Nerves

In Nerves, physician and psychoanalytic writer Alfred B. Kuttner examines the psychological tensions he believed were shaping American life in the early twentieth century.

Kuttner challenges the familiar explanation that modern nervous disorders are simply the result of business pressure, industrial noise, and relentless activity. Instead, he looks beneath the surface to family relationships, emotional repression, social conformity, sexual attitudes, immigration, religion, and the constant demand to adapt to a rapidly changing society.

Tracing ideas from the nineteenth-century diagnosis of neurasthenia through the arrival of Freud and psychoanalysis in America, Kuttner explores how new theories of the unconscious challenged older assumptions about human behavior. He argues that a culture celebrating individual freedom can simultaneously exert enormous pressure to think, feel, and behave like everyone else.

Originally published in the influential 1922 anthology Civilization in the United States, Nerves offers a fascinating historical portrait of psychology at a moment when Americans were beginning to reconsider the relationship between culture, family, emotion, and mental health.

This historical work contains psychological terminology, social assumptions, and theories that reflect the era in which it was written.

Narrated by Ryan Durham.