Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

Psychoanalysis provided a framework for asking these questions because it contained not only an idea of self-transformation but also a critique of social conventions. If society demanded that sexual impulses were to be suppressed, and if this resulted in people being stunted and unhappy, then Americans had to develop a new relationship with their own bodies and emotional lives and a rejection of the frantic, commercialized society that made these demands. “Something oppressed them,” wrote the novelist Malcolm Cowley. “It was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine, which had been developed to satisfy men’s needs, but which was now controlling those needs and forcing its standardized products upon us by means of omnipresent advertising and omnipresent vulgarity.”