ABSTRACT
After World War I, Freudian psychoanalysis was approached by reformers and revolutionaries in the Marxist tradition who hoped to find in its theory and practice a psychological foundation they envisioned. US President Ronald Reagan was a critic of “welfarism” and a proponent of the privatisation of service industries, and his policies were buttressed by neoconservative “free market” economic theorists for whom social democracy was anathema. The most important postwar developments in US psychoanalysis originated among the European emigre analysts. Childhood and Society was better known in Great Britain in the 1950s than it was in the US, where Erik Erikson was criticised for his socialist European and questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. So the “Marx-Anna Freud synthesis” of the immediate post-war period was a practical synthesis especially focused on child development: not a matter of grand theory but of pragmatic theory.
