Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism

Although The Interpretation of Dreams was published over a century ago, the integration of psychoanalysis into the broad matrix of modern social and cultural history has barely begun. During his lifetime, Freud’s charisma was so powerful that the historical landscape surrounding him remained in shadows. Only decades after his death did light begin to dawn. The earliest significant attempt to historicize psychoanalysis appeared in 1980. Situating Freud in the context of the decline of classical liberalism and the rise of mass politics and mass culture, Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was an inspired beginning. My own work, Secrets of the Soul, takes the same point of departure.1 Certainly Schorske was right to situate psychoanalysis in a broad historical frame. The brilliant debut of psychoanalysis in 1899, its spectacular entry into American-style mass culture, the widespread fascination it inspired among youth, flappers, artists and intellectuals, as well as among advertising writers and industrial psychologists, its critical contribution to the post-World War II welfare states, the revival of its utopian dimensions during the 1960s, and the central place it occupied in the history of second-wave feminism and gay liberation, all attest to the depth and pervasiveness of the connections between psychoanalysis and twentieth century culture. In psychoanalysis, it is possible to say, one encounters the spirit of twentieth century culture, at least until the 1970s. If so, then the problem of situating psychoanalysis historically may have an affinity with the problem Max Weber faced when he made the phrase “the spirit of capitalism” famous in 1905. Whereas Adam Smith and the British school of political economy tended to take the psychology and culture of capitalism for granted, Weber and his contemporaries, faced with the late development of the German economy, viewed psychology and culture as problems requiring explanation.2 Distinguishing the “form” of capitalism, especially exchange relations, from its spirit (Geist), and describing the modern economic order as a “tremendous cosmos” of meanings, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism isolated one crucial moment in the evolution of the spirit of capitalism, namely the origins of such bourgeois virtues as thrift, discipline and self-denial in the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 Specifically, Weber argued that the Calvinist idea of a rationalized, methodical life-plan devoted to this-worldly affairs – a “calling” (Beruf ) – was crucial in precipitating the spirit of capitalism. Originating in aspirations for salvation, Weber reasoned, rational, goal-directed, methodical self-organization remained integral to the emerging commercial and industrial order even after it lost its support in religious life.4 When he wrote The Protestant Ethic, Weber believed that capitalism no longer needed a transcendental justification, i.e., a Geist or spirit. This-worldly asceticism, he remarked, having successfully remodeled the world, had flown from the iron cage. “Victorious capitalism” rested on “mechanical foundations.” Since Weber wrote, however, others have argued that capitalism always requires a “spirit,” that it can never justify itself. In particular, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s recent Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme developed this thesis for the late twentieth century.5 In this paper, I will build on this suggestion to argue that psychoanalysis played a crucial role in bringing about the changes in the spirit of capitalism that we associate with the second industrial revolution, that is with the rise of mass