Abstract
Macromarketing interest in the history of psychiatric practice and its application to marketing is marked by various publications such as Fullerton and Punj’s (2004) study into the history of kleptomania and Schwarzkopf and Gries’s (2010) excellent volume about Ernest Dichter. To such enquiry, George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis represents an important addition. Originally conceived as a method for clinical practice, psychoanalysis’s theoretical richness and inherent fascinating nature ensured its broad spread across theory, humanities, popular culture, and, of course, marketing practice rendering it to be a huge center of ideas and activity. Indeed, psychoanalytic concerns with the subconscious have helped frame popular debate concerning marketing’s ability to subliminally control consumer behavior. More broadly, Adam Curtis’s recent BBC documentary series The Century of the Self suggests that psychoanalytic applications have extended the logic of the consumer mindset so that the Freudian understanding of consciousness and unconsciousness mediate contemporary life, bringing about profound transformations in political, economic, and consumer culture. Despite detractors psychoanalysis has been hugely influential and has obvious macromarketing relevancy.
Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis explores the genesis of Freud’s theories and their dissemination across scholarship and clinical practice. The book begins with the arrival of Freud in Paris in 1885 as he sought to embed himself in the thriving hospital research tradition marked by great institutions like the Salpêtrière. Freud studied major medical researchers such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Auguste Comte, their research into hysteria and innovations relating to hypnosis. Resisting tempting narratives of the isolated genius, Makari instead reveals Freud to be a master of synthesis, incorporating ideas from various different fields into his unfolding intellectual project of the inner world. Freud mined fields of sexology, psychopathology, biophysics and philosophy, borrowing, and synthesizing ideas and is presented as a master of dialectical interdisciplinary engagement. By 1899, Freud had arguably his first serious articulation of psychoanalytic ideas with the Interpretation of Dreams, in which we see germinations of what would become theories of the subconscious and Oedipal Complex. The limits of Freud’s ideas were already becoming manifest with Comte’s critique that any psychology so subjective in origin could never transcend personal prejudice and achieve scientific consensus not only prophesized the hostility from the wider world of clinical practice but also presenting the question of whose psychology was central to analysis: Freud’s? His detractors? A full hysteric?
As a group of Freudians started to gather, discuss, and propagate these ideas, the intensity of this latter enigma of whose psychology came to dog social interactions between the emerging advocates. Makari fascinatingly explores the formation of a Wednesday Psychological Society who would convene in Freud’s Vienna home and, it seems, feud under Freud’s watchful eye—sometimes distant and allowing diversity to emerge, but other times polemical and set to the bitter task of removing heretics. The arrival of the Zurich School, which included such major scholars as Paul Bleuler, director of the prestigious Burghölzlicentre at the cutting edge of clinical therapy and brain research, and also Carl Jung whose work eventually rivaled Freud’s, were to lend empirical, international, and institutional credibility to Freud’s ideas. In 1908, a congress was held in Salzburg, which eventually led to the creation of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Almost immediately its tangled web of envy, jealousy, paranoia, and ambition defined the Association.
Makari reveals a group perhaps best understood in terms of their own psychoanalytic dysfunctions. For example, it is suggested that Fritz Wittels’ polemics against women doctors revealed more about his own “seething psychosexual dilemmas.” Alfred Adler’s insistence on behavior as a type of compensation for self-weakness was understood by some colleagues to be an act of self-relating, while Freud was suspected by many of being obsessed with sex and had apparently became locked into father–son rivalry with Jung. Bitter confrontations ensued with Adler and Wittels forced out of the Wednesday Psychology Society while Jung eventually resigned his presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association amid much acrimony. Meanwhile psychoanalytic practice was regularly undermined by controversial countertransferent sexual relationships between analysts and patients and concerns about wild analysts.
For a field with so many Jewish exponents the tragic unfolding of events across Europe lends a dark backdrop to Makari’s account. The book details the sad scramble of psychoanalysts to safety in England and America as the impressive European network that had formed by the 1930s was all but wiped out. Psychoanalysis lived on during the Third Reich with Matthias Göring, cousin of Herman, taking control of the German institutions and identifying Mein Kampf as a text worthy of scientific study. By the end of the war at least fifteen psychoanalysts had been murdered by the Nazis and only two of the original Salzburg congress had survived. Makari concludes with accounts of nomadic clashing—the London group suddenly became swamped by Viennese counterparts and conflict immediately ensued between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, while in the United States—where the psychoanalytic community had not yet established any particular school of thought—the Europeans adopted the manner of “dispossessed royalty” with depressingly predictable tensions ensuing.
Overall Makari’s Revolution in Mind presents an excellent and high-quality overview of the emergence of psychoanalysis. Makari’s summarizing of complex positions is enormously helpful for those of us seeking to trawl through the confusion of conflicting schools. The text provides brilliant analysis of the social process of paradigm formation against background tensions spread across chronological, sectarian, and geographic terrains. While Makari is strongest demonstrating Freud’s dialectical process of theoretical development and locating Freud’s early works among the various intellectual traditions that he was borrowing from and within the specific social formations within which psychoanalysis started to spread, a question that perhaps remains unanswered is how Freud’s ideas spoke to the cultural transformations of modernity that defined early twentieth-century Europe. Just why were Freud’s ideas so charismatic and how are we to understand the wider diffusion of psychoanalysis into popular culture and imagination? While Makari leaves us wondering, these very questions form the basis of Zaretsky’s (2005) recent Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis providing a neat complementarity between the two important texts. Revolution in Mind is to be recommended for anybody interested in Freudian theory, paradigm development, European history, and the development of theory fundamental for understanding contemporary identities and consumption, markets and culture.