ABSTRACT
The Americans were attracted to the promises of optimal personal gratification and the reduction of individual anxiety. In America this occurred by the 1950s, when the intellectual public for the most part no longer frowned on personal psychoanalyses; when they lost interest in psychoanalyzing tribal cultures and concentrated on child studies; and when prominent Freudians were working in hospitals. Thus Sigmund Freud's cultural excursions belonged to the cosmology of the day, and intellectuals accepted or rejected them according to their own theoretical and emotional investment. The Freudians who met on Wednesday evenings were enthusiastic at the prospect of liberating individuals and society from repressions and aggressions. Although Freud conceded to both Oskar Pfister and James Jackson Putnam that there might be a "moral" affinity between psychoanalysis and Protestantism, since both were searching for "ultimate" truth, he always remained ambivalent about religion.
