Epilogue: Science in Search of Self

Summary

The postwar alliance for scientific professionalism began to peak around 1970 as the distinctive contours of the psychology community began to merge with the cultural landscape of America. A seemingly limitless market for psychological expertise enabled the profession to continue its remarkable expansion, with no end in sight. In 1970 membership in the American Psychological Association reached more than 30,000, an increase of nearly a hundred-fold over the span of a single professional lifetime.

By this time scientific interests and social concerns had coalesced around the study of personality and the concept of the self. Interest in personality theory was high among academic psychologists, reinforced by the “golden age” in the popularization of psychoanalytic ideas in the postwar period. Possessing vast interpretive flexibility, the self was constructed as an object of research and a locus of personal and cultural concern. After disappearing for decades from the psychological literature, theoretical and empirical studies of the self proliferated after the war. Between 1940 and 1970 some two thousand publications related to the concept of the self appeared.

The cultural preoccupation with the self was already well established when writer Tom Wolfe christened the 1970s the “Me Decade.” In a series of brilliant essays he captured the widespread and intense self-absorption of the American middle class that was associated with sexual liberation, recreational drug use, psychotherapeutic and religious cults, and various other forms of self-indulgence.