English Social Sciences Social Science, Sociology, Ethics, etc.

***I am not sure how to interpret it - even though effective? when it was effective? Other meanings?***

It is no secret that US psychoanalysis was politically conservative in the postwar years, but nobody has been able fully to explain it. Historians so far have provided at least four explanations (in addition to thinking of “Americanization” of psychoanalysis as involving a good fit with American culture’s historical tendency to promote introspection and individual efforts at self-optimization). Most scholars – from Russell Jacoby in 1983 to Eli Zaretsky in 2004 – have referenced the active silencing and expulsion of more radically inclined analysts from the official fold as well as the blunting impact of medicalization on psychoanalysis’ critical political potential (since in the US only MDs were allowed to practice as analysts). As Jacoby memorably quipped:

“Next to the quiet, **if effective**, process of medicalization, the impact of immigration was noisy and catastrophic… The power of psychoanalytic organizations to regulate dissent – and filter out dissenters – paled in comparison with the might of the state to expel or allow entry… The refugees knew the risks … As they filled out their applications for entry permits and visas, their politics evaporated; and what they left off the forms, they dumped in the Atlantic as they crossed it.”

Elizabeth Ann Danto in 2012 also documented the very tangible and extensive anticommunist redbaiting and intimidating surveillance of analysts – with the foreign-accented émigrés perceived as especially suspect. And Emily Kuriloff in 2009 and Lewis Aron and Karen Starr in 2013 proposed that postwar psychoanalysis needs to be understood as itself a “Holocaust survivor” – traumatized and manically intent on fitting in to the host society which had, after all, given safe haven to hundreds of analysts and their family members.