Post War Psychology Theorists

According to Freud, those who chafed at middle-class conformity were maladjusted. He especially applied this idea toward women. During the Great Depression, interest in his theories waned, in large part, because of the failure of the Freudians to predict the economic debacle. However, in the post-war years of the 1940s, renewed interest in Freudian theories flourished (Fishbein, p. 641-642). Freudianism served to bolster a mystique of feminine fulfillment that persuaded women to abandon their jobs to returning veterans in order to find satisfaction as wives and mothers. The problems of love and sex diverted attention from the more difficult problems of the Cold War rivalry, poverty, and discrimination.

Intellectual and career women became the misfits of popularizers of Freudianism in the late 1940s (Fishbein, p. 643). The preliminary findings of the Kinsey report seemed to support this idea since its findings seemed to indicate that between 50 and 85 percent of the college educated women polled never had experienced sex

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le is one of being a wife and when she realizes that she shares the universal feminine desire for motherhood. Prior to this affirmation, she had ambitions of having a career as a writer and did not rate motherhood as a more suitable occupation. Furthermore, the film depicted mental health nurses as less feminine and unhappy with their (as to be unexpected) unmarried status. This was the fate, according to Hollywood--via Freud--of women who devoted themselves to a career. Additionally, such women were shown not to have the warmth and compassion of women who found fulfillment in marriage and motherhood (Fishbein, p. 659). Later theories of psychology reject Freudian theories of repression and its emphasis on neuroticism. One such psychologist was Frank Perls. Whereas Freud had emphasized maturity as the plateau of the life cycle, Perls emphasized an ascending and variable sequence of "growth experiences," which would include, not only routine matters like intramarital adjustments, but divorce, the loss of a job, and even dying (From conformity, p. 88-89). His Gestalt Therapy carried the new psychology to the verge of politics: if it was human nature to creatively experience the world through growth, then the social order s
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