Synopses & Reviews
Our nation began with the simple phrase, "We the People". But who were and are "We"? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today?
With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths — such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption — and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of "American" yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character.
Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart, yet challenging many of their conclusions Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.
Review
"The wants, needs, hopes, and aspirations of generations of Americans — 'all sorts and conditions' of them — are given careful and circumspect attention in this arresting portrait of a nation ever, it seems, changing, growing. Here is a book that will tell its readers much about how and why a people once struggling to find and define themselves-the very terrain of their country, and too, its values and ideas-became the members of a United States of America whose many variations and sometime contradictions are brought tellingly alive in pages of clear, illuminating, and well-informed prose." Robert Coles
Review
"Made in America is a book rich in its findings and judicious in its interpretations. Fischer has uncovered a lot of things that even those of us who have long studied the United States didn't know, and he has also expertly shown that many of the things we thought we knew are simply wrong. The book will make any reader wiser and more careful in thinking about this strange country in which we live." Robert Bellah
Review
"[A] vastly ambitious project. . . . [R]eadable and entertaining .. . . [A] formidable achievement. . . . brought to life by the stories of ordinary people.”
Financial Times
Review
"Fischer has done scholars and lay readers alike an enormous service. . . . Made in America is exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the sort of bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest."—New Republic New Republic
Review
"A thoughtful assessment of the patterns of American life over the course of the past several centuries. . . . Challenges a number of myths. . . . Has a wealth of important insights and reads well from beginning to tend. All in all, it is a lively and intriguing effort to understand the most important elements of American life."—Times Higher Education Times Higher Education
Review
"Brave and ambitious. . . . [Fischer's] book will take its place in a distinguished scholarly tradition that historians have all but abandoned for nearly half a century." Boston Review
Review
“A fascinating, funny, and fast-paced exploration of how psychoanalysis has become subtly but deeply ingrained in everything from American art and advertising to our aspirations and identities.”—Stephen J. Kraus, author of Psychological Foundations of Success: A Harvard-Trained Scientist Separates the Science of Success from Self-Help Snake Oil
Review
“An exceptionally well-researched, accessible book that will undoubtedly appeal to both professionals in the psychoanalytic field and the interested lay reader.”—Therese Ragen, author of The Consulting Room and Beyond: Psychoanalytic Work and Its Reverberations in the Analysts Life
Review
"[Samuel] takes psychoanalysis off the couch in this fascinating history of the growth of Freud's brainchild. . . . This compelling study will appeal both to proponents and detractors."—Publishers Weekly
Review
"The distinctiveness of Shrink lies in its focus on popular culture. . . . An American book on America and psychoanalysis would not be complete without the extras: the retelling of horror and wonder stories that made news in the 1950s-1970s; the review of the popular terms that emerged to capture the psychoanalytic moment—from getting "psyched" in the 1920s to "hitting the couch" in mid-century; the discussion of films dealing with psychoanalysis; the treatment of the topic in womens magazines, etc. etc."—Liana Giorgi, New York Journal of Books
Review
"A fascinating history."—James A. Cox , Library Bookwatch
Review
"Lawrence R. Samuel successfully explores the role psychoanalysis has had on shaping the country's consciousness overtime. Samuel delivers a powerful narrative of the discipline's ups and downs, packed with lively quotes, anecdotes, and fascinating historical tidbits."—Foreword Reviews
Review
"Last year, the British production company that made what has become the popular series America: The Story of Us for the History Channel invited me to review the script, which treats the invention of America across 400 years. I advised against the use of the term 'American national character' on the grounds that it was misleading, since all Americans don't have the same character, and the term elides variations in race, class, region, religion, ethnicity, gender, and politics. In any case, it was academically unfashionable. Now, Claude S. Fischer's Made in America has rehabilitated the expression 'American character,' at least for me." Daniel Walker Howe, The Wilson Quarterly ( read the entire Wilson Quarterly review)
Synopsis
“Psychology has stepped down from the university chair into the marketplace” was how the
New York Times put it in 1926. Another commentator in 1929 was more biting. Psychoanalysis, he said, had over a generation, “converted the human scene into a neurotic.” Freud first used the word around 1895, and by the 1920s psychoanalysis was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the United States. How it gained such purchase, taking hold in virtually every aspect of American culture, is the story Lawrence R. Samuel tells in
Shrink, the first comprehensive popular history of psychoanalysis in America.
Arriving on the scene at around the same time as the modern idea of the self, psychoanalysis has both shaped and reflected the ascent of individualism in American society. Samuel traces its path from the theories of Freud and Jung to the innermost reaches of our current me-based, narcissistic culture. Along the way he shows how the arbiters of culture, high and low, from public intellectuals, novelists, and filmmakers to Good Housekeeping and the Cosmo girl, mediated or embraced psychoanalysis (or some version of it), until it could be legitimately viewed as an integral feature of American consciousness.
About the Author
Claude S. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of many books, including Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years and America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. The Stories We Tell
2. Security
3. Goods
4. Groups
5. Public Spaces
6. Mentality
7. Closing
Notes
List of Abbreviations
Works CitedIndex