Im doing research on the Musical Lady in the Dark by Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill. The plot revovles around a woman whom, at the height of her success as a powerful editor of a fashion magazine, is going through an emotional breakdown. The action in the play revolves around her going to see an analyist and also a good portion of analizing her dreams. What would the average Joe , going to see this production think of the subject matter of a woman going to a psychoanalyist? Would they know what it was? Would they be shocked or was this common knowledge? The analyst is going along the lines of the comonly practiced freudian technique. Any insight would be greatly apprecitaed!! Thank you. Michael Shell

-- Michael Shell (mshellnj@aol.com), April 21, 2001

Answers

Freud and psychoanalysis were very much part of popular culture by that time. Freud first appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in October of 1924 and then again just before his death in 1939 - when he was labelled "Intellectual provocateur" and the subject of one of the longest substantive articles the magazine had published. In the late '20s a popular song included the lines, "Don't tell me what you dreamed last night, For I've been reading Freud."

You will find a few basic details in my own article, "Snapshots of Freud in America, 1899-1999," which appeared in the September, 2000 issue of American Psychologist. You will find a list of much more detailed references there, of which i would especially recommend Burnham's 1978 and 1979 articles, and the 1971 and 1995 books by Nathan Hale.

-- Raymond Fancher (fancher@yorku.ca), April 21, 2001.

Hi Michael, if you want to see another story whose plot is psychoanalytic for a comparison, "Butterfield 8." Best, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 21, 2001.

I would second Ray Fancher in recommending the Nathan Hale books. The one entitled The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States covers the time period you're interested in and discusses popularization of PA. Other good examples from the time period include Alfred Hitchcock movies, especially Spellbound which came out in 1945 and features psychiatrists, repressed memories, dream analysis and dream sequences choreographed by Salvador Dali. All of Hitchcock's movies are psychoanalytically inspired even when it isn't made explicitly part of the plot. Hitchcock's producer David O. Selznick even commissioned a film script about Freud's life in the 1930s but never produced it (I have seen a published book of it and I think it might have been written by someone famous like Sartre, or maybe I'm just misremembering!) However, there was another movie made about Freud's life with Montgomery Clift. I don't know when it was made but it was in black and white so I'd guess the thirties. Anyway, the point is that around that time Freud and Freudian ideas were well in vogue and the average educated person (is that the average Joe?) or at least the average educated theatre-goer would have been familiar with psychoanalysis (at least the popular versions of it). By the way, some Cole Porter lyrics play on Freudian ideas too AND one of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's most amusing musicals, Carefree, features him as a Freudian psychiatrist who mistakes her for a patient. More evidence of how sophisticated audiences were amused by psychoanalytic ideas.

-- Gail Donaldson (donaldsg@union.edu), April 23, 2001.

Other useful sources for psychoanalysis and popular culture are: J Pfister and N Schnog (1997) 'Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America', and A Douglas (1995) 'Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s'. Roger Smith's 'The Norton History of the Human Sciences' (1997) contains a long bibliography.

-- Geoff Bunn (g.bunn@nmsi.ac.uk), April 24, 2001.