ABSTRACT
Although psychoanalytic doctrine may sometimes look like a uniform system of thought, in fact different national societies, and even regions, have taken up and magnified disparate strands in Freud’s work that peculiarly suited their own cultural moods. The story of Freud in America has to do largely with the medical need to find a new psychotherapeutic system; and the Americans also wanted to find in psychoanalysis a way of challenging traditional family life, overthrowing past norms of constraint.
