The Romance of American Psychology "nsd0e5974"

1. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

2. For an interesting examination of the idea of "postindustrial society," which emphasizes that leftists were as enthusiastic about "the obsolescence of the economic" as were liberals like Daniel Bell, see Howard Brick, "Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s," American Quarterly 44 (September 1992):348-380.

3. Ellen Herman, "Being and Doing: Humanistic Psychology and the Spirit of the 1960s," in Sights on the Sixties, ed. Barbara Tischler (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 87-101.

4. William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press,

1972); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (New York: Random House, 1979).

5. Philip Wylie, "Common Women," in Generation of Vipers (New York: Pocket Books, 1942), 188.

6. Ibid., 191.

7. Philip Wylie, "The Transmogrification of More," in Sons and Daughters of Mom (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 41.

8. Edward A. Strecker, Their Mothers' Sons: The Psychiatrist Examines an American Problem (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1946), 30.

9. Ibid., 219-220.

10. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 143, 67.

11. Ibid., 356-359.

12. Robert Coughalan, "Changing Roles in Modern Marriage," Life 41 (24 December 1956):110.

13. Ibid., 116.

14. Roxanne Dunbar, "Spock Sentences Women," Helix (11 December 1969), in WH, reel 2, p. 594.

15. "Psychology Constructs the Female" is the title of an important feminist manifesto authored by psychologist Naomi Weisstein. It is discussed in greater detail below.

16. Weisstein's piece was first published by the New England Free Press in pamphlet form under the title, "Kinder, KÜche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female." It was subsequently revised as "Psychology Constructs the Female" and was widely reprinted in the early 1970s. The original text can be found in WH, reel 2, pp. 689-696.

17. Naomi Weisstein, "Adventures of a Woman in Science," in Women Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques, ed. Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 188.

18. For another story about how Harvard's Psychology Department marginalized its female graduate students and faculty members, see Miriam Lewin, "The Kurt Lewin Memorial Award Presentation and Introduction," Journal of Social Issues 48 (1992):170.

19. Weisstein, "Adventures of a Woman in Science," 189; Naomi Weisstein, Virginia Blaisdell, and Jesse Lemisch, The Godfathers: Freudians, Marxists, and the Scientific and Political Protection Societies (New Haven: Belladonna Publishing, 1975), 2.

20. Weisstein, "Adventures of a Woman in Science," 200.

21. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female or The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist (with some attention to the fantasies of his friends, the male biologist and the male anthropologist)," in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 181.

22. Ibid., 179.

21. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female or The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist (with some attention to the fantasies of his friends, the male biologist and the male anthropologist)," in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 181.

23. Ibid., 195.

21. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female or The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist (with some attention to the fantasies of his friends, the male biologist and the male anthropologist)," in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 181.

24. Ibid., 181.

21. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female or The Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist (with some attention to the fantasies of his friends, the male biologist and the male anthropologist)," in Radical Feminism, ed. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 181.

25. Ibid., 189.

26. The phrase "ideological pollution" is from Nancy M. Henley, "Shaking the Lead Out: Action Proposals for Psychology," paper presented at the 1971 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, in WH, reel 3, p. 702.

27. Pauline B. Bart, "Sexism and Social Science: From the Gilded Cage to the Iron Cage, or, the Perils of Pauline," Journal of Marriage and the Family (November 1971):737. See also her "Depression in Middle-Aged Women," in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New York: New American Library, 1971), 163-186, and "The Myth of a Value-Free Psychotherapy," in The Sociology of the Future: Theory, Cases, and Annotated Bibliography, ed. Wendell Bell and James A. Mau (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), 113-159.

28. Phyllis Chesler, "Marriage and Psychotherapy," in The Radical Therapist, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 175-180; "Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship," in Woman in Sexist Society, 362-392; "Women as Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Patients," Journal of Marriage and the Family 33 (November 1971):746-759.

29. Phyllis Chesler, Women & Madness (New York: Avon, 1972), 56, emphasis in original.

30. Ibid., 16, emphasis in original.

31. Chesler, "Women as Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Patients," 757; Chesler, "Marriage and Psychotherapy," 180; Chesler, Women & Madness, chap. 10.

32. An overview of feminist work to transform psychology, in these and other fields, can be found in a special issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly 15 (December 1991) devoted to "Women's Heritage in Psychology."

33. An early effort to discuss the class and race biases of feminist critiques of psychiatry is Judi Chamberlain, "Women's Oppression and Psychiatric Oppression," in Women Look at Psychiatry, ed. Dorothy E. Smith and Sara J. David (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1975), 39-46.

34. The best overview of the intellectual history of the early women's movement is Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). The first book to argue that feminism's most important, generative roots were in the civil rights movement and the New Left was Evans, Personal Politics. Another analysis, which stresses the importance of Freedom Summer in establishing continuity of key personnel, ideas, and strategies between various 1960s movements, is Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

35. General overviews of antipsychiatric theory and activism can be found in Norman Dain, "Critics and Dissenters: Reflections on 'Anti-Psychiatry' in the United States," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25 (January 1989):3-25; Grob, From Asylum to Community, 279-288; Jane M. Ussher, Women's Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), chap. 6.

36. For example, R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967); Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). One

of the best anthologies from the activist wing of the movement is Jerome Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist.

37. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, 69.

38. Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 106.

39. Ibid., 248, 223.

40. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), 36,emphasis in original.

41. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 129.

42. For discussions that emphasize the conflicts between antipsychiatric and feminist analysis of madness and the helping professions, see Elaine Showalter, "Women, Madness, and the Family: R. D. Laing and the Culture of Antipsychiatry," in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 220-247; Ussher, Women's Madness, chap. 7.

43. See for example, Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist, pt. 3; Judi Chamberlain, On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978); K. Portland Frank, The Anti-Psychiatry Bibliography and Resource Guide, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1979), section on "Psychiatry and Women"; Smith and David, eds., Women Look at Psychiatry; Hogie Wyckoff, ed., Love, Therapy and Politics: Issues in Radical Therapy—The First Year (New York: Grove Press, 1976), esp. pt. 2.

44. Claude Steiner, "Radical Psychiatry Manifesto," in Claude Steiner et al., Readings in Radical Psychiatry (New York: Grove Press), 6. This document is reprinted in Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist, 280-282.

45. Partisans of radical therapy were sometimes sharply divided on the question of whether anything positive could be salvaged from psychotherapy. For example, the collective that published one of the movement's major publications, The Radical Therapist, split in early 1972 over this issue. The faction opposed to any type of psychotherapy moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it began to publish Rough Times, a quarterly whose name was eventually changed to State and Mind. That part of the movement which continued to support the work of radical therapists was centered in the Berkeley Radical Psychiatry Center and published Issues in Radical Therapy.

46. A few theorists took a harder line. See, for example, Dorothy Tennov Hoffman, "Psychotherapy as an Agent of Patriarchy," typescript, talk delivered to Pittsburgh Psychological Association, 23 April 1971, in WH, reel 2, pp. 804-820. Hoffman termed psychotherapy "a monster in our midst" and "a kind of opiate." Her tone moderated somewhat over the next several years. See Dorothy Tennov, ''Feminism, Psychotherapy and Professionalism," Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 5 (Summer 1973):107-111. She eventually published a book that reclassified psychotherapy from monstrous to "hazardous." See Dorothy Tennov, Psychotherapy: The Hazardous Cure (New York: Abelard-Schumen, 1975).

Several years later, Mary Daly also argued that "the concept of 'feminist' therapy is inherently a contradiction." Psychotherapy of any sort was, in Daly's analysis, the equivalent of "mind rape." "A woman seduced into treatment is

'inspired' with dis-ease she had never before even suspected. . . . The multiplicity of therapies feeds into this dis-ease, for they constitute an arsenal for the manufacture of the many forms of semantic bullets used to bombard the minds of women struggling to survive in the therapeutically polluted environment." Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 282, 287, 276.

47. A number of documents relating to these types of actions can be found in WH.

48. San Francisco Redstockings, "Radical Psychiatrists," letter following 1970 American Psychiatric Association convention, in WH, reel 2, p. 787. This document is also reprinted in Agel, ed., The Radical Therapist, 173-174.

49. David Perlman, "The Psychiatrists & the Protestors," San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, 24 May 1970, in WH, reel 2, p. 727.

50. Untitled document presented to business meeting, Radical Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association, documents from the May 1970 ApA convention, in WH, reel 2, p. 1149.

51. Perhaps the best illustration of this came in 1973, when a protracted campaign organized by gay liberationists, feminists, and professional supporters finally resulted in the deletion of homosexuality from the third edition of psychiatry's roster of mental illnesses, DSM-III. See Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University, Press, 1987), and Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990, An Oral History (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 221-225, 250-255.

52. Radical Caucus of the American Psychiatric Association, documents from the May 1970 ApA convention, in WH, reel 2, p. 1153.

53. Ibid., 1150, emphasis in original.

54. The only overview of Association for Women in Psychology history is Leonore Tiefer, "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Psychology, 1969-1991," Psychology of Women Quarterly 15 (December 1991 ):635-649. A somewhat longer version was published in pamphlet form by the AWP for its members as part of the 1992 centennial celebration of the American Psychological Association. It is this longer version that is cited in the notes below. See also Ian E. McNett, "Psychologists: One Session Taken Over Five Dissident Groups Seek Changes," Chronicle of Higher Education 3 (15 September 1969):7.

55. Henley, "Shaking the Lead Out," WH, reel 3, p. 702.

56. Leonore Tiefer, "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Psychology, 1969-1991" (Indiana, Pa.: Association for Women in Psychology, 1992), 9.

57. Henley, "Shaking the Lead Out," WH, reel 3, p. 700.

58. Tiefer, "A Brief History of the Association for Women in Psychology, 1969-1991," 9.

59. Ibid., 6.

60. "Psychology and the New Woman: Statement of the Association for Women Psychologists to the American Psychological Association," September 1970, Miami Beach, Florida, in WH, reel 2, pp. 1234-1235.