Freud's Answer : The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century

For a hundred years the “decoding” of Freud and psychoanalysis has been a preoccupation in the West. If it was not, as presented, a science and therapy for the treatment of individuals suffering from mental illness, what was it? Critics have labeled it a failed experiment or a hoax, suggesting that Freud was deluded, or anti-Victorian, or an aspiring prophet. Disciples have seen it as a means to a private identity, or a coherent belief system after the fall of religion, or an essential tool of a humane and democratic society. But none of a welter of explanations has accounted for the Freudians’ overwhelming acceptance in Western culture. In Freud’s Answer, a stimulating and original book, Martin Wain provides the first coherent view of the roots of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the new urban industrial age of the nineteenth century, Mr. Wain shows, Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense. Their patient was modern Western culture at a time of disorder and maximum danger. Their treatment was a set of theoretical concepts and practices that carried deep, suggestive symbolic messages so effective and desirable that for a hundred years they held sway, influencing a myriad of human endeavors. Freud’s Answer for the first time clearly illuminates one of the major intellectual phenomena of our age.

For a hundred years the “decoding” of Freud and psychoanalysis has been a preoccupation in the West. If it was not, as presented, a science and therapy for the treatment of individuals suffering from mental illness, what was it? Critics have labeled it a failed experiment or a hoax, suggesting that Freud was deluded, or anti-Victorian, or an aspiring prophet. Disciples have seen it as a means to a private identity, or a coherent belief system after the fall of religion, or an essential tool of a humane and democratic society. But none of a welter of explanations has accounted for the Freudians’ overwhelming acceptance in Western culture. In Freud’s Answer, a stimulating and original book, Martin Wain provides the first coherent view of the roots of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the new urban industrial age of the nineteenth century, Mr. Wain shows, Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense. Their patient was modern Western culture at a time of disorder and maximum danger. Their treatment was a set of theoretical concepts and practices that carried deep, suggestive symbolic messages so effective and desirable that for a hundred years they held sway, influencing a myriad of human endeavors. Freud’s Answer for the first time clearly illuminates one of the major intellectual phenomena of our age.