Joyce Brothers, and Other Jewish Thinkers. What would Freud have said if he'd read this paean to the Jewish contribution to the American 'culture of therapy'?,
by Leslie K. Rabkin, Jerusalem Report (Israel), May 1, 2005
"Jews and the American Soul" is a triumphalist tale of how Jewish psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, as well as anthropologists, rabbis, writers and advice columnists, "created the vocabulary of 20th-century selfhood and the way Americans came to view their psyches and human nature." This development, Andrew Heinze claims, was the outgrowth of popular expositions of "Jewish values," by a coterie of "Jewish thinkers," who offered up new ideas about one's "inner life," and thereby gave rise to America's "culture of therapy." [Bullshit. It's the result of Jewish networking, Jewish hustling, and Jewish pushing at every possible door while undermining the established (once Christian) order. It is also the result of incessant Jewish materalism, self-doubt, tribal shame, and self-obsession.] Furthermore, avers Heinze, a professor of American history and Jewish studies at the University of San Francisco, these Jewish "evangelists" of the new psychology of Freud challenged and usurped the role of Protestant moralizing discourse and spiritual guidance as the traditional paths toward understanding the interplay between the realms of one's conscious and unconscious worlds. This was to be done by replacing faith with the science of the psychological laboratory, and spiritual guidance with psychotherapy, designed to master the inner struggle between impulse and self-control. Only some of the multitude of dramatis personae on Heinze's stage will be familiar to 21st-century readers (his index lists more than 200 Jews) - including Erich Fromm, Martin Buber, Erik Erikson, the Lederer sisters (known in their advice columns by the pseudonyms Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren), Abe Maslow and Betty Friedan - but the rest are a melange of mostly forgotten Jewish mental-health professionals and assorted pundits whose writings responded to what the author rhetorically refers to as the "most important spiritual question of the [last half of the 20th century]: How do we locate the authentic person, the genuine self, beneath the layers of conventional behavior that family and society impose on the individual?" As best I can tell from the text, however, this phantom is still at large. Heinze has written a book that is celebratory in nature, and his authorial form of uplift often reads like the banal homilies proffered by his subjects ... If we add to this line-up such factors as Jewish marginality and a press for upward mobility, an abhorrence of discrimination, the rigor of Talmudic pilpul, and the Enlightenment tradition of self-examination, as well as the mameloshen's clinical and social usefulness of irony, character delineation, and insight into the follies of human behavior, we might better understand what led Jews to become so important in shaping America's "therapeutic culture." [Jewish identity (obsessive self-love and self-hate) is totally neurotic. This obvious reason for Jewish dominance of this field is beyond the scope of Jewish understanding.] ... And, although a glossary of words coined by Heinze's heroes did become part of American rhetoric - words like ego and id, defense mechanism, self-actualization, identity crisis, and the I-thou relationship - do readers understand and use this Jewish-inflected vocabulary to achieve peace of mind? Does it help them in any serious way? Alas, I doubt it. Having been a clinical psychologist for more than 40 years, I am well aware of the Sisyphean nature of trying to bring about change in one's life, even when the desire is optimal and one is willing to pay dearly. And the ultimate irony of Heinze's obvious pleasure in chronicling a Jewish success story, is that Americans, who have a short memory, appear to have already ditched the rigors of an introspective, therapeutic point of view, and now are known as a "Prozac culture." (Incidentally, it was a Jewish psychiatrist, Peter Kramer, whose 1993 bestseller, "Listening to Prozac," first touted "cosmetic psychopharmacology," and made the anti-depressant a household word.) Nor does Heinze mention that in the 50s and 60s, the heady days of postwar American psychotherapy, some 50 percent of clinical psychologists, analysts, psychiatrists and social workers were Jewish, and, in urban settings like New York and L.A., Jews outnumbered gentiles more than three to one as seekers of talking cures. From these figures, one must suppose that the groundswell of interest in the psyche was mainly a Jewish-American phenomenon. Freud would have plotzed had he read this book. For one thing, he most certainly did not want psychoanalysis to be viewed as "a Jewish national affair." ... Freud's admonition to his American acolyte, A.A. Brill, also suggests that the lofty goal of public enlightenment may not at all be the primary aim of the producers of the literature whose importance Heinze acclaims: "You have submitted far too much to the two big vices of America," the Professor lamented, "the greed for money and the respect of public opinion."
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