ABSTRACT

The patriarch of the European family, pacing the garden “so afraid, so terrified for Dorothy” while awaiting the Americans, is Sigmund Freud. “Dorothy” is Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, daughter of the Art Nouveau designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. Auden’s adulatory view matches that of Freud’s American detractors; only the valuations differ. Psychoanalysis, according to one of Freud’s American critics, provides “a theory, a technique, an organization, an ethos, an ethic, a climate” or again a “dominant idiom for the discussion of human personality and of human relations”. Dorothy’s Burlingham’s paternal grandfather, Charles Lewis Tiffany, was not only a beneficiary of the new mercantile ethic: as a prominent member and leader of his generation of entrepreneurs, he was an architect of this system of social control. Parallel with the shift in the focus of virtuous activities, the urban elites disagreed about the feasibility of improving conditions for the working class.