How Psychoanalysis Got Sexually Conservative: The ‚Jewish Science‘ Crosses the Atlantic

In no other time and place was Freudian psychoanalysis more
successful than in the first two Cold War decades in the US. This
was also a time and place when psychoanalysis was intensely
conservative – especially sexually conservative. In this lecture,
Dagmar Herzog shows that the florid misogyny and homophobia were
not merely products of generalized Cold War trends, but rather a
side-effect of widely broadcast battles over the relationship
between religion and psychoanalysis, as the “Jewish science” of
psychoanalysis underwent a process of “Christianization” in the
postwar US. In addition, tracing the arc from Karen Horney’s
Neurotic Personality of Our Time to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior
in the Human Male, the lecture will explore how complex processes
of de- and resexualization and profound ambivalence about the
status and meaning of the concept of “libido” were at the heart of
a succession of fierce rivalries that helped determine the
directions taken by American Freudians – with consequences for the
fate of Freudianism as a whole. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished
Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New
York. Her most recent books are Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in
an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge 2017), Unlearning Eugenics:
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe
(Wisconsin 2018), and Lust und Verwundbarkeit: Zur Zeitgeschichte
der Sexualität in Europa und den USA (Wallstein 2018).