The Taproot Podcast - Part 2: A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Myth of Normal and the American Plague

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

When the Great Depression wiped out the myth of the rugged, self-made American hero, the country was left with a massive psychological void. Right on cue, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis arrived in the U.S. with refugees fleeing Europe. Freud famously warned that he was bringing America a "plague," but America didn't catch it. Instead, we domesticated it. In Part 2 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel explores how the deep, messy, and uncomfortable theories of the human soul were repackaged to fit American consumerism. We look at how Edward Bernays weaponized his uncle Freud's ideas to invent modern PR and advertising, how a bizarre 1940s contest to find the mathematically "average" person gave birth to the suffocating myth of Normalcy, and how the brutal logistics of World War II forced the military to create a standardized checklist for human suffering—laying the exact groundwork for the modern DSM. If you've ever wondered why we treat mental health like a checklist, the answer starts here. psychology history, sigmund freud, psychoanalysis, edward bernays, the dsm, mental health podcast, history of therapy, sociology, american history, great depression, world war 2, taproot therapy, joel blackstock, cultural critique, mental illness

History looping through your throat. Cold machines warns your soft, sad laughing notes, get carried through the tangled wires. Cold machines. You sing and something in the house. Hey guys, it's Joel, and thank you for tuning into part two of Therapy on the Couch, Psycho History of American Psychology. What psychology can see, what it can't, and why it has trouble telling the difference. By the 1920s, America had a problem that no amount of brass instruments or behavioral conditioning could solve. It didn't know where it was going.

And this wasn't abstract. It was felt in the bones of every office worker sitting in a skyscraper, but not building one. Wondering what his grandfather, who sat on the beam outside his window, would have thought of him. It was felt in the chest of all the young women who had moved from the farm to the city and discovered that the the rules from the farm no longer applied. The hierarchies were gone. The traditions were no longer valid. And it was felt in the sleeplessness of every immigrant who had crossed the ocean to find that America was not this golden land of opportunity, but a confusing and chaotic place where the structure of the old world failed to provide the same certainties.

The previous generation had known what they were doing. They were going to tame the frontier or build the railroad or establish the homestead or make enough money that their children would have more than they did. And these were not sophisticated goals, but they were legible. And you could measure your progress. You could tell whether you were succeeding or failing. The story had a shape. All of these previous periods of American history had left us with profound myths. America had inherited the rugged self-made man mythology from the frontier of the West. This was a myth that built the country, the belief that an individual through sheer willpower and physical endurance could carve out a destiny in the wilderness. But in the 1920s, the story had lost.

its shape. The frontier was closed, the railroads were built, the great industrial projects were complete, and America had become the most productive economy in human history, and nobody knew what to do next. The surplus of the roaring 20s had become an end unto itself until that end, when it became infinitely attainable, became ultimately meaningless, and failed to provide meaning. The nation didn't know where to go anymore, but it still inherited that old frontier mythology and desperately struggled to apply it to a new situation. You can't be a rugged frontiersman in a windowless factory. It's also hard to feel like your self-made or that you're a hero. The Western genre would come back in 1935, but at the time in 1920 it was too new. The

frontier had just closed, and this was recent memory. The hero myth was sort of projected into true crime novels where there were detectives like Philip Marlowe, but the nation struggled to see itself as a hero or to find a hero within itself. After the myth of the self-made man became so infused with their identity, Americans felt alienated or impoverished by these massive new industrial bureaucracies. They didn't blame the system, but they internalized the failure. And so psychology had inherited a new problem, not its fault, but let, again, what would be tasked with fixing. Why don't you remember? I'm your pal. Say, buddy, can you spare a dime?

The question that would define the next two decades was deceptively simple. Could psychology provide the explanatory power that religion, tradition, and communal narrative had once supplied? Could it tell Americans who they were, or where they were going? The answer, it turned out, was complicated. Psychology could offer explanations, but the explanations it offered were often too dark, too strange, too honest, or too unflattering about what they said about human nature. Americans wouldn't fully embrace them. And so it began a 20-year struggle

between what psychology actually discovered about the human mind and what Americans were willing to accept. But that says nothing compared to what happens when our ideas begin to trickle through in whatever garbled form that relayed to the public. The denials, the frenzy, the incoherent rage.

But might that not be caused by your insistence in an exclusively sexual interpretation of the clinical material? All I'm doing is pointing out what experience indicates to me must be the truth. And I can assure you that in a hundred years' time, our work will still be rejected. Columbus, you know, had no idea what country he'd discovered. Like him, I'm in the dark. All I know is I've set foot on the shore, and the country exists.

In the winter of 1909, Sigmund Freud stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor and looked up at the skyline of Manhattan. Perhaps apocryphly, he turned to his traveling companion, Carl Jung, and said, They don't realize we are bringing with us the plague. Whether or not he said it, Freud was wrong. America did not succumb to the plague. America domesticated it. Freud's 1909 visit was brief.

He delivered a series of lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts, introduced American audiences to the basics of psychoanalysis, and then he returned to Vienna, convinced that Americans were too shallow, too optimistic, and too obsessed with money to truly understand what he was offering. But the ideas stayed. One of the issues that psychology had encountered before is that Americans under an advertising regime that incorporated psychology

were losing the ability to tell the difference between what was real and what could be bought. If it wasn't bought, it couldn't be commodified. Maybe it didn't exist. What Americans saw in psychoanalysis where Freud saw a philosophy was a product. And over the next three decades, psychology would spread, through American culture in ways that Freud never anticipated and would come to deplore.

The real migration came later, under far darker circumstances. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Freud was 82 years old and dying of cancer. His books had already been burned in Berlin, and his daughter Anna was becoming a psychologist in her own right. Through the intervention of powerful friends, Freud escaped to London. He died there in 1939, but psychoanalysis itself had already begun its journey across the Atlantic. Throughout the 1930s, as fascism spread across Europe, a generation of Jewish analysts fled to America. They carried with them not just Freud's theories, but an entire intellectual tradition, a way of thinking about the human mind that had been developed in the coffee houses of Vienna and the consulting rooms of Berlin. They traveled in New York, mostly,

and they set up practices in the Upper West Side and in Greenwich Village. They trained American doctors in the psychoanalytic method, and they discovered to their frustration and fascination that Americans wanted something from psychoanalysis that it was not designed to provide. Actually, it's a fairly well-established psychological principle that society has a death wish. And if we could just tap into that, the market potential is... What the hell are you talking about? Are you insane? To understand why psychoanalysis struggled in America at first, you have to understand what Freud was actually claiming about the human mind. Freud's fundamental insight was not that sex was important.

That was the part that scandalized Victorian audiences and made for good headlines. The deeper, more interesting claim was that human beings are not masters of their own houses. Beneath the conscious mind, Freud argued, lies a vast unconscious territory populated by desires, fears, and memories that we cannot access directly. And these unconscious forces do not disappear simply because we can't see them. They shape our behavior, our relationships, our choices, often in ways that we find horrifying if we understood them. We are in a very real sense strangers to ourselves. More troubling for America still, Freud believed that civilization itself rests on repression. The drives that make social life possible are the same drives that uncontrolled would tear society apart.

We learn to redirect our aggression into competition, our sexuality into romance, and our death wish into religion. But the redirection is never complete. The repressed material does not disappear. It returns in symptoms, in dreams, in slips of the time. and the thousand smaller rationalities that punctuate daily life that Freud would analyze. I saw him drop the wheel on the roof. Suddenly I was running. Then I heard something beating over my head. It was a great pair of wings. The wings chased me and almost caught up with me when I came to the bottom of the hill.

However, despite all of the weirdness of Freud using sexuality as a bulwark to batter Victorian morality, and aside from the sexual theories, there were structural roots for what we know today is attachment therapy. When Freud talked about the edible complex, it wasn't strictly that the people just wanted to have sex with their parents. At a much deeper level, it was that people wanted to become them, because the parent was the only available model for what a human being could be. And we absorbed their neuroses because we are desperately trying to attach to them, to become like them, to handle the world the way that they handle it. This flawed but crucial insight paved the way for much better thinkers, like Winnicott and Karen Horny, who would later strip away the reductive sexual dogmas and build the relational psychodynamic therapy that we still practice today. By the 1920s, Freud had developed his structural model of the

mind, the id, the primitive reservoir of desires, the ego, the reality-testing conscious self, and the super-ego, the internalized voice of the parental and social authority. He had also introduced the concept of the death drive, Thanato, a fundamental tendency towards destruction that he believed was as basic to human nature as the sexual drive. This was not an optimistic psychology, for we did not believe that people could be cured of their neuroses. The best one could hope for was to transform hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. In some of Freud's letters to colleagues, he writes in a derogatory fashion about patients, calling them the fuel for the undiscovered country of psychoanalysis to be discovered,

meaning that they would pay for his lifestyle so that he could study them. He failed even at times to see it as a medical intervention, more of a process of discovering the mind. In Freud's eyes, the unconscious could not be conquered. It could only be partially illuminated. And for Americans raised on optimism, progress, and the belief that any problem could be solved with sufficient effort, this was too nihilistic. It was too European. It was too dark. And they wanted the tools without the philosophy. America would use this vocabulary to build a new hero myth of the mind. What is popularity made of anyway?

How does a person get to be popular with lots of people and have a few close friends too? Hey Jerry, there's that new girl in our math class. Oh, yes. My name's Carolyn Ames. She's a swell kid. Why? Do you know her? Not very well.

I wish I did. Yeah, especially when you compare it with some of the weird characters in this place. Yoo-hoo! While psychoanalysis was spreading through elite circles, a very different psychological project was transforming American society, the creation of statistical normalcy. In 1945, a Cleveland physician named Dr. Robert Lattow Dickinson and a sculptor named Abraham Belski unveiled two statues they called Norma and Norman. These figures were not idealized beauties or heroic archetypes. They were composites built from the average measurements of thousands of American bodies. Norma represented the statistical average American woman, and Norman represented the statistical average American man.

The statues were celebrated as triumphs of scientific measurement. Here, finally, was an objective standard to which Americans could measure themselves. The Cleveland Plain Dealer even sponsored a contest to find the real woman whose body most clearly matched Norman's proportions. Thousands of women submitted their measurements, and no winner was ever found. No actual woman matched the statistical average. And this should have been a clue. The normal was a mathematical abstraction, not a description of real human beings, definitely not a goal, and not a replacement for America's hero myth. But the concept had already escaped the laboratory.

By the 1920s and 30s, the statistical definition of normalcy had become the goal of American psychology. The discipline's mandate shifted from treating the sick to defining and enforcing the normal. This myth of normal became a fiercely weaponized concept. It was highly weaponized against women who were not allowed to point out exactly what was normal. about their own lived experiences, and the definition of normalcy was entirely controlled by a medical patriarchy to keep the client compliant, to keep the weirdness away, to stop the other from creeping in. A Stepford Wives style psychological containment. But the myth of normal was equally weaponized to gut men. Normal for a man was defined as being stoic, unemotional, hyperproductive, underthought.

And when the Great Depression hit, this manufactured myth of male normalcy, structurally crushed men, leaving without a psychological framework to process their own economic castration. This was a subtle but profound transformation. In the old world, there were the sane and the insane, the healthy and the diseased, and the categories were relatively clear. But the invention of the statistical normal created a vast new territory, the not quite normal. And you might not be clinically ill, but you might be anxious in ways that fell outside of the standard deviation.

Your personality might deviate from your mean. Your intelligence or your emotional. your sexual desires might fall on the wrong part of the bell curve and the new psychology was less interested in curing dramatic pathologies than in adjusting these subtle deviations and it was the goal was to help Americans become more normal to move towards the center of the distribution to smooth out their eccentricities to become more like the statistical composite that no actual person resembled but this just didn't create conformity it created hyper atomization

At the same time that you were striving to be normal, you were also striving to be more normal and better at being normal than everyone around you. It put the American psyche into a paradoxical and insane state of competition. It birthed the modern suburb. This was a psychology perfectly suited for mass production and mass marketing. Not only did you need to buy a whole lot of stuff to do everything yourself like power tools, you also needed to buy a whole lot of stuff to make sure that you could do it better than the person next to you, which meant that you had to buy nicer stuff. If you could define normal, you could manufacture products for it,

and if you could identify who deviated from normal, then you could sell them solutions. Whether or not you were normal meant that you needed to buy a product. The middle of the bell curve became the target market for everything from soap to psychotherapy. Mrs. Will Thompson bought a frigidaire with super freezer. The neighbors and friends learned of this new oasis and brought their butter, milk, and eggs for safekeeping.

The migration to America did not just transform psychoanalysis. It also determined which versions of depth psychology would flourish and which would be marginalized. Freud was not the only game in town. By the 1920s, two of his most brilliant former disciples had broken with him and developed their own approaches, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Both offered visions of the human mind that were in many ways more compatible with American sensibilities than Freud's pessimistic theory. But neither would achieve the heights that psychoanalysis would reach. Alfred Adler was the first major defector from Freud's inner circle.

He had developed what he called individual psychology. Where Freud emphasized the primacy of sexual drives, Adler focused on the social nature of human beings. His central concept was the inferiority complex, the universal human experience of feeling inadequate, and the equal universal striving to compensate. Adler's psychology was fundamentally optimistic. He believed that people could change, could grow,

and could develop their social feeling, and become contributing members of society. contributing members of society. He was interested in education, in child rearing, in the prevention of mental illness, through the creation of supportive community, and he ran guidance clinics in Vienna that were models of democratic accessible mental health care. And this should have appealed to Americans, and in many ways it did. Adler was enormously popular in the United States during his lifetime. He lectured widely, and he trained American therapist and influenced a generation of educators and social workers. The concept of the inferiority complex entered the common speech.

but Adler never achieved institutional dominance. He had no powerful organization to promote his ideas. He refused to establish the kind of training institutes that Freudians would build, and he was more interested in reaching ordinary people than creating an elite priesthood of analysts. And so after his death in 37, his ideas dispersed. Carl Jung's fate was different but equally instructive. Jung had been Freud's closest successor, the crown prince of psychoanalysis, until their dramatic break in 1913. You could not accept Freud's insistence that sexuality was the primary human drive. He believed that there was something more, something deeper, a spiritual dimension to the psyche that Freud's materialism could not accommodate. The subjectivity akin to William James.

Which is why I ask us all to raise our glasses tonight. To wish Dr. Freud, Dr. Young, and Dr. Adler the very best of luck in their new science. Ladies and gentlemen. May I ask you, what did you find was the most fascinating moment of the conference? When they declared my theories had nothing to do with science, that instead were a matter for the police. It's because everything you say is couched in biological terms. Well, I suppose you would rather I spoke with the spirit.

Maybe. But what is spirit? Everything. No. Everything that shows what you call spirit has more to do with repressive. sexuality. Please, gentlemen, not in the middle of the descent. Our culture is our spirit, our whole civilization. Civilization, Colin. And don't tell me, it's just a consequence of repressed sexuality. Yes, I'm afraid it is. The whole dilemma of power, heroes and love seems to be never

ending. Well, to quote you, Carl, the pendulum of the mind swings between sense and nonsense, not between white and wrong. the psychological development was not simply about adjusting to society. It was about individual integration, taking all of the parts of self and then making them understood or conscious so that they could become part of a bigger whole. The process itself was essentially spiritual, and this was too mystical for American medicine. Jung's ideas appealed to artists, writers, theologians, and seekers of various kinds. Joseph Campbell, who had spent the 1930s and 1940s developing his theory of the hero's journey to be published in the 50s, was deeply influenced by Jung's concept of archetypes.

But the medical establishment viewed Jung with suspicion. His embrace of religion, his interest in alchemy and mythology, his interest in the psyche, and the spiritual dimension made him seem unscientific, including his inability to produce any metrics. Publishing broad theories and case studies, he stayed away from quantified data. And here we must pause and look at a terrifying parallel. In the previous episode, we saw how American psychology desperately insecure and craving the authority of hard science murdered its own father, William James. James embraced the stream of consciousness in the mystical, and he was replaced by John Watson, who offered the sterile, mechanicalistic illusion of control. Across the Atlantic, the exact same tragedy played out between Sigmund Freud

and Carl Jung, and this dynamic was not simply capitalism binding the world. It was about psychology itself becoming profoundly insecure. Freud was terrified that if so psychoanalysis embraced the spiritual or the uncomputable, it would be dismissed by the rigid medical establishment. He was largely right, and Freud famously warned you that they must take a dogma of sexual theory to act as a bulwark against the black mud of occultism. Freud and Watson were the institutional enforcers. They pushed the mystery of the human soul away to protect their fragile academic effects. And James and Jung were the expansive, messy, mystical explorers who were excommunicated because their ideas couldn't be quantified, controlled, or easily monetized by the emerging technocratic state. This also has a parallel in what would happen in the 1980s and 90s, when cognitive and behavioral therapy would largely replace psychodynamic and somatic therapy as objective metrics to push away some of the weirdness of the mindfulness-based New Age movement.

when Eastern philosophy would cross-contaminate psychotherapy in California in this early 60s. While traditional psychoanalysis debated sexual drives and Oedipus complexes, a German psychoanalyst named Karen Hornay arrived in the U.S. in 1932 and saw something far more urgent. Hornay realized that in a terrifying environment, human beings are not primarily motivated by primitive drives. They're motivated by the need for security, for love, and what she called basic trust. Unlike Watson, she didn't think that every variable of the environment could control a person, but unlike Freud and Jung, she didn't think that basic inborn drives needed to be discovered in the unconscious. She saw the roots of human attachment to the parent in early childhood as the thing that had the most explaining power about human behavior in adults.

Back to the matter, Muley, after what them dust has done to the land, the tenant system don't work no more. They don't even break even, much less show a profit. By one man on the tractor can handle 12 or 14 of these places. You just pay them a wage and take all the crop. Yeah, but we couldn't do on any less than what our share is now. Well, the children ain't getting enough to eat as it is. And they're so ragged. We'd be ashamed if everybody else's children wasn't the same way.

I can't help that. All I know is I got my orders. They told me to tell you to get off, and that's what I'm telling you. You mean get off from my own land? I don't go to blaming me. It ain't my fault. Whose fault is it? You know who owns the land, the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company? It ain't nobody, it's a company.

They got a president, ain't they? They got somebody in those one of shotguns for, ain't they? Oh, son, it ain't his fault because the bank tells him what to do. All right. Where's the bank? Tulsa. What's the use of picking on him? He ain't nothing but the manager. And he's half crazy as self trying to keep up with his orders from the East. Then who do we shoot?

Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell him. did I tell you. In the middle of the 1930s, America was a fundamentally unsaved place. The frontier was dead, the economy had collapsed, and the nation was suspended in a terrifying void, desperately waiting for a new hero myth to save them. In the winter of 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the American people. His fireside chats were not a traditional speech.

They were intimate conversations delivered through a medium that had just transformed the country. The media theorist Walter Ong called radio the beginning of a secondary or rhaps. It created a voice without a body, intimate without presence, creating the sensation of personal connection across impossible distance. Radio created a parasycial relationship, the profound feeling of knowing someone that you would never actually met. And this was a massive nationwide attachment play. It was only because of the sheer economic terror of the Great Depression that this medium

could be stumbled upon and weaponized in this exact way. And a great time of economic surplus, it wouldn't have been needed. But during the Depression, the American male, the traditional pattern from Melius, had been economically castrated. He no longer felt like the provider. Inner FDR. Throughout the radio, the president effectively threw a warm blanket over a freezing and terrified country.

He got cozy with everybody, making the populace feel like they were snuggling in a bed, listening to a wise, protective grandfather, and he successfully projected the ultimate Jungian archetype of the father, filling the void left by the death of the American hero. But as Jung would understand, this kind of attachment also can have a shadow, the ability for someone to manipulate. Roosevelt wasn't the only one who understood the archetypes that were missing in America, or the powerful new media and cultural realities the technology was allowing. Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew, and where Freud was interested in healing, Bernays wanted power. Bernay's core insight drawn directly from depth psychology was that human beings are not rational actors.

To influence mass behavior, you do not appeal to reason, you appeal to instinct, and you manufacture desires that people do not know that they have. Bernays staged spectacles, like having debutants smoke lucky-strike cigarettes, a male behavior being done defiantly by women. It looked organic. The women held up signs saying that they were called torches of freedom, and Bernays had engineered the whole thing. He took a genuine political desire, women's equality,

and then redirected it towards a consumer behavior. making them both inseparable. If you wanted female empowerment, you know how to smoke as a woman. The energy of rebellion was captured and commodified, and Bernays was explicit in his 1928 book, Propaganda, writing that the intelligent manipulation of the masses as the true ruling power of the country. The elite were utilizing an archetypal magic,

the mother, the hero, the patriarch, to sell soap, cigarettes, and political compliance, hiding behind the veneer of rational PR. Crucially, this engineering would soon extend to selling a suburban home as the ultimate psychological sanctuary. PR firms and developers utilize these exact same mechanisms to equate citizenship and consumption, ensuring that the public was primed to retreat into private consumerist fortresses the moment that the coming war ended. Hello? George, there is a room around town that you close your doors. Is that true?

Oh, well, I'm very glad to hear that. Are you all right? Do you need any police? Police, what for? Well, mobs get pretty ugly sometimes, you know. George, I am going all out to help in this crisis. I have just guaranteed the bank sufficient funds to meet their needs. They will close up for a week and then reopen. Just took over the bank.

I may lose a fortune, but I am willing to guarantee your people, too. Just tell them to bring their shares over here, and I will pay 50 cents on the dollar. Boy, you never miss a trick, do you, Potter? Or you're going to miss this one. If you close your doors before 6 p.m., you will never reopen. The stock market crash of October 1929 destroyed not just wealth, but the entire American mythology. Millions lost their jobs and homes, and this massive split between the material realities of America and the promises of the American dream led to a profound reorientation.

The American Dream had been presented like a guaranteed contract, but now the people who had been promised assembly lines were lining up for bread lines. And when that happened, the system didn't blame itself. It started blaming the victim. Before the Great Depression, poverty in America had a very different psychological texture than poverty in the old world. In medieval England or France, poverty was futile. It was a permanent structural class that you were born into. But the American mythos was built on the safety valve of the frontier. poverty was supposed to be a temporary state. If you failed in the east, you could go west.

Upward mobility wasn't just possible. It was the national religion. By the 1930s, the frontier was closed, and the factories were padlocked. Suddenly America found itself with a permanent trapped starving underclass, and for the first time in history, America was staring down the barrel of European-style structural poverty. The stock market crash broke the illusion, and when the psychological pacification of mass media failed to keep starving people docile, the mask slipped. In 1933, wealthy Wall Street elites looked at this new, permanent underclass and became terrified of a European-style communist revolution. In a blind panic, they actually attempted to organize a fascist military coup,

the infamous business plot, approaching a retired Marine Corps general, General Smedley Butler, to march an army of veterans on Washington to overthrow FDR's government. The coup was thwarted, but when Butler blew the whistle, the failure of the business, plot taught the American establishment a terrifying and valuable lesson. In a democracy, you can't control a starving, angry, working class with guns and dictatorship. It's too clumsy. It sparks revolution. You have to control their minds. This is why the system doubled down on a new kind of psychological management. If the elites could not use the military to keep the masses in line, then they would find a way to get the masses to keep themselves in line. In the feudal system of Europe, class was based around

identity, but in America, identity was malleable. If you failed, then the failure must have been your fault. It was this hyper-internalized shame that would collide with the logistical meat grinder of World War II to make the psychology of the next century. When America entered the war, the military establishment faced an unprecedented demand, sorting millions and millions of men. They did not care about the depths of the human soul, and they didn't care about the debates between Freudians and Jungians.

They just needed metrics. And they needed a standardized baseline of human behavior that could be applied at scale. So they invented the myth of normal that would later come to define the suburbs. To process the chaotic reality of combat trauma, the military forced the creation of a standardized logistical sorting manual for psychiatric casualties. This manual laid the immediate groundwork for what would become the first DSM, or diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Crucially, this rigid statistical checklist was pushed through against the wishes of the very

psychiatrist who were forced to draft it. The clinicians knew that human suffering could not be reduced to a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet had already won. The military's drive to standardize everything led directly into the civilian world in 1945. The discipline of psychology shifted its mandate from exploring the depths of the soul to enforcing the baseline of the normal citizen. And when you combine these two historical forces, the paralyzing shame of the rugged individual self-made man and the idea of the aggressively normal person, you got to the human.

got the groundwork for the American suburb. The ultimate absurdity is that absolutely no one working in these psychological systems at this time thought of psychiatry like a system that was objective or quantifiable. Freud, Jung, Adler, none of them. Only John B. Watson and the behaviorists actually believed that you could measure the human mind like a machine. The military establishment grabbed the wriggling aqueous body of the discombobulated scene that was American psychology, and they forced it into the rigid reductivism of the Taylorist,

the Watsonian behaviorist, and the systems thinkers. Like James had envisioned it, psychotherapy was still a pretty subjective process. It was about the relationship between nodes, the relationships between people, and that blank space was the medicine. The change made at this time would turn the system into symptoms and interventions for the rest of its existence. It's something that nobody planned and that nobody at the time thought was possible, but it happened all without anyone noticing. And if you asked Adler, Freud, or Jung about this, what would they say?

Freudian psychoanalysis was essentially Freud wanting to study people. He thought that there were dark and unreconcilable forces, and your best bet was just to take a little peek at them, think about how powerless you are, appreciate the gravity of that interpretation, and then move on. He would be appalled to see his priest class of interpreters replaced by a checklist. Carl Jung thought that people had distinct parts of self

that played different roles in society and came from different parts of history and different evolutionary needs of a system. And he believed that you should prepare for death as the ultimate state of life, looking for the structure of narrative and the structure of anthropological society to model how a person finds meaning while they move through life and age. You cannot stream for that like a disease. And Alfred Adler thought that our neuroses were internal compensatory mechanisms for social dysfunction

that showed up externally and could be mapped in social interaction. None of this is compatible with the system it's been forced into, but it still uses their language. The terms are still around in the DSM. And there are concepts that are completely irreconcilable with a diagnostic checklist because there are forces that move across time and in between things, not things that can be screened for. And so this bizarre fusion, this deep subjective theory of these three thinkers, violently compressed into the objective metrics of the military and the behaviorists

that became what we know today, even though the language doesn't make any sense. And this is the moment that the world actually split. The image of psychology began to divorce from the American reality of psychology. And talking about psychology from this point onward becomes a hall of mirrors. Just like the end of the first episode, we're left living inside of a ghost story here. The theory is forged in 1920 and 1945 and the manufactured normalcy, the behavioral metrics, the lie that systemic poverty is a personal psychological defect, still haunt us today. They still organize our lives, and their conclusions are baking.

into the very foundation of modern American psychology, even though our culture has long since canceled their premises, and modern science has found them scientifically useless. We're still being diagnosed by the ghosts of World War II military logisticians. Scientifically, the 1945 pair-up time has been completely obliterated, yet the institutions the governmental health, the American Psychiatric Association, the managed care networks, the university training models, are locked into an infrastructure trap. They cannot abandon these mid-century metrics, metrics because the entire economic architecture of American health care relies on them. And the DSM is not just a clinical document.

It's a financial instrument. And the bureaucracy demands a standardized measurable normal to process claims, allocate resources, and conduct pharmacological research. The ghost of the 1940s isn't a statue or an ideal anymore. It is a statistical mean against which all human suffering must be plotted and build. And this requirement for measurable normalcy combined with the logical efficiency, of the military, created the ultimate pressure cooker, and as the troops came home, this exact combination laid the stage for white flight and the birth of the American suburb. Millions of Americans fled the cities, not just to find a patch of grass, but to frantically

prove to the system to their neighbors and to themselves that they fit the metric. In our next episode, we'll follow the ghosts into the 1950s. We'll enter the plastic oasis of the American suburb, and we'll see what happens when the military's normal becomes mandatory, when the mind is reduced to a computer and when a generation desperately tries and fails to break out the little boxes on the hillside. Cold machines, warm ghosts, we're humming under power lines, your soft-set laughing notes

get carried through the tangled wires, cold machines, warm ghosts, you sing in something in you sing, something in you, breaks I'm holding on mistake. Hey guys, thank you for listening to Part 2 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, a Psycho History of American Psychology. If you have not already, please check out our website, gettherapy Birmingham.com,

and consider subscribing to the podcast in your favorite podcast library or on YouTube.