Lawlor, director of the Home, whereas London, whose "Beauty Ranch" bordered the grounds of the large facility, boasted of his friendships with "imbeciles" living there. In 1916 Dreiser, whose descriptions of characters frequently included blunt assessments of their intelligence, shocked New York theater audiences with The Hand of the Potter, a forensic drama about the mental life of an epileptic child molester and murderer. Everyone in this poorly received play—from the police, to the murderer's Russian Jewish family, to the murderer Isadore Berchansky himself—debates the "causes and consequences" (to borrow the title of Clark-trained psychologist H. H. Goddard's 1917 compendium on "idiocy," "imbecility," and "moronism") of Berchansky's frightening form of feeblemindedness.

FREUD'S IMPACT ON AMERICAN CULTURE, 1910–1920

Establishing the thoroughly psychological character of U.S. narrative before Freud is important because, as Steven Marcus and other literary scholars have shown, the medical/philosophical orientation, Darwinist worldview, and narrative structure of Freudian theory closely paralleled the developmental bent and internally focused structure of much European and American fiction. In other words, Freud's writings (especially his case studies) looked a lot like the narratives that literary scholars would later analyze with Freud's help. For example, ten or more years before Freud's U.S. debut, Frank Norris wrote (but did not publish) Vandover and the Brute, in which the protagonist's childhood psychosexual trauma plants the seed of his eventual mental deterioration. Similarly, in her 1899 The Awakening, Kate Chopin explored the emotional effects of middle-class sexual repression on a character who resembles the patients (or heroines) in some of Freud's case studies. How best to account for the overlap between psychological developments in the narrative and theory of this period? As historian John Demos (1997) argues, Freud's theories about infantile sexuality and the emotional (dys)function of the nuclear mother/father/child triad grew out of the same "hothouse family" structure that animated so much late-nineteenth-century realist fiction. Both the psychological novels and psychoanalytic theories were logical products of a middle-class family structure in which socially disempowered mothers were rewarded by their husbands and communities for investing most of their emotional energy in the nurturance of children (especially sons); likewise, fathers' work in the capitalist marketplace rendered their authority over their children more symbolic (and hence open to children's interpretation and fantasy) than it had been in previous eras. For their part, children in the "hothouse family" learned to see their same-sex parent as rivals for the affection of their opposite-sex parent. While the Victorian glorification of the nuclear family and taboos against open discussion of sexuality meant that most novels of the period would not revolve around overtly sexualized parent-child conflicts, realist narratives frequently emphasized competition between sons and fathers or overly intense mother/child bonds. Freud's theories provided a technical vocabulary for analyzing both late-nineteenth-century middle-class subjects and the narratives they produced.

In Theodore Dreiser's 1916 play The Hand of the Potter, Quinn, an Irish American reporter, informs his colleagues (and the play's audience) of the current research on sexual pathology:

Now ye were sayin' a while ago that ye can't understand why a man like that should be attackin' a little girl, unless he were a low, vile creature, even if he wasn't balanced quite right—but I can. If ye'd ever made a study ave the passion ave love in the sense that Freud an' some others have ye'd understand it well enough. It's a great force about which we know naathing as yet an' which we're just beginnin' to look into—what it manes, how it affects people.

Dreiser, The Hand of the Potter.

Between 1914 and 1916, popular American magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Republic familiarized educated readers with basic psychoanalytic terms and concepts, usually in simplified form; further simplified (and perhaps distorted) borrowings soon appeared in explicitly literary contexts. Since its introduction to the United States, both proponents and critics of psychoanalysis have lamented the widespread "liberatory" interpretation that Freud's ideas received from American intellectuals between 1911 and 1930: while Freud and his professional disciples emphasized the hard work of sublimating or integrating instinctual drives (especially for sexual satisfaction and parental approval) to form a productive adult psyche, lay followers used Freudian insights about sexual repression and expression to authorize "free love" and other transgressions of middle-class sexual convention. In his 1918 play The Angel Intrudes, for instance, Freudian enthusiast Floyd Dell (1887–1969; one of the founders, with George Cook Cram and Susan Glaspell, of the influential Provincetown Players) presented a man and his much younger partner (played by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay) whose tryst is interrupted by the appearance of the man's guardian angel. Far from intending to redirect the man's sensuality, however, the angel wants to emulate it—to dress, drink, and love the way his human charge does. Faced with a choice between the sexually predictable man and his naive, "utterly depraved" guardian, Annabelle (named, perhaps, after the child lover in Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 poem "Annabelle Lee") runs away with the angel, promising the angel, "I shall never hold you against your will. I do not want to burn your wings. I really don't!"

While the tone of his play is ironic, Dell wants audiences to see the spontaneous, pleasure-seeking angel as the taboo-ridden man's better self. Dell's embrace of (what he saw as) Freudian freedom may have been partly a rejection of the Iowan's midwestern background in favor of the cosmopolitan ethos of his adopted home in New York City's Greenwich Village. Orthodox Freudians saw such interpretations as dangerous oversimplifications, but their currency would spread, especially with the popularity of Eugene O'Neill's plays from 1920 on.

In his 1918 story "Seeds," included in his 1920 short story collection The Triumph of the Egg, Chicagoan Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) takes what professional psychologists might have seen as a pessimistic, but nonetheless more responsible, approach to the therapeutic value of sexual expression. His caution reflected the reserved culture of the midwestern characters he created: far from believing that sexual activity could cure what later philosophers would describe as existential angst, Anderson saw sexuality as a force that might be biologically innate but was still constructed by culture. As such, it was just as likely as other forms of expression to be confused or misunderstood; because so many taboos surrounded the "language" of sex, miscommunications of the body and of emotional desire were harder than verbal ones to resolve. While a story like "Seeds" suggests that Anderson the modernist writer saw artistic value in Freudian insights about human development and sexuality, his characters make it clear that the writer had little faith in psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice.

Even more than Sherwood Anderson, Jack London disagreed with "liberatory" uses of Freudian thought; at the same time, however, London praised Freud as a crucial connector of human biological and cultural behaviors. Writing in California, far from the New York City hub of Freudian fans, London may have been following developments in Freud's thinking (among other psychologists, scientists, and philosophers) as they were being discussed by scholars, even before their translation into English. Deeply influenced by Darwin and Spencer, London understood whatever theories he read in terms of evolutionary ideas of natural selection. His interpretations of psychologists Freud, Havelock Ellis, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank emphasized his belief that psychological adjustment occurred in the evolutionary service of biological reproduction. In London's 1913 novel The Valley of the Moon, for example, Freud's and Ellis's ideas about female hysteria help London show how the example of what he sometimes called "primitives"—in this case, wild animals and a dark-skinned woman—helps his heroine, Saxon, learn an evolutionarily healthy sexuality. Saxon's self-aware sexuality is not a tool for what later psychoanalytic devotees might call "self-actualization," but a key to what London saw as a responsible, reproductively oriented adulthood. In a late, partly autobiographical novel like The Little Lady of the Big House (1916), by contrast, the suicide of the female protagonist demonstrates London's belief that emotionally complicated adults are unlikely to be freed of their mental pain and neuroses by loosened sexual conventions.

The number of practicing Freudian psychoanalysts in the United States was never large in the years immediately following Freud's Clark lectures, but, thanks to popularizers like Dell, Max Eastman, and Walter Lippmann, Freudian ideas directly influenced legal, social, and educational policy; trends in public policy, in turn, influenced literary texts by writers who might not themselves have read Freud before 1920. An especially vivid example appears in Dreiser's The Hand of the Potter (1918). Near the end of the play, Dreiser shows one police detective (saddled by Dreiser with the broadest possible Irish accent) chastising another for not knowing current psychological theories about deviant sexuality. Dreiser's invocation of Freud to explain behavior that was far beyond the pale of any of Freud's own subjects anticipates by six years the defense attorney Clarence Darrow's use of Freudian theory to exculpate teenage "thrill-kill" murderers Leopold and Loeb, who, in 1924, would (inexplicably, to most observers) kill a younger boy and dump his body in a marshland outside of Chicago. By 1920 Freudian "slips," "inferiority complexes," "death drives," "Oedipal complexes," and other concepts from his writings had been thoroughly absorbed into educated public discourse and were well on their way to becoming clichés.

See alsoPseudoscience; Realism; Science and Technology

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Dell, Floyd. The Angel Intrudes: A Play in One Act. New York: E. Arens, 1918. Available at http://gutenberg.teleglobe.net/etext04/kgrts10.txt.

Dreiser, Theodore. The Hand of the Potter. 1916. In The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser, edited by Keith Newlin and Frederic E. Rusch. Albany: Whitston, 2000.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis." American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910): 181–218. Available at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Origin/.

Goddard, Henry Herbert. Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan, 1914.

London, Jack. The Valley of the Moon. 1913. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Secondary Works

Alkana, Joseph. The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

Demos, John. "History and the Psychosocial: Reflections on 'Oedipus and America.'" In Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, edited by Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, pp. 79–83. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Hale, Nathan G. Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Marcus, Steven. "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History." In In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism, edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, pp. 56–91. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Perkins, Priscilla. "'A Little Body with a Very Large Head': Composition, Psychopathology, and the Making of Stein's Normal Self." Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 529–546.

Perkins, Priscilla. "Self-Generation in a Post-Eugenic Utopia: Dreiser's Conception of the 'Matronized' Genius." American Literary Realism 32, no. 1 (1999): 12–34.

Schrager, Cynthia. "Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race." In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, pp. 307–329. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Priscilla Perkins