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Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Rellahan, J. Connelly. "At Home Among the Puritans: Sigmund Freud and the Calvinist Tradition in America," University of Hawaii, Manoa, December 1988. Advisor: David Bertelson (2, 11, 16)
This dissertation links many of Freud’s “scientific” principles to an earlier world view held by the Puritans. The principles that Freud offered in his system of psychoanalysis deeply affirmed the Puritan view of mind and body. Calvinist and Freudian alike rejected the dualistic view that “the body is the prison of the soul.“ If Freud sought to cure the illnesses caused by repressing the “passions of the id,“ then he also acknowledged the existence of these unruly affections. Both the Puritans and Freud held that the sexual instinct is problematic and needs to be controlled, but not repressed. In the 19th century Calvinism experienced a decline, especially with the rise of optimism expressed in Methodist Perfectionism and New England Transcendentalism. The complicated view of human nature that the Puritans had held found its expression in the male Romantic hero. To balance this dangerous but attractive personality, men looked to women to provide moral shelter from their storms of passion. Psychoanalysis revitalized the Puritan view of women. The Calvinist tradition provided a fertile intellectual soil in which Freud sowed his ideas.
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