Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America

Abstract

When and why did it become chic for members of white middle and upper classes to perceive and value themselves as neurotic, primitive, and emotionally fragile? Is popular tendency to define self in language derived from revealed (Freudian) truths, or does American culture for various purposes invent and promote and identities? In this fascinating book, distinguished interdisciplinary scholars show that ways Americans imagine innerness and have been shaped by mass media, economics, domesticity, and arts. The authors investigate how changes in ideologies of family, class, race, gender, and sexuality over past two centuries relate to shifts in Americans' visions of self and psyche; they study the psychological as a changing cultural category and emotions as historically shifting self-definitions. Their compelling topics include how Romantic idea of moods was appropriated by nineteenth-century female authors of sentimental fiction; how black jazz musicians have responded to white interpretations of African-American jazz as emotionally and aesthetically deep; and whether women's confessions of victimization on Oprah Winfrey Show are akin to 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups. Provocative and timely, book challenges premises of psychohistory and dominant ways in which Americans have been taught to conceptualize making of and emotional life.