Psychiatry and Psychology

PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY. Leftists have had a long, sometimes contentious relationship with psychiatry and psychology, which they have encountered as both professions and theories of human behavior. Before World War I, psychology was one of the sciences that socialists used to create a vision of post-capitalist humanity and an effective rhetoric of social change. Touring rural Oklahoma in 1907, for example, Oscar Ameringer had a colleague hypnotize members of the audience to simulate the false consciousness of workers under capitalism. Fortunately, Ameringer explained, the program of the Socialist party (SP) offered a “socialist snap of the fingers” to awaken and radicalize the masses. In New York City, the more urbane writers of the Masses and New Review celebrated the liberating force of “the primitive”—which they found in new trends in psychology, anthropology, and the arts.

At the end of the 1920s, psychology had almost disappeared from leftist discourse as the SP disintegrated and the U.S. Communist party (CPUSA) entered its sectarian Third Period. Militant socialists associated with the Brookwood School, however, continued to look to psychology for an alternative to the pessimistic economism of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor. They read articles on personality by Prynce (aka Prince) Hopkins, a “red millionaire” who studied psychology in Europe, helped found Labor Age, served on its board, and kept it afloat financially. Within the communist movement, only V. F. Calverton persisted in efforts toward a Marx-Freud synthesis that had begun in the New Masses in 1926–1927.

By the mid-1930s, the politics of the psyche was again a subject debated within the Left. To many leaders of the CP, discussions of psychology were a distraction from the class struggle. Psychiatry, likewise, was judged a profession promoting superstition, anticommunism, and conformity to oppressive social relations. In December 1934 this assessment was validated by the psychiatric confinement of Jane Emery Newton, publicized nationally by the Hearst press. The daughter of a socially prominent family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Jane Emery moved to Chicago in 1929, where she radicalized and married Herbert Newton, an African American activist on the CPUSA’s Central Committee. During a routine court appearance Jane’s family background was discovered; she was certified insane by a forensic psychiatrist and committed to Cook County Psychopathic Hospital.

Offsetting this image of the psychiatrist as a tool of capitalism were the many young clinicians who were Marxists. Together with radicalized academic psychologists, these young professionals soon supplanted bohemians and sexual libertarians as psychological authorities and activists within the communist movement. In Popular Front caucuses within various professions, they and their supporters debated the social content of competing schools of psychology and tried to interest their colleagues in antifascist causes. The Social Worker Discussion Clubs and Psychologists League published Social Work Today and the Psychologists League Journal, respectively; held forums on psychotherapy and personality theory; and campaigned for government programs to hire unemployed scientists and clinicians. In medicine, the Medical Bureau of the Daily Worker devoted much of its newspaper column and monthly magazine (Health and Hygiene) to psychiatric topics. Among its leaders was the psychoanalytic psychiatrist Frankwood Williams, whom the New Masses hailed as a model antifascist professional.

Within broader Popular Front institutions, psychology had visibility and influence far beyond its importance to Marx and Lenin. When, for example, the CPUSA organized the Pen and Hammer Clubs as a multidisciplinary successor to the John Reed Clubs, psychology was second only to economics as a topic for forums, articles, and study groups. A psychologist, Solomon Diamond [Party name: Edward Magus], was a founder and leader of Pen and Hammer, becoming the research director and national officer of its repackaged successor, the National Research League. When the Marxist journal Science and Society was founded in 1936, psychology was the scientific discipline best represented on the editorial board; combined with psychiatry it became the subject most extensively covered. Early contributors and supporters of the journal included the prominent young psychologists Solomon Asch, J. F. Brown, and Gregory Razran.

During the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Communist-initiated caucuses such as the Psychologists League suffered internal splits, lost members, and eventually dissolved. Longer lasting has been the Left-liberal Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), best known for its members’ providing the social psychology brief for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education. SPSSI was formed in 1936 by members of the SP, New America (a Deweyist-Marxist group), and former Christian socialists to sensitize the American Psychological Association to the issue of psychologists’ unemployment. Initially radical in its perspective, SPSSI pioneered the idea of social science research on war, class conflict, and racism. Distrusting the mass media, it mounted its own exhibit on the irrationality of war and laissez-faire capitalism at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Among the early leaders of SPSSI was George W. Hartmann, a pacifist, perennial SP candidate for office, and chairman of the wartime group Peace Now.

In the early 1940s, the CPUSA’s “Workers’ Schools” added courses in psychology and psychiatry, reflecting the Party’s interest in recruiting white-collar and middle-class members. When Workers’ Schools became “Peoples’ Schools” in the mid-1940s, psychology courses were among their most popular offerings, with liberal psychotherapists and academics recruited as teachers. The faculty of the California Labor School was perhaps the most eclectic, exemplified by Cavendish Moxon—a British émigré who had been psychoanalyzed by Otto Rank and who was a popular therapist for Communists in the San Francisco Bay area. Contrary to the stereotype of the CPUSA sympathizer as intellectually compliant, Moxon used the purge of Earl Browder as an occasion for chiding the Party’s National Committee for its neglect of psychology. What it failed to see, he wrote to the New Masses, was that Browder was a “self-willed individualist” who elicited “over-submissiveness” in Party members and who should have undergone psychotherapy “as a condition for continuing to hold his job.”

In addition to teaching, psychologists and psychiatrists assumed more than their share of administrative duties in Party schools; in Boston, for example, both the director (Harrison Harley) and the associate director of the Samuel Adams School of Social Studies were psychologists. By 1949, the Peoples’ Schools experiments in combining Marxism with psychology ended when government repression closed all but those in New York and San Francisco. Responding to the Cold War by turning inward, the CPUSA purged all Western psychology from these remaining schools, either abolishing psychology as a subject or replacing it with Soviet paeans to Ivan Pavlov.

In 1950, the Party launched an anti-psychological witch-hunt within its ranks, attacking the loyalty and reliability of anyone “contaminated by” Freudian ideas. The hundreds of members who were undergoing psychotherapy were told to quit either the Party or their treatment, causing many Communists to spend years suffering from unnecessary psychological distress. Until 1956 the CPUSA campaigned relentlessly in its press against psychotherapy and non-Soviet psychology. It isolated itself from scores of independent Marxists in medicine and psychology, such as Alfred Blazer, who wrote a popular mental health column for the Daily Compass titled “What’s YOUR Problem?”

Despite the Party’s anti-Freud campaign, many clinicians and academics remained loyal to the communist movement. Some quarreled in Science and Society over which psychoanalytic concepts should be retained, while others such as Communist social worker Bertha Reynolds vainly submitted defenses of psychotherapy to the Party’s press. One group, led by the psychoanalyst Bernard Robbins, established a psychiatric day hospital in Flushing, Queens, to apply Marxist ideas to the treatment of seriously disturbed patients. The practice of psychotherapy also gave some academics close to the Party a second career, free from government harassment and university blacklists. These included the formerly anti-Freudian experimental psychologists Bernard Riess and Ralph Gundlach, and the literature professors Harry Slochower and Edwin Berry Burgum.

Meanwhile, a few anti-Stalinist Marxists spent the postwar years attempting to link psychoanalysis to political change and social issues. Paul Goodman, for example, praised the revolutionary essence of both Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to the readers of Politics, while critiquing Freud’s political naïveté and Reich’s “Rousseauian” faith in the unfettered instinctual life.

In the Vietnam War era, leftist caucuses were again formed in psychology and related fields, including Psychologists for a Democratic Society, Psychologists for Social Action, and Behaviorists for Social Action (Marxist-Leninist Skinnerians). More visible to the public was the Radical Therapy Collective, publisher of the anti-psychiatric Radical Therapist. By the late 1970s, leftist critiques of modern capitalism were informed by revisionist histories of IQ testing; most prominent was The Science and Politics of I.Q., written by the formerly blacklisted psychologist Leon Kamin.

Within the remnants of the Marxist and neo-Marxist Left, psychology took on new meanings in the 1970s and ‘80s. In a few small groups, the distinction between psychological theory and political practice was intentionally breached, as socializing and controlling the membership became explicitly psychopolitical procedures. The best-known example of this was the applied psychology developed in the mid-1970s by Lyndon La Rouche in his National Caucus of Labor Committees. To keep his own cadre under control and free from moral pollution, La Rouche applied techniques of psychological coercion usually associated with religious cults and modern police states. These were also used by La Rouche’s former colleague Fred Newman, who claimed to have created a revolutionary Marxist therapy based on the ideas of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In the 1980s he became known for recruiting patients from his Institute for Social Therapy into an affiliated, cult-like organization, the New Alliance party, which twice ran a developmental psychologist for president of the United States. Since Newman’s death in 2011, his East Side Institute in New York City has continued under the direction of Lois Holzman.

A final expression of idiosyncratic Marxism combined with authoritarian control and personality reorganization has been a handful of psychotherapeutic sects organized by former activists in the communist movement. One was founded in New York City by Saul B. Cohen (aka Saul Newton), a charismatic former Communist social worker and member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who developed his own interpretation of Harry Stack Sullivan’s psychiatric theories.

More successful has been the Communities for Re-Evaluation Counseling (CRC). Established in numerous US cities and abroad, this group was founded in Seattle by Harvey Jackins, a labor organizer who became a self-taught therapist in 1950—following an anticommunist purge of the labor movement in the Northwest. In contrast to leaders of other psychopolitical sects, Jackins neither called his therapy “Marxist” nor cited explicitly Marxist principles in his many books and pamphlets. His overall strategy, however, began as an amalgam of individual psychotherapy and class struggle politics, controlled by Leninist authoritarianism. Combining the optimistic bombast of 1950s Lysenkoism, Scientology, and nineteenth-century Spencerian evolutionism, Jackins proclaimed his group to be “engaged in probably the most fundamental change” in the history of humanity, putting it on “the very leading edge of the tendency toward order and meaning in the universe.” After Jackins’ death in 1999, his son Tim Jackins became the leader of the CRC. In the early twenty-first century it created two NGOs that serve as front groups, Sustaining All Life (climate change) and United to End Racism.

Finison, Lorenz J. “The Psychological Insurgency, 1936–1945.” Journal of Social Issues 42, no. 1, 21-33 (1986).

Harris, Ben. “‘Don’t Be Unconscious, Join Our Ranks’: Psychology, Politics and Communist Education.” Rethinking Marxism 6, no. 1, 44-76 (1993).

Harris, Ben. “The Benjamin Rush Society and Marxist psychiatry in the United States, 1944-1951”. History of Psychiatry, 6, 309-331 (1995).

Harris, Ben. “Psychology and Marxist Politics in America.” In Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice, edited by Ian Parker and Russell Spears. London: Pluto Press, pp. 64-78. (1996).

Harris, Ben. “The Snake Pit: Mixing Marx with Freud in Hollywood,” History of Psychology, in press.