Sigmund Freud and his opponents in the United States seemed to agree on one thing: that psychoanalysis is pestilential to the American way of life.
“They don’t realise that we are bringing them the plague”: so goes the well-known line, supposedly delivered by Freud to Carl Jung on the former’s first visit to the US in 1909 as his steamship drew into New York harbour. The remark was intended in jest, presumably, but with a hint of seriousness: repressed America could hardly be prepared to discover the seething forces contending within man’s divided self.
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