In Defense of Common Sense: Mental Hygiene as Ideology and Mentality in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

This essay on the middlebrow popularization of the role and influence of psychiatric ideas in the United States suggests that the world view variously described as the secular social gospel, progressivism, or (after about 1930) liberalism can best be understood in terms of the great influence that society's popularized medical models have had upon it. That is, liberal or progressive thinkers came to conceive of society as “a patient etherized upon a table,” an organism subject to illness but able to benefit from therapy as prescribed by trained experts. The popularization of psychiatric models also offered norms of health for the individual and (often by implication) for the group based upon the degree of adjustment to a reality external to the individual and subsuming smooth interpersonal relations and a variety of social norms. The most concrete institutional expression of this popular medical model of human nature and society was the network of local, state, and national societies for mental hygiene, and I have therefore used “mental hygiene” as a shorthand term for the concepts under discussion. However, it should be obvious that the fit between ideal-typical concepts and institutions is never perfect and that there is always a mix of ideas and motives among the individuals who constitute an institution at any one time. The concern here is with ideas and their diffusion, rather than with the close evolution of institutions or the development and effectiveness of therapeutic techniques. Furthermore, while this study is written from a viewpoint somewhat critical of the popular effects of a hygienic mentality, it should not be read as imputing either conscious self-interest or “bad faith” to the advocates of popular psychiatry, who appear to have been sincere, energetic individuals convinced that the diffusion of their own beliefs would have enormous social benefit. One of the regrettable tendencies of recent revisionist history has been a vulgar imputation of a conscious selfseeking or promotion of class interests to reformers and other actors who sought to change their environment—apparently from a Utopian view of what constitutes true sincerity and disinterestedness that finds only contamination in the mixed motives and unintended consequences of action in bourgeois society. A tragic or ironic view of history, obviously, avoids this naive faith and anger by assuming that consequences are rarely exact reflections of intentions, that action is as hazardous and morally ambiguous as it is necessary.

Positive Psychology

“…As stated in an early issue of the Mental Hygiene Bulletin (1923), a goal of the movement was 'to create a desire for health positive' among the citizenry (p. 4). The ideal was that of perfect adjustment to society, an ideal that doubled as a moral standard (Matthews, 1978). In 1930, Dr. Frederick A. Allen, a child psychiatrist and leading proponent, described the movement thus: Matthews, 1978, pp.…”

Social Scientists and the Culture Concept, 1930-1950: The Conflict between Processual and Structural Approaches

“…Given the more numerous theoretical sources and centers of instruction, the term "structural" has to stand for several overlapping frames of reference which had in common a focus on the persistent elements in social situations, like classes and institutions visualized as stable arrangements of elements. A number of structural theories began to become elements of the interpretive apparatus of educated Americans by the mid1940s: most obviously those of Freud and Marx (Matthews 1988a), but also the patterned, configurational model of culture offered by Columbia anthropology (Benedict 1934), and the equilibrium analysis of social systems developed by Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1968(Parsons [1937). For a smaller number, the neo-Aristotelianism and neoThomism of Chicago humanism played a part in this broad re-orientation of educated American thought away from process, change and openness, towards structure, continuity and limits (Adler 1977).…”

“…4 Many examples of the pervasiveness of this process model can be culled from the sociological literature of ethnicity through the watershed of the years after 1945. The assumption that radical change was inevitable and nondestructive, since it released the full potential of the individual, and the derivative axiom that such groupcategories as ethnic identity were mutable without loss, were the premises that give power to the work of Louis Wirth, the leading sociologist of ethnicity during the 1930s and 40s (Matthews 1987). The anthropologist Robert Lowie spoke of "the very continuousness of change" which implied "an unending series of transitional stages" (Lowie 1942).…”

“…354-89). A treatment of this school as one influence on the "expert" literature of child-rearing is Matthews (1988c).…”

“…Durkheim's work had been known by the older American sociology, but remained peripheral, since its basic interpretive model was conceptually incompatible (Matthews 1977 , p. 182). Linton's universalistic model of culture as structure was developed in response to the visiting A.R.…”