Jews and American Popular Psychology: Reconsidering the Protestant Paradigm of Popular Thought

Andrew R. Heinze

Ever since Benjamin Franklin enthralled the colonial public with the maxims of Poor Richard's Almanack, Americans have demanded mass-marketed reflections on human nature. Religion dominated this market until the twentieth century, but after the 1880s, when professional psychology emerged, religion had to strike a new balance with science for authority over this area of popular thought. Psychological thinkers had a distinct advantage in a middle-class market of readers who were restless with the platitudes that flowed from all but the most sophisticated pulpits. The resounding influence of William James at the turn of the century, the boom of Sigmund Freud and John B. Watson in the 1920s, the psychoreligious best sellers of the clergymen Harry Emerson Fosdick, Joshua Liebman, and Norman Vincent Peale in the 1940s and 1950s, the explosion of humanistic psychologies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the biological, cognitive, religious, and "positive" psychologies of the 1980s and 1990s—all suggest the dynamism of America's mass market of psychological advice and inspiration in the twentieth century.1	1
Jews have played a greatly disproportionate role in marketing psychological ideas, but scholars have not systematically grappled with this fact as a problem of intellectual and cultural history. Historians generally describe American popular psychology as an aftereffect, mutation, or extenuation of Protestant modes of thought. Jews appear sporadically in the histories but generally as isolated individuals inexplicably dotting a post-Protestant landscape. Yet Jewish thinkers created much of the American lexicon of self in the twentieth century, articulating the human desire for self-expression and acceptance with such concepts as ego-id-superego, rationalization, projection, defense mechanism, identity, identity crisis, life cycle, inferiority complex, compensation, life-style, peak experience, self-actualization, and I-thou relationship. Jews also pioneered in what might be termed the social psychology of evil, producing classic studies of the conditions under which individuals violate their sense of right and wrong. Without indulging in ethnopieties or postulating a Jewish mind, historians ought to consider the possibility that some popular American ideas about human nature and the human condition had origins outside Protestantism.2	2
To inquire systematically into that possibility, this essay will focus on the formative decades of American popular psychology between 1890 and 1940. It will examine the disproportionate presence of Jewish psychologists and psychiatrists among the early popularizers of psychology. It will argue that those writers and speakers shared core values by virtue of their Jewish background, and that they infused those values into American culture through the market of psychological advice and explanation.	3
In mapping the movement of Jewish values into American conversation about human nature, this essay will call for a more nuanced interpretation of the sources of mainstream thought and for a vigorous combination of intellectual, cultural, and ethnoreligious history. The topic links the histories of popular culture, psychology, immigration, and religion, and it raises questions about the role of immigrant or "outsider" status in the construction of both psychological concepts and motifs of popular culture.	. . .