This is from something that I’ve been working on regarding Freudian psychology and social conditioning. Unfortunately, one of the author’s sources is Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which falsely equates Communism with Nazism. To be honest, I haven’t found any “perfect” sources for my project. Even Michael Parenti’s Against Psychopolitics quotes problematic sources (Harold Lasswell was involved with the RAND Corporation). While Karl Korsch had worked for the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which was home to the CIA front Frankfurt School, I like the above quote. I’ll probably end up using a different one when it’s all said and done, though.
This paper surveys how and why psychoanalysis during the 1950s—its “Golden Age” in the United States emerged as a highly respected professional discipline with great public currency.
The prevalence and popularity of psychoanalysts in public culture is substantiated by an extensive survey of primary print sources featuring psychoanalysts opining on many of the major social and political issues of the decade. Combining these opinions with those expressed in professional journals and publications, this paper reveals how psychoanalysts used their growing public currency to shape debates about which social identities and behaviors, cultural values, and political ideals were appropriate and legitimate for Americans during the era. By determining the boundaries between normal and abnormal, and associating some identities, values, and behavior with mental illness, psychoanalysts helped construct and legitimize social and political norms in postwar society. The behaviors and ideals psychoanalysts publicly promoted included marriage, home-ownership, and a new nuclear family; separate gender spheres and clearly defined roles for men and women; heterosexuality; personal industriousness; anticommunism; and individualism. Finally, despite the preeminence of concerns about conformity among intellectuals during the 1950s, and the apparent promise of psychoanalysis to support better self-realization for individuals, the construction and normalization of this limited set of values actually promoted conformity and thwarted individuality.
Related:
Clara Zetkin: Lenin on the Women’s Question
The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems ‘educated’, even scientific, but it is ignorant, bungling. Freudian theory is the modern fashion. I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles, dissertations, pamphlets, etc., in short, of that particular kind of literature which flourishes luxuriantly in the dirty soil of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always contemplating the several questions, like the Indian saint his navel. It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary hypotheses, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.
Invention of Heterosexuality | Queer History – Rogan Shannon
The article I drew from goes on to discuss Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist, and his work in defining sexual love and what was “normal.” It also discusses how the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class and seemingly increasing degeneracy. This was when cities were exploding in size in the 19th century. It wouldn’t be an article/video without mentioning Freud and his psychosexual theory of development, which is really messed up but was happily accepted as the explanation for “normal” sexuality. So bizarre. Kinsey is also mentioned, and his work in defining the spectrum of sexuality which reinforced the idea that sexuality was between two ends. I’ll quote from the article here: “Once upon a time, heterosexuality was necessary because modern humans needed to prove who they were and why they were, and they needed to defend their right to be where they were. As time wears on, that label seems to actually limit the myriad ways we humans understand our desires and loves and fears.” The article closes out with this: “The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn’t just blurry, as some take Kinsey’s research to imply – it’s an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. Men and women will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality – as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity – may well die out long before then.”
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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