On the Couch.

Jews and the American Soul

Human Nature in the Twentieth Century

Andrew H. Heinze

Princeton University Press, $29.95, 376 pp.

One of the more remarkable revelations of Andrew Heinze's Jews and the American Soul is that a nineteenth-century mainstream style of Jewish musar, a kind of ethical handbook, was inspired by, and consciously modeled after, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. Among Jewish literati, Franklin became known as "the musar Sage in Philadelphia," and an 1833 Viennese Hebrew paper said, "It was a goy that lit the candle that serves as the light of Israel."

Heinze, a professor of both American history and Jewish studies, points out that Franklin and an important wing of nineteenth-century musar authors were grappling with a common problem--how to develop a practical set of ethics without appealing to divine sanctions. Franklin was a secularist living in the waning days of the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism that had dominated early eighteenth-century America. Similarly, European Jewish writers in the Reform and Ethical Culture traditions were struggling to escape the shackles of the intensely mystic, rabbinic religion that had been a cultural analogue of America's Great Awakening. And just as Franklin never lost his essentially Protestant worldview, the Jewish secular writers stayed grounded in a uniquely Jewish sensibility.

It is precisely the interpenetration of the American and the Jewish outlook, as epitomized by the Franklin story, that Heinze wishes to explore in Jews and the American Soul. More specifically, he argues that the signal Jewish contribution to American culture has been in the realm of psychology, ranging from the thunderous impact of Freudianism through the popular ministrations and down-to-earth advice of Dr. Joyce Brothers and the Friedman sisters--Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby) and Anne Landers--to kitschy bestsellers like Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Even the musar consciously modeled on the Almanack, he notes, show an interest in the subconscious springs of human action missing from the flatly empiricist Franklin. While Franklin dispensed practical rules for efficient living, Jewish writers probed further into the why of ineffective behavior, opening the door to that endlessly fascinating subject, oneself.

Freud's impact on America far eclipsed that on his native continent. So complex and far-reaching a phenomenon is not susceptible to straightforward explanations, and Heinze doesn't attempt any. But he usefully points out America's uniquely receptive cultural context--the ideology of self-improvement and "getting ahead," a long tradition of advice literature, and most important at the turn of the century, an almost childish faith in the efficacy of "science" to address any problem. This was the era when Henry Adams was trying to tease out a "dynamic theory of history" that could approach the exactitude of physics, and the new discipline of sociology was searching for the laws of the "social-equilibrating apparatus" that underlay observed social interactions. Once Freud had been hailed as a scientific genius, on a par with Newton and Darwin, all forms of pyschologic speculation were instantly ratified.

Heinze is also quite good at tracking the influences running the other way. The doyen of American psychology was Harvard's William James. James called his philosophy "pragmatism," but was quite at home with the irrational, as attested by his Varieties of Religious Experience; James was also among the first to introduce Freud to a wider American audience. Pragmatism imposed a "functionalist" spin on American psychiatry--more focused on practical solutions of adjustment in a sea of interpersonal complexity. Functionalism's influence can be seen in the work of Alfred Adler, who reinterpreted the Freudian family dynamic of sexuality into a struggle for dominance: his "inferiority complex" struck a much more responsive chord in America than Freudian seduction theory. Dale Carnegie's perennial bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People was, at bottom, an American popularization of Adler.

Psychotherapy, at least of the non-pharmaceutical variety, is inherently anecdotal, and so is Heinze's book. While there is an overall chronological structure, with some deft summaries of cultural and intellectual contexts, including the ebbs and flows of anti-Semitism, the greatest portion of the book is composed of thumbnail sketches of Jewish American psychiatric contributors of varying degrees of importance and obscurity. Although Heinze writes well and often colorfully, this is, after all, a university press book, and the imperative of comprehensiveness may wear on the general reader.

Heinze is celebrating the contribution of psychology to American culture. But at one point he permits himself a brief reflection that laypeople may have misinterpreted Abraham Maslow's ideals of "self-actualization" and the "peak experience." It is one of the few instances where he implies that the social consequences of the movement he extols were anything but entirely positive. Similarly, in his recitations of early psychoanalytic diagnoses and case histories, one might have expected at least some acknowledgement of their high quota of nonsense.

My own curmudgeonly belief is that the mysterious intergalactic energy source called "dark matter" is just an emanation of the universal whine of the American upper-middle class in search of an ever-elusive "self-fulfillment." The consequences reach beyond the disposable incomes of analysts. Whining was first endorsed as national policy in 1957 when Congress, after aggressive lobbying by the psychotherapeutic community, funded a study to determine whether Americans were "happy or unhappy, worried or unworried, optimistic or pessimistic in their outlook? Do they feel strong or weak, adequate or inadequate? What troubles Americans, as they see themselves?" Over the next two decades, the United States discharged tens of thousands of seriously ill people from state mental hospitals and redirected funds to middle-class psychotherapy. Ostensibly, the money was supposed to provide "community care" for the released hospital patients, but that was a lie.

It can be fairly argued that mental illness is both America's most undertreated and most overtreated health condition. Heinze's very useful book is just one side of the story of how we got there.

Charles R. Morris is the author of American Catholic (Times) and Money, Greed, and Risk (Crown), among other books.