Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this sweeping review of psychoanalysis in Europe and the United States, Max Weber looms as large as Sigmund Freud. Using a Weberian sensibility to probe psychoanalysis demonstrates the virtues of approaching changes in material life, social institutions, and leading ideas as historically interdependent. Channeling Weber to probe the momentous cultural difference Freud made, Eli Zaretsky believes, promises new revelations not only about psychoanalysis but also about the triumphs and failures of modernity between the late nineteenth century and the end of the 1960s. Secrets of the Soul interprets the era of Freudian ferment as Weber interpreted the Protestant Reformation. “Psychoanalysis served as the ‘Calvinism’ of the second industrial revolution,” the author asserts (p. 8). Just as intolerable anxieties about personal salvation and religious concepts such as the “calling” stoked the fires of market revolution, analytic commitments to interiority advanced the socioeconomic transformations we associate with the culture and economy of consumption. For Weber, the spirit of capitalism was the motive force behind the rationalization of modern economic and social life. For Zaretsky, an ethic of ruthless introspection combined with depth psychology functioned similarly, creating preconditions for unprecedented experiences of personal life. The emergence of selfhood as a lifelong project rooted in early familial relationships at once emotionally intensive and vulnerable to repression is perhaps Freud's most obvious legacy. It permanently altered childhood while placing childhood psychology at the permanent center of the human condition.