Rethinking the Triumph of the Therapeutic: Psychology, Sex, and Living Rationally in Twentieth-Century America

There have been a number of narratives about the entanglement of psychotherapy, sexuality, and individuality in twentieth-century America. Modernist psychoanalysts and psychologists proclaimed that the historical role of their science was that of liberating the public from a Victorian morality. At mid-century, a number of cultural critics countered that psychotherapy provided an impoverished replacement for religion, one that fostered a culture of self-absorbed narcissism. Later, Foucauldian genealogies of subjectification focused on how psychology contributed to an individualization intimately tied to liberal projects of management and self-governance. However, recent developments call for revisiting these existing historical narratives. For example, they fail to account for the late-twentieth-century eclipse of psychoanalysis by a more immediate and action-oriented cognitive behavioral therapy as the predominant form of psychotherapy. The opening of the twentieth century’s psychological archives (e.g. collections of letters written to psychologists, the protocols of projective and personality tests, and the responses to surveys) offers new avenues for exploring how patients and a broader public did not simply mirror psychologists’ ideas but adapted them into their self-talk. These archives of self-reports furnish fascinating opportunities to illuminate the social history of sexuality and subjectivity, however their use are fraught with epistemological and ethical challenges. Turning to these kinds of records, this presentation will look at three moments when American psychologists self-consciously sought to instill rational attitudes towards sexuality: 1) attempts to create an  “objective psychopathology” to counterpoint psychoanalysis in the 1920s; 2) the sexological origins of Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Theory from the 1950s to the 1970s; 3) the work of social psychologists seeking to measure and alter the public’s attitude and knowledge about AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. These episodes furnish opportunities for investigating the making of selfhood in relationship with (and in resistance to) forms of scientific expertise.