Its democratic ethos and tradition of individualism were inhospitable to Marx’s class analysis, which gained little traction in American public life. Freud was a different story. He had quite different assumptions about the powerful forces underlying human affairs, and his psychoanalytical method focused more on the individual and his psychological well-being. In the intellectual culture of 1950s America, therefore, Freud was a more influential master of suspicion than Marx. The first wave of anti-totalitarian disenchantment in America was therapeutic, not Marxist.
