394 BOOK REVIEWS

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 23, October 1987

Robert C. Fuller. Americans and the Unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. viii + 248 pp. $19.95 (cloth) (Reviewd by Daniel Horowitz)

Robert C. Fuller has written a bold and suggestive book, one that draws on published primary and secondary works in American religious, cultural, and intellectual history to explore the connections between psychology and religion. In the end, he reminds us that just as psychology’s importance derives not only from its place in academic life, so too is it possible to find religion outside the walls of institutions and the boundaries of formal theology. A cogent attack on the current direction of much of academic psychology, Americans and the Unconscious illuminates some cultural functions that psychology performs, functions usually associated with philosophy and theology.

The central contribution of the book is its identification and analysis of “a distinc- tively American interpretation of the unconscious” (p. 128). Ideas about the nature of the unconscious, Fuller persuasively argues, serve “a symbolizing function” and “reveal differences in philosophical viewpoint or ideological orientation” (p. 5). Based on “struc- tural replays of indigenous American religious and cultural traditions” developed in ac- cord “with the underlying cultural patterns,” the unconscious in America involves “an enduring tendency to symbolize harmony, restoration, and revitalization” (p. 5 ) , in the process connecting the individual with “an immanent spiritual power” (p. 6). The per- sistence of this “aesthetic spirituality” (p. 1 l), often influenced by Eastern mysticism, involves an emphasis on inner experience, an acceptance of the presence of God in the natural universe, and the equation of spirituality with consciousness of divine harmony.

Prefigured by Jonathan Edwards and then begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson, this tradition continued, Fuller demonstrates in successive chapters, through mesmerism, functionalism, Jamesian psychology, Freudian revisionism, and humanistic psychology. The American version of the unconscious thus involves “a remarkable continuity in the religious and metaphysical assumptions which have guided Americans in their efforts to describe their own unconscious depths” (p. 9). Behaviorists have done their best to end the connection between aesthetic spiritualism and academic psychology. Americans nonetheless have continued to draw on this tradition through popular psychology. Nor- man Vincent Peale and M. Scott Peck are but the latest of a long line of writers - stretching back to proponents of mesmerism, New Thought, mind cure, Theosophy - who have connected the spiritual and the unconscious.

In addition to demonstrating the persistence of a major tradition, Fuller develops several important subthemes. He applies Robert Wiebe’s notion that Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in a “search for order” when he suggests that academic psychologists in these years sought to provide their discipline with new powers of social control and individuals with the ability to orient themselves to a universe transformed by industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, as well as by new currents of thought. Fuller also explores the complex relationships between academic and popular psychology, suggesting ways in which they supported and then broke with one another. Moreover, the author takes issue with those who believe that psychology replaced religion; rather, he argues, “Americans appropriated psychological ideas in order to reinforce broader cultural and religious commitments” (p. 165). Thus the uniquely American use of notions of the unconscious involved not only a special

BOOK REVIEWS 395

kind of aesthetic spirituality but also buttressed the belief in the work ethic, democracy, optimism, progress, and God’s providential power.

Despite its very considerable strengths, one wishes the author had made a greater effort to come to grips with issues raised by scholars in intellectual history and American Studies.’ To refer to “assumptions which were more or less endemic to American Culture” (p. 1 l), “the pull of American culture” (p. 105), and “the continuities of American culture” (p. 198) leaves unanswered the questions of how intellectual and cultural traditions originate and develop and what forces call them into being and sustain them. Nor are central cultural beliefs - such as the work ethic or progress - as unchanging, free of tension, and uniform as Fuller seems to imply.2 Fuller has identified a uniquely American tradition, but he might have tried to explain why some elements within it, such as humanistic psychology, drew such strength from the work of European CmigrCs. Finally, there is a lack of specificity about the audience of the American view of the unconscious. Phrases like “the general public” (p. 40), “the American public” (p. 49), “general reading audiences” (p. 173), and “middle-class clientele” (p. 48) do not get us very far in under- standing the impact of psychology as religion.

Greater attention to such issues would have strengthened a book that ably serves as a fine introduction to important elements of the history of American religion and psychology. Fuller enables us to see influential movements and people in new and fruit- ful ways. The explanatory power of the book comes not so much from the light it sheds on individual parts as from its ability to show us the relationship of parts to an entire tradition. Although selective in what it examines, the book is nonetheless sweeping and suggestive in its reach. Americans and the Unconscious provides an important understanding of powerful elements of a psychological world view that remains strong in American life.

NOTES

I. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 293-337 and “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” Prospects: An Annual ofAmerican Culture Studies 4 (1978): 517-547. 2. See, for example, Daniel T. Rodgers, The WorkEthic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Journal of Ihe Hislory of rhe Behavioral Sciences Volume 23. October I987

Colin Loader. The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim. Cambridge and Lon- don: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ix + 261 pp. $34.50 (cloth) (Reviewed by Douglas E. Williams)

Colin Loader has written an impressive book about one of this century’s most imag- inative though controversial and frequently misunderstood thinkers, Karl Mannheim. Intellectual historians, sociologists, social psychologists, philosophers of education, and