Silvano Arieti: Anti-Psychoanalytic Cultural Forces in the Development of Western Civilization

In this wide-ranging essay, grounded in extensive knowledge of cultural history, Arieti singles out three factors that conspired to delay for centuries in the Western world the widespread acceptance of psychoanalytic doctrine: The Aristotelian emphasis on rationality, reinforced by Thomas Aquinas in the Catholic Church; the suppression of the sensory and the emotional; and the supreme importance of moral evaluation as typified by St. Augustine. These and other cultural-philosophical trends-by stressing the rational, the general, and the objective-ran counter to the Freudian emphasis on unconscious, irrational, and individual determinants of individual thought and behavior. This analysis is valuable and illuminating, but in my view may not go far enough. The more penetrating question may be, what forces enabled psychoanalysis to become a dominant cultural force around the end of World War I, and to continue influential until the present? A possible reason may be that in this postwar era the social and political order began to disintegrate and concomitantly humans started to question many, if not most, traditional codes of morality and conduct. Both trends are continuing and intensifying today. In short, since World War I, the West has been sinking into chaos and dragging the rest of the world after it. The reasons for this dilemma are too numerous to be even considered in this brief comment. I am greatly impressed by the suggestion that the pervading sense of unease as well as the massive and diverse problems besetting us can all be traced to a single psychological feature of today's world that the philosopher and educator John R. Silber terms the pollution of time.' I take this to mean that in virtually every realm conditions of life are changing so rapidly and drastically as to transcend our ability to adapt to them.2 To single out some random examples: In military affairs new weapon systems that originally took generations to develop, now are obsolete even before they are deployed. Communication technologies like the typewriter and printing press, after enduring for decades or even centuries, are abruptly being overwhelmed by hosts of telecommunication devices. And these, although invented only a decade or so ago, already are being entirely reshaped. The same tumultuous changes bedevil every field. In the biological realm, genetics, and with it most fields of medicine are being revolutionized by the cracking of the genetic code. …