Concepts from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology spoke to the concerns of Americans in the 1920s, as they tried to cope with the social consequences of better mobility, increased personal independence, and awareness of diversity. Simplifications of theories from these fields promoted more open attitudes toward sex, legislation to control immigration and fertility, and environmental manipulations attempting to shape behavior and improve society.

In the 1920s, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis functioned as separate and independent disciplines. Psychology was an academic discipline that was no longer taught as a part of moral philosophy. Learning, sensation, memory, and the assessment of such traits as intelligence were major areas of psychological focus. Psychiatrists viewed their mission as the treatment of mental illness, a category beginning to expand beyond identifiable brain diseases. Most psychologists and many psychiatrists were suspicious of psychoanalysis, the data of which was neither measurable nor clearly related to brain structures. Psychoanalysts, who had been trained as physicians, read their own academic journals and met with their own organizations instead of participating in scholarly discussion with psychologists or psychiatrists. During the 1920s, the concepts from each of these disciplines that filtered down to the public were usually simplified by enthusiastic advocates and molded to fit popular stereotypes. The general public took these simplifications as scientific truth.

Psychoanalysis

During the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a work-in-progress. Still dominated by the teachings of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, this technique involved the guided exploration of a patient’s unconscious mind. The goal of psychoanalytic therapy was for the patient to gain insight into unconscious emotional conflicts. According to Freud, the central driving force behind such conflicts was libido, or sexual energy. To Freud, libido represented a much broader motive than the desire for sexual fulfillment; rather, it fueled the entire range of human affections. Freud’s writings during the 1920s further broadened his concept of libido and motivation. In his work The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud suggested that instinctual forces known as the id were often inhibited by a moral guide instilled in childhood that he called the superego. The reasoning part of human personality, the ego, was in Freud’s view responsible for arbitrating between the opposing forces of the id and superego.

Psychoanalysis had only a modest influence on American psychiatry during the 1920s. This may have been partly due to the length, rigor, and distance of psychoanalytical training programs, which were still primarily located in Europe. Additionally, Freud was in the process of revising his theories. Although some American psychiatrists, such as A. A. Brill, objected to the internal contradictions they saw in psychoanalysis, the first generation of American psychoanalysts still reflected Freud’s earlier views. Most American psychiatrists remained outside the psychoanalytic fold during the 1920s, perhaps because psychoanalysis was regarded as having only limited application. With no effective medication, psychoanalysis was not a viable treatment option for hospitalized patients who were inarticulate, mute, or incoherent, and it was too costly and time-consuming for most patients suffering from neuroses.

Popular interpretations of psychoanalytic ideas, however, had a dramatic effect on American society during the 1920s, bringing about a shift in manners and moral attitudes. Before and during World War I, dress styles and societal norms seemed directed toward the preservation of unmarried women’s chastity. During the 1920s, society became more open about sexual matters. Makeup, revealing clothing styles, and shorter hair came to be seen as symptoms of women’s growing sexual independence. Explicit accounts of erotic adventures could be found in magazines and in the novels of authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Many cultural developments contributed to this change in mores: the mobility permitted by widespread automobile ownership, women’s increasing economic independence and political participation, and some decline in the prestige and power of traditional religious institutions. Another important factor was the idea attributed to Freud that the suppression of sexual impulses results in repression and neurosis. Some people took Freud’s teachings to mean that sexual restraint could be harmful to one’s mental health. Few who thus cited Freud were aware that he viewed self-imposed control as necessary for civilization, even at the cost of personal anxiety.

Psychiatry

Most psychiatrists in the 1920s worked in large mental hospitals with patients so impaired they could not function in ordinary family and social interactions. Most of these patients were considered to suffer from an incurable brain disease and given only custodial care.

Experimental interventions were sometimes made during the 1920s. Some patients with terminal brain syphilis recovered after being inoculated with malaria; the high fevers malaria induced killed the syphilis bacteria. One group of patients who hallucinated or displayed incoherent speech or preposterous beliefs were called schizophrenic. Schizophrenics mostly remained hospitalized, although a small percentage of them experienced mysterious recovery. Deeply depressed patients would usually recover to a degree, although some would later experience a relapse. Despite such occasional successes, the number of patients in American mental hospitals increased to several hundred thousand by 1930.

By the end of the 1920s, about 30 percent of all psychiatrists had practices consisting of nonhospitalized patients. Some of these psychiatrists practiced in child guidance clinics and dealt with children’s school and family problems. Other office psychiatrists were consulted by anxious and unhappy women who described their unsettled condition as “nerves.” Many of these office psychiatrists adopted the commonsense psychology of Adolph Meyer, whose technique was to appraise every sphere of the patient’s life—biological, family, work, and social adjustment—in order to identify the patient’s faulty reaction pattern and encourage adaptive changes. Such changes were often effected through social workers’ attempts to alter the patient’s environment.

Psychology

Within academic psychology during the decade, no area of study was more important than learning, and no learning psychologist was more important than John Watson. Psychologists experimenting with learning behaviors studied improvements in the performance of laboratory rats that repeatedly overcame obstacles in a maze and thereby obtained a reward. Watson extrapolated from this research an integrated theory of learning with implications for improving society. Calling his theory “behaviorism,” Watson was emphatic that scientific psychology should report only observable behavior and make no inferences about the workings of the mind. Watson’s entire learning theory was based on the idea that learning is a simple process of linking stimuli with responses and that repeated stimulus responses become habits. Vocal sounds linked to particular objects become words, for example. According to Watson, thinking is a learned behavior as well, resulting from learned sequences of words. Watson further posited that emotions such as fear were internal visceral responses that had become conditioned to dangerous objects. His notion was that every person forms a unique personality because, over the course of a lifetime, responses are linked to a unique sequence of changing environmental stimuli.

Watson wrote articles for popular magazines and became one of the best-known psychologists of the 1920s. His ideas were easy for the public to understand. He argued that behavioral control achieved by the linking of desirable responses to positive environments would instill good habits and improve society. He freely offered parents advice on how to instill desirable habits in their children. Neurotic fears, according to Watson, were the product of bad conditioning and could be eliminated by reconditioning. Critics argued that children differ in temperament and that Watson’s universal rules for conditioning children were far too rigid. Watson nonetheless retained his popularity because his message of a better life through learning was a hopeful one that resonated with the public.

The issue of the 1920s that aroused the most intense controversy between psychologists and the general public concerned the nature of intelligence and the validity of the tests that purportedly measured it. A successful intelligence quotient (IQ) test was first devised by French psychologist Alfred Binet. Binet’s test consisted of schoolbook questions carefully arranged in order of difficulty. The test had proven useful in identifying children who would have experienced difficulty coping with standard elementary school curricula. A group version of such a test had been successfully used in World War I to select U.S. Army recruits who could master complex military tasks.

Psychologists held differing views about the origins of intelligence. Psychologists Henry Goddard and Robert Yerkes held that IQ test scores measured a person’s genetically inherited ability. These psychologists cited pedigree studies showing that brilliant achievers seem to cluster in some families. The genetic determination of intelligence was a significant factor in laws drafted by legislators concerned about declining national intelligence. Such legislators wrote the Immigration Law of 1924, reducing the quota of U.S. immigrants from southern Europe, where children were performing less well on IQ tests. Children who scored below 70 on IQ tests were classified as having mental disabilities. Many state eugenic laws were written authorizing the reproductive sterilization of people with mental disabilities to prevent the possibility of their procreating and transmitting their low IQ to progeny. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sterilization legislation in the case of Buck v. Bell. A number of psychologists opposed such laws based on the inadequacy of the scientific evidence supporting the theory that IQ is entirely hereditary. They noted that such environmental antecedents as intellectually impoverished home environments and inadequate schooling were correlated with low IQ test scores just as strongly as ancestry. Joined by civil libertarians, moralists, and journalist Walter Lippmann, the opposition to sterilization laws had increased dramatically by 1930.

Psychologists during the 1920s adapted general ability tests to measure the aptitudes required in specific vocations. During the 1920s, managers attempted to improve morale and increase industrial productivity by making greater efforts to match workers with appropriate jobs. The demand for aptitude tests for placement decisions increased greatly. In 1921, the Psychological Corporation was founded to design and publish psychological tests.

Impact

Some of the social changes inspired by psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis of the 1920s did not survive the test of time. Studies of adopted children and identical twins reared apart showed convincingly that a combination of both learning environments and inherited genes determine IQ scores. Compulsory sterilizations were ultimately deemed arbitrary and cruel. By the 1940s, state eugenic laws were falling into disuse and beginning to be repealed. The conditioning programs recommended by Watson were considered too rigid by later child psychologists. The emotional bonds established between parents and children were increasingly held to be more important than conditioning methods. Those who interpreted psychoanalytic theory as a sanction for unrestrained sexual expression found little fulfillment in the direction psychology and psychiatry took after the 1920s.

Certain aspects of 1920s psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis did make enduring contributions to modern understandings of the mind. The new openness of the 1920s in discussing personal problems became the basis for the Sensitivity Training groups of the 1970s, which sought to make people better aware of others’ sensitivity. Psychoanalysis became dominant in American psychiatry during the generation of the 1950s. While its direct importance in psychiatry and psychology has since faded, psychoanalytic concepts under other names have become a part of the mainstream. The refining of Watson’s behaviorism by psychologist B. F. Skinner resulted in the development of an effective behavior-based therapy. IQ tests and aptitude tests are still considered sufficiently predictive of achievement potential to be used in selection decisions by colleges and employers alike.

Further Reading