Sigmund Freud spent three weeks in the United States, in the summer of 1909, but his imprint on American intellectual, artistic, and medical life stayed much longer. How much longer is a question of debate, although most will agree on the basic shape of that influence: the foundation in 1909, the summit around mid-century, and a downward slope of disputable gradient in the second half of the twentieth century. After Freud Left, an engaging collection of essays based on an earlier conference at the New York Academy of Medicine, largely affirms these contours, despite its distinguished editor's claim that “the standard narrative will no longer look the same as it did” before this volume was published (13). If the landscape it presents of Freud's influence is familiar, the map it offers unfolds further and more neatly than most others. It challenges the common idea that American psychoanalysis was a straightforward derivative of European practice, a stance shared by recent work in intellectual history, and instead emphasizes that America's appropriation of Freud was “less a singular turning point” anchored around 1909, and more “a constant – and contested – process” (210) throughout the twentieth century.

It is no longer a revelation to observe that Freud was just one distinguished figure among many when he arrived at Clark University in 1909. The historian Nathan Hale Jr. took care of that twenty years ago, noting how Freud only “assumed [an] exalted status” around mid-century. John Burnham's introduction offers some helpful gestures as to how Freud won that status, showing that in the 1970s the 1909 visit became a shorthand for explaining the general traffic in ideas about the mind in these years. Throughout this volume the tone is whimsical, taking an interest in the “unintended beginnings” (20) of Freud's influence on the US, drawn to the sheer “improbability” (209) of that influence. Two chapters examine the 1909 conference that G. Stanley Hall organized at Clark University, though they do so from different perspectives. Richard Skues forensically studies the iconic photograph taken of the conference's forty-two delegates to show that most who attended the event did so not just to meet Freud. Sonu Shamdasani works on a broader patch, aiming to place the Clark conference and Freud amid what proves to be a sprawling landscape of that year's mental sciences. The scene he presents us with is one where Hugo Münsterberg's Psychopathology (1909) towers over Freud's five lectures, in which the importance of the Clark conference is overshadowed by meetings in Geneva and New Haven. His verdict that “the Clark conference had been a non-event” (46) is a sign, though, that not everyone has stopped digging in the land of the “Freud Wars.”

If there is a prevailing theme here it comes in the attention that most pay to the “Americanizing [of] Freudian thought” (13), a theme that will appeal to readers of this journal. The theme of course arose at mid-century, amid centenary celebrations of Freud's birth, when some intellectuals asserted a special connection between Freud and America. Their work helped to “domesticate” (235) Freud, but did so by interpreting his vision of human nature as austere. This process of Americanization happened in a number of ways throughout the twentieth century though, and the volume captures most. Historian Elizabeth Lunbeck's sterling chapter on the émigré analyst Heinz Kohut begins by showing how Freud's ideas were bashed into a “distinctly meliorist American idiom” (210) in the early twentieth century. An original chapter by Hale Usak-Sahin recounts the circuitous wartime emigration of three European analysts, and helps to illuminate the comparatively auspicious environment provided by the US for psychoanalysts. What Usak-Sahin finds, and others confirm, is that the US reception of Freudian psychoanalysis owed much to “the cultural infrastructure that was in place in the United States” (157). That infrastructure encompassed the “analytic ‘scene,’ the university chair, the highbrow journal” (243). As the authority of that infrastructure vaulted in the 1940s and 1950s, so too did Freud's reputation, while it dipped when those institutions were recomposed in later decades. Only that distinctly American formation, the “culture and personality” school of the social sciences, given passing mention in Jean-Christophe Agnew's essay, seems crucially absent from this volume.

The entrenchment of psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth-century US, this volume suggests, owed as much to “local settings” (25), its entanglement with pre-existing debates, and “interact[ion] with other intellectual traditions” (161) as it did to the emigration of European analysts or the straightforward importation of Freud's work. Dorothy Ross shows that literary modernists, like Lionel Trilling, appropriated Freud in a way that fit with “the anti-Stalinist voice of American left liberals” (169), while Louis Menand suggests that America's postwar interest in Freud owed much to a prevailing “Cold War discourse of anxiety” (189), and postwar debates about totalitarianism. Still, Menand's case is not entirely persuasive. A discourse about anxiety was, at times, no less evident in Western Europe than in the United States – a fact the theologian Paul Tillich, whom Menand cites, recognized – yet Freud enjoyed no comparable stature there. In part this difference can be explained by Freud's relative standing within European and American medical practice, a subject given only slight treatment here. While this coverage is limiting, it is not surprising, following the trend set by the 1956 centenary, where literary critics and historians dominated discussions. It is an example of one more way in which the place of Freud in the US has changed much less than we at first imagine.