Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.

41(3), 207–224 Summer 2005

Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20101
© 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

Marginality is an important concept in the history of science, though it is often used in a

manner that presumes marginality to be a static designation. We contend that the dynamics
of marginality are crucial to the history of psychoanalysis, a discipline that has moved be-
tween dominant and marginal positions. We address psychoanalytic marginality via three
specific “cases”: the marginalization among Freud and his followers when psychoanalysis
was an emergent discipline; the marginality trope in Erich Fromm’s popular psychoanalytic
writing when psychoanalysis was orthodoxy in American academic psychiatry; and the
rhetorical marginality of psychoanalysis in Sweden as psychoanalysis entered a decline
within psychiatry. Our aim is to show that marginalization and self-marginalization serve
interpersonal, social, and professional strategies. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Although there is much concern for power, control, legitimacy, and repression in social
science, relatively little attention has been paid to marginality. Few historians or sociologists
would dispute the idea that some theories adapt to specific environmental requirements and
prevailing scientific and intellectual agendas better than others. But what about the less “well-
adapted” theories? Proponents of marginalized theories often cope with reduced funding
sources, curtailed job opportunities, blocked academic promotions, and other obstacles.
However, marginalization is not a permanent designation. In due time, once-marginalized the-
ories (such as those of kin selection in evolutionary biology) can become dominant, while
once-prevailing theories (such as the Lamarckian theory of inherited acquired characteristics)
may lose their prestige and legitimacy.
One example of a scientific paradigm that has gone through both stages is psychoanaly-
sis. Once marginalized, it became popular and even dominant in academic psychiatry in the
United States after World War II, and has since returned to the margins. In this article, we will
examine questions of marginality by focusing on psychoanalysis as a marginalized and mar-
ginalizing practice. The basic thesis of this article is that there are several ways to link strate-
gic goals within and beyond professional communities to the theme of marginality. This un-
derstanding of marginality comes from an outlook that takes marginality to be not a static
feature of specific individuals and groups but a relational theme that is played out between
what are taken to be the centers and edges of social fields. Far from being a status to which
one can be permanently relegated, marginality can be thoughtfully conceptualized as a valu-
able strategic tool within and across professional scientific disciplines.

JAAP BOS is an assistant professor at the University of Utrecht in the Department of Interdisciplinary
Social Science. He has published studies on the history of psychoanalysis in various journals, most re-
cently in History of Psychology, Social Epistemology, and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
He can be contacted by e-mail at j.c.bos@fss.uu.nl.
DAVID W. PARK is an assistant professor of communication at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest,
Illinois. His research involves the study of intellectuals and experts in the mass media. He can be con-
tacted by e-mail at park@lfc.edu.
PETTERI PIETIKAINEN is an associate professor (docent) at the University of Helsinki in the
Department of History. He has published articles in English and Finnish on the history of dynamic psy-
chology, Swedish psychiatry, psychological utopianism, and intellectual history. He is currently engaged
in a study of comparative history of neurosis in Finland and Sweden and can be contacted by e-mail at
popietik@yahoo.com.

207
208 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

After a short theoretical discussion, we will illustrate the question of marginality

through three case studies that aim to demonstrate some of the qualities of marginality in
the psychoanalytic context. At the end of the article, we will draw some conclusions
about how the idea of marginalization can become embedded in narratives flowing from
the conflicts that follow from the attempts to relegate a theory, a movement, or an indi-
vidual to the margins.

THE MEANING OF MARGINALITY

Marginality is a classical sociological concept. It is also a concept that lends itself to nu-
merous divergent uses; so many, in fact, that the question was posed about whether it would
not be better to dispose of it altogether (Del Pilar & Udasco, 2004). In this article, we discuss
four uses of the concept of marginality.
It is, first of all, a concept to describe a condition that seems to befall individuals or even
groups of people, either by accident or deliberately. As a condition, as a state of being, mar-
ginality is understood to be an extremely simple phenomenon. Borrowing from geography,
marginality is seen as a moving away from the center (rich, powerful) to the margins (poor,
powerless), assuming that there is a spatial gap between the marginal and the central, that the
two are physically alienated from each other by time, space, and social forces.
Secondly, marginality is understood to be a process. In this definition, the focus is on the
traffic between the center and the border—notions of inclusion and exclusion, upward and
downward mobility, social integration, and segregation are but a few concepts that denote
these movements and actions. Thus, Bourdieu (1988, 1992), who was particularly interested
in the problem of how and through which mechanisms ideas can penetrate into the heart of
the business and gain status, called the traffic from the margins to the center “consecration.”
When marginal ideas become consecrated, they may change dominant opinion, but in them-
selves these ideas also change during this process because they now acquire a new status and,
with that, a new meaning.
Yet another way to approach the problem of marginality is to pose the question of what
it takes to become marginal, thus differentiating among psychological, social, and institu-
tional mechanisms operative in the process. Stonequist (1937), who was one of the first to ex-
plain marginality, described the life cycle of marginal groups as a process of learning to give
up one’s identity, while Kerckhoff and McCormick (1955) define marginalization in terms of
psychological dysfunction, describing the “marginal man” as socially isolated, an aphatic per-
son who suffers from mood swings, is unable to act decisively, and has serious doubts about
his social place. In the work of Mary Douglas (1986, 1999), the focus is more on societal
mechanisms, such as rites of passage, that mark the transition from the border to the center.
Finally, marginality is taken as subversive concept, one that allows us to unmask hidden
aspects of reality. Obviously, Foucault (1977) was one of the first to explore this idea when
he gave voice to the “logic of unreason” (madness, crime, sexual deviance, etc.). In the wake
of Foucault, it has become easier to see that marginalization can result in a position that has
positive values, which allow the person to escape from the narrow confinement of the domi-
nant position ascribed to him by social convention. The marginal man deliberately situates
himself between two cultures or groups, rather than in the center of one. Lumsden (1984)
called this the in-between location or the “liminal position.” Similarly, Bennett (1997) argued
that marginalization can be constructive, rather than destructive or detrimental, to one’s posi-
tion, arguing that it allows a person to develop his identity more strongly. And recently,
McLaughlin (2001) called the marginal position potentially “optimal” because it allows in-
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 209
tellectuals to have access to the creative core of an intellectual tradition, without being bound
by institutional restrictions.
Surely, these models are designed in order to better understand the marginal, so as to im-
prove their living conditions or facilitate their transition from the margin to the center.
However, even the most idealistic social scientist admits that there is and indeed must be a
difference between the marginal and the central, even if this difference is built on a com-
pletely arbitrary norm. As Bourdieu (1992) wrote, “Between the last person to pass and the
first person to fail, the competitive examination creates a difference of all or nothing that can
last a lifetime. The former will graduate from an elite institution . . . while the latter will be-
come a nobody” (p. 120).
While we are interested in the nobodies, those who do not pass their exams, we do not
want to address the question of why it is that they fail. Instead, we would like to draw atten-
tion to something that is not accounted for in many models of marginality, though it is alluded
to (but not worked out) in Bourdieu’s metaphor: the fact that there is a constant dialogue be-
tween the marginalizer and the marginalized. In fact, they are not at all separated by time,
space, social inhibitions, or laws: the marginalizer and the marginalized are bound by a com-
mon understanding of what constitutes the mainstream.
Thus, when Bourdieu emphasizes how the ruler succeeds in imposing his views on the
less powerful, he speaks of a “specific kind of communication” between them, where the one
“signifies to [the other] what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and im-
poses it on him by expressing it in front of everyone . . . and thus informing him in an au-
thoritative manner of what he is and must be” (1992, p. 121). Bourdieu gives as examples of
this particular type of communication the insult and the social judgment of attribution. Is this
then what marginalization is about? Pushing people back by calling them names, telling them
how stupid they really are, in front of everybody?
Although this does happen, we emphasize that it only rarely comes to this, and that mar-
ginalization is often a process that takes place with the consent of the marginalized. In fact,
the marginalized figure often contributes actively to his or her own marginalization—not out
of sheer masochistic pleasure or because of subjection to a Foucauldian disciplining machine,
but knowingly and willingly, because the marginal position is a position in its own right. In
fact, de Certeau (1988, p. xvii) argued that in modernity, “marginality is no longer limited to
minority groups.” Marginality is the new dominant position, the position of the “silent ma-
jority,” whose influence exceeds that of the cultural elite. This argument may seem overly
“postmodern” for many readers, but it certainly reminds us that we should be wary of our ex-
pectations, and that it is sometimes fruitful to turn these expectations upside down.
Before we illustrate this point, we would like to differentiate marginalization from
processes that are easily confused with it, such as repression, domination, stigmatization, and
other forms of systematic exclusion on the one hand, and disciplining and other patronizing
forms on the other. What all these processes have in common is a dynamic based on differ-
ences in power or status. Stigmatization, for example, is about exercising this power and
specifically refers to how one party defines another party’s identity in terms of exclusion. This
means that in the dominant discourse, there is no place for those who are stigmatized:
“Identity norms breed deviations as well as conformance,” says Goffman (1963, p. 129).
Disciplining is more or less the negative of this; it is about defining the identity of one party
in terms of his or her inclusion. If you are disciplined, you are undergoing a process of trans-
formation that continues until you “fit in.” This still presupposes a dominant discourse in
which your position is not accepted or recognized as such. Marginalization is also based on
differences in power and may incorporate elements of inclusion and exclusion but it is differ-
210 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

ent from stigmatization or disciplining in the sense that it presupposes active cooperation of
two parties. Marginalization has very different discursive functions, since the position of the
marginal is acknowledged and is in fact functional in the dominant discourse.

INSTRUMENTAL MARGINALIZATION WITHIN FREUDIAN CIRCLES

In his startling book Collaborative Circles, Michael P. Farrell (2001) uses the term in-
strumental intimacy to describe the process that yields the rare creative, innovative work that
can be found in some collaborative communities. This involves an understanding between its
members that is functional both at an institutional level (it allows its members to rebel against
a dominant authority) and at an individual level (it allows its members to develop and ex-
change innovative ideas). The formation of collaborative circles, Farrell argues, depends on
strong mutual commitment and interdependency relations, and is found more often among
those who are marginalized (2001, p. 19). As a case in point, he examines the Freud-Fliess
friendship, which exhibits all of the creative collaboration hallmarks.1
The thesis that such closed, tightly connected but also highly productive communities
and friendship circles arise in response to marginalization certainly makes sense when we
look at the earliest processes of group formation and institutionalization in psychoanalytic
history (ca. 1900–1930). The formation of the Wednesday Evening Society (in 1902) marked,
as is well known, the end of Freud’s “splendid isolation” (Freud, 1925). But it did not bring
Freud closer to academia, as psychoanalysis was never intended to be an academic discipline
(Winter, 1999), even though its journals, congresses, and training institutes were modeled
after academic institutions (Gilman, 1987).
In fact, the formation of psychoanalytic institutions allowed Freud to purify psychoana-
lytic language through a long course of accommodation and adjustment to a shared under-
standing; this was a co-construction in the literal sense of the word, one that cannot be reduced
to clever manipulations on the side of Freud (Bos, 2004). It is to this element of active devel-
opment and expansion of a discourse, in which its users had invested their trust, that we pay
some attention here. In what sense was the marginalization of psychoanalysis functional or
dysfunctional to this development?
There are two dimensions to the early marginalization of psychoanalysis that we find to
be important. The first is a social dimension, concerned with the construction of solidarity.
Freud may have had relatively little success in the early days, but he took extraordinary pride
in that fact and heavily emphasized the resistance he had to face. Thus, in the
Autobiographical Study, Freud (1925, p. 48) sketched a picture of himself as at first “com-
pletely isolated . . . with no followers . . . no notice taken of [him] . . . [his works] scarcely re-
viewed in the technical journals,” and with people repudiating his work who had not even read
it. This exact picture was then reproduced by his first followers, who used it to celebrate their
hero and build a pedestal for him (Ellenberger, 1970; Sulloway, 1979). The marginalization
of psychoanalysis was thus conceived of as a sign of Freud’s true greatness and became the
cement that bound his followers together.
The second dimension to the early marginalization of psychoanalysis is located at an in-
terpersonal level and has a slightly different function—namely, the construction of faith. We
tentatively call it inverse marginalization, as we find that in the relationships with his fol-
lowers, many aspects of Freud’s marginalization were reproduced, except that now Freud was
the party who did the marginalizing, largely through personal contact and correspondence.

1. Oddly, Fliess is systematically misspelled Fleiss by Farrell.

 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 211
That is, up until the 1920s, when the institutionalization of psychoanalysis became regulated
through the expanding system of official training analysis, most followers came to psycho-
analysis through Freud personally and had to submit to a close and consuming relation with
him. If they accepted and submitted to him, it was taken as a sign of good faith that they
would publish papers that corroborated his findings but also showed their independence.
These two dimensions kept the followers in what resembles the classical double bind: a
state of internal conflict between feelings of loyalty on the one hand and independence on the
other. It is this two-faced conflict or struggle with marginality, we argue, that is the fundament
of “instrumental intimacy,” which results in the creative, innovative exchange of ideas char-
acteristic of some (but not all) collaborative communities. We shall illustrate this point by
briefly looking at the relationship between Freud and three of his followers, who were all mar-
ginal in one sense but also creative or original in another.

Icons of Marginality: Stekel, Groddeck, and Andreas-Salomé

The first marginal known for his marginality is Wilhelm Stekel (1861–1940), a Viennese
medical doctor, whose role has been largely neglected by historians of science, despite his
considerable influence on early psychoanalysis. Stekel’s historical role has been outlined else-
where (Bos, 2003, 2005; Bos & Groenendijk, 2004); here we shall focus exclusively on the
problem of marginalization in this relationship and to what extent it contributed to the devel-
opment of psychoanalysis as a practice.
Stekel was a loyal follower of Freud who joined the ranks around 1901 and was dispelled
from the movement in 1912 on account of personal problems and/or scientific differences
(see Kuhn, 1998, for a discussion of the motives in the Freud-Stekel break). During those 11
years, he was the single-most well-known analyst after Freud, although it should also be noted
that his ideas were by no means strictly Freudian (Stekel, 1950). Despite his initial enthusi-
asm, Stekel would always remain ambivalent toward Freud. Indeed, he and Freud were not in
accord on many subjects. First, Stekel emphasized psychic conflict (contained in his theory
of bipolarity) and opposed Freud’s views on the origin of neurosis. Secondly, he contradicted
Freud’s view on the importance of masturbation, which Freud believed to be a cause of
neurasthenia, while Stekel considered it harmless and in fact argued that repression of the
urge to masturbate causes neurosis. Lastly, Stekel advocated short-term (active) analyses,
while Freud stuck to his long-term “classical analyses.”
Still, in spite of these differing viewpoints, it was at Stekel’s instigation that the
Wednesday Evening Society was founded. Its goal, he once wrote, was “to bestow on the
master the recognition he deserved” (Stekel, 1926/2005, p. 105). From the records of that
society, we can see that not only did he bestow Freud with proper recognition during the
society’s meetings, but he also used it as a platform to develop his own ideas. Out of the
141 sessions devoted to papers delivered to the Vienna society during the period
1906–1912, 16 were by Stekel, compared to only 9 by Freud (and only a few by most other
members). Only Adler, who was to be dispelled from the movement also, equaled him in
this respect. Furthermore, when comparing the subsequent editions of Freud’s popular
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901), it becomes clear that until about 1910 it
was Stekel to whom Freud most often referred; a role that Ferenczi was later to adopt (see
Bos, 2004). All this is to say that Stekel occupied no small place in Freud’s discourse at
this time.
Despite all this, it appears that right from the start, Stekel’s position within the psycho-
analytic community was extremely feeble. His presentations before the society were almost
always severely criticized, and many of his publications received such a bad reception among
212 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

the Freudians that he is quoted as saying that he felt “horrified at the lack of understanding
which he encountered” (Nunberg & Federn, 1962–1975, Vol. I, p. 280). Indeed, his theory of
bipolarity was rejected by Freud and the Viennese, and his views on masturbation were openly
contradicted by Freud in a collection of essays on this problem.
Nevertheless, it was also Freud who defended Stekel against accusations by others—al-
though perhaps not always entirely wholeheartedly—and who was quite appreciative of his
1911 book on the symbolism of dreams (The Language of Dreams), of which he wrote even
after their break that it “contains the fullest collection of interpretations of symbols” (Freud,
1900, p. 375). Conversely, Stekel not only dared to contradict Freud, but was the only follower
who interpreted some of the master’s dreams. Once, in response to an account of Freud be-
fore the Vienna society about a dream that featured the Italian name Savonarola, Stekel is re-
ported to have said that this was about a masturbation fantasy, as can be gathered from the
name—Sav-ona-rola, in which the root of the word onanism is hidden. Freud apparently tol-
erated this interpretation and did not contradict Stekel (see Nunberg & Federn, 1962–1975,
Vol. III, pp. 182–187).
In the Freud-Stekel relationship, the two extremes of the marginality-bind—originality
and loyalty—are thus not only clearly represented, but in fact explain much of the tension be-
tween the two men. It was only after their break that Stekel’s role in psychoanalytic history
was disposed of its ambiguous nature and reduced to that of a simple opponent, someone who
had gone “totally astray.”
Our second example is Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), a German physician who came to
psychoanalysis relatively late (when he was already 51), and although he never belonged to
Freud’s inner circle the way Stekel did, his place in psychoanalysis is quite exceptional (for
biographical studies on Groddeck, see Martynkewicz, 2001; Will, 1987). He started corre-
sponding with Freud in 1917 and first met him in 1920 at the sixth psychoanalytic congress
at The Hague, where he introduced himself to the embarrassment of many (but not Freud)
with the words: “I am a wild analyst.” Groddeck is known for his scandalous novel Der
Seelensucher (1921) and, of course, his Das Buch vom Es, with which he introduced into psy-
choanalytic vocabulary the term Es (it or Id)—which Freud adopted in Das Ich und das Es
(The Ego and the Id, 1923), published a few months after Groddeck’s book.
When Groddeck wrote his first long letter to Freud in 1917, he explained to him that he
used the term Es in pretty much the same way as Freud used the term Unconscious. However,
he wrote, he felt uncertain about how Freud would think about his use of the term. “I consider
myself a disciple of you,” he wrote, “but I also believe I am going beyond the limits of psy-
choanalytic practice” (Groddeck to Freud, 27.5.1917, quoted in Groddeck, 1977, p. 36, em-
phasis added).
Unknowingly, Groddeck thus touched on the essence of Freud’s instrumental marginal-
ity: loyalty/originality. Freud did not hesitate to admit him to his “wild bunch”: “Obviously I
am doing you a service if I push you away from me to the place where Adler and Jung and
others stand. Yet I cannot do this; I have to claim you” (Freud to Groddeck, 5.6.1917, quoted
in Groddeck, 1977, p. 36). Thus, Groddeck became an analyst.
But he was to regret it. When Freud adopted the Es (Id, in the Latinized translation) from
Groddeck in 1923, he unreservedly thanked his colleague for having drawn his attention to
the term but added in a footnote that Groddeck had followed Nietzsche’s example. Thus, he
commended Groddeck for his originality while depriving him of it in the same breath.
But Groddeck’s original contribution consisted not in a new term for the unconscious; it
was far more ambitious. It consisted of a new approach to psychoanalytic therapy that was
aimed at psychological as well as somatic processes. When Groddeck began using das Es (in
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 213
the second half of the 1910s), he meant to replace with it the Unconscious along with the Ego,
preserving the unity between psyche and soma. Freud, however, had a much more limited use
for it and differentiated between Ego, Id, and Superego as separate forces (Freud, 1923). In
fact, it was in their correspondence that the now-famous model of the psychical forces first
appeared (Freud to Groddeck, 17.4.1922, in Groddeck, 1977). Thus, when he congratulated
Groddeck on his 60th birthday, Freud jokingly wrote, “My Ego and Id congratulate your It”
(Freud to Groddeck, 17.10.1926, in Groddeck, 1977). There is hardly a better illustration of
marginal originality being reduced to marginality proper.
This did not cause a full break between Freud and Groddeck, but their relationship de-
teriorated dramatically from that point on. Interestingly, at one point, Freud warned Groddeck
not to become “a Stekel,” but Groddeck wrote to his wife that he felt Freud had used him, just
like he had used Stekel (see Bos, 1992, for a fuller account). So here too we find that ex-
traordinarily but irresolvable tension between wanting to be a loyal member on the one hand
and an original writer on the other.
Our last example is Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937), famous femme fatale, friend of
Nietzsche, Rilke, and others, who came to Freud in 1912 (for biographical studies on
Andreas-Salomé, see Binion, 1968; Livingstone, 1984; Peters, 1963). Of the three, she had
the fewest open conflicts with Freud, but her position has been marginalized the most.
Andreas-Salomé’s contributions to psychoanalysis, in particular her work on narcissism, were
already largely ignored in her lifetime and still largely are (although feminists have often tried
to revive interest in her work, see Martin, 1991; Welsch & Wiesner, 1990). Readings of her
works are often limited to her (auto)biographical studies of and letters with others (Freud,
Nietzsche, Rilke), which reduces her position to that of an analyst who silently observed (e.g.,
Martin, 1991; Sirois, 1998). Her work, it is said, reveals little; that is, little personal informa-
tion. It is as if she is absent from her own work. Yet it is through this explicit absence that she
constituted an original position— namely, that of an implicit presence in the works of others.
Thus, her tribute to Freud (Andreas-Salomé, 1931) is not to be read as a demonstration of her
analytic comprehension of Freud but as an attempt to share psychoanalysis with Freud (Bos,
2000). Freud, however, was unable or unwilling to appreciate Andreas-Salomé’s “shared life
narrative” as such and only credited her for her role as Versteherin, thus once again reducing
originality to loyalty.
The marginalization of Andreas-Salomé, who, in contradistinction to Groddeck and
Stekel, did not insist on priority, made a long-lasting productive collaboration with Freud pos-
sible but did not protect her from the same troubles the other two faced. Her work too was
forced into Freudian discourse at the cost of losing some of its original dimensions.
The three examples discussed above could easily be expanded to other cases, such as
Pfister, Binswanger, Reik, Rado, Putnam, and many others, who pushed the limits of origi-
nality to the extreme but refused to draw the ultimate conclusion—namely, to break away
from Freud (as did Adler, Jung, and others)—instead suffering the consequences of their
being too independent without being entirely autonomous. Still others, such as Jones, Lampl-
de Groot, or Eitingon, remained forever imprisoned in the loyalty catch and felt obliged to de-
fend Freud even after his death. In fact, it is only recently that analysts have felt freer to move
beyond Freud’s heritage without being branded as “renegades.”
The importance of marginality during the early phase in psychoanalytic history now be-
comes clearer. First of all, Freud’s marginality appears as a necessary condition: it constitutes
the space in which psychoanalysis is able to mature. Secondly, all those who follow him are
not only bound by this marginality, but also by their own marginality vis-à-vis Freud. Freud’s
followers are thus drawn into the center as marginals. That results in an interesting conflict:
214 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

the followers are not and can never be Freud’s equal but are forever condemned to aspire to
become it. It is this struggle that produces some of the most promising originality in Freud’s
followers. But as the marginal’s originality is made serviceable to the dominant discourse, it
simultaneously transforms into something else, pushing the marginal once again back into the
margins.
Instrumental marginality was thus the dominant mode of operation during the formative
years that enabled psychoanalysis to transform into a mainstream practice. In the subsequent
section, we examine the contribution of marginality to the development of psychoanalysis
during the period when it was a dominant practice (in the United States).

ERICH FROMM AND THE PUBLIC FACE OF MARGINALITY

Erich Fromm played many roles simultaneously, including those of émigré intellectual
in the United States, psychoanalyst, and social critic. Though it is sometimes forgotten (see
McLaughlin, 1998), Fromm was also a tremendously successful popular writer. His best-sell-
ing book, The Sane Society (1955), was a uniquely successful work of psychoanalytic popu-
lar writing, and he was a fixture of popular psychoanalysis from the early 1940s through the
early 1960s. During this time, in addition to The Sane Society, he wrote numerous articles for
popular periodicals as well as the books Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself
(1947), The Forgotten Language (1951), The Art of Loving (1956), Sigmund Freud’s Mission
(1959), and May Man Prevail? (1961).
There are many senses in which we can consider Erich Fromm as a marginal figure.
From the vantage point of orthodox psychoanalysis and psychiatry, he did not occupy a cen-
tral place; he is better known for having been an outsider to professional associations than for
the roles he played within them (Burston, 1991). His rejection of Freud’s sexual theories dis-
tanced him from figures such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, and his focus on cul-
ture as a variable made him distinct from several other Neo-Freudians (Funk, 1982, pp. 3–4).
He was associated for a time with the Zodiac Club, but this was in itself a group of individu-
als who hoped to counter some of the tendencies fostered by the professionalization of psy-
choanalysis in the United States. As a result of this distance from orthodoxy, Fromm was often
the target of critical swipes from all sides in the psychoanalytic community (Hausdorff, 1972,
p. 26). Fromm developed many of his own ideas on the theories of Freud and Marx—both of
whom have what Guyton Hammond has termed “an ambiguous status in the world of science”
(1965, p. 38). This broad-based approach made his work “tense and vigorous, full of move-
ment and dare,” in John Schaar’s carefully chosen words (1961, p. 7). Fromm found himself
at the margins of mainstream psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis.
However, a marginal position within a field need not be an obstacle to success. Neil
McLaughlin has offered a very productive view of Erich Fromm as an exemplar of what he
calls “optimal marginality.” What McLaughlin calls “optimally marginal intellectuals” are
those who “have access to the creative core of an intellectual tradition, while avoiding orga-
nizational, financial, cultural or psychological dependencies that limit innovations” (2001, p.
273). He applies this model of optimal marginality to Fromm’s situation vis-à-vis Freudian
and other psychological institutions. Fromm possessed valuable connections to Freudian in-
stitutions and networks but lacked the constraints that came with being a member of the dom-
inant institutions.
This sense of Fromm’s “optimal marginality” gives us a fresh sense of how access to un-
orthodox sources of power can change the course of ideas in a culture or subculture. As
McLaughlin points out, Fromm’s relative fame and access to “opinion journals and quality
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 215
book presses” were important resources in Fromm’s role as an optimally marginal figure
(2001, p. 280). In this sense, a prominent public profile can go hand-in-hand with an opti-
mally marginal position. This concern for how Fromm communicated with a large lay audi-
ence invites us to extend the institutional- and network-based views of marginality to take ac-
count of the cultural authority that Fromm presented to his audiences.
The idea of cultural authority collides with the idea of optimal marginality in some
thought-provoking ways. In the context of a popular expert like Fromm, we consider cultural
authority as a kind of strategic self-presentation. Pierre Bourdieu described how strategies of
self-positioning play out in the field of cultural production; the point occupied by the figure
in the field shapes the authoritative strategies that the figure will use (1993, p. 45). In the con-
text of optimal marginality, the job becomes that of understanding what kind of strategically
inflected discourse would describe the position of the optimally marginal figure, such as
Fromm. When examined from this point of view, we can see how Fromm programmed his
own marginal stance into a strategy to present this marginality to the public as evidence of his
own authority. While one might imagine that a writer like Fromm would conceal his distance
from orthodoxy so as to play up his own expertise to his audience, in fact, the opposite was
true. He trumpeted his own marginality, making his own distance from psychoanalysis, psy-
chiatry, and other psychological approaches appear to be a warrant of his own authority.

Against Orthodox Professionalism

It is easy to notice Fromm’s attempts to locate himself as outside of psychoanalytic or-
thodoxy. Though he found much to praise in psychoanalysis, he also made very clear his op-
position to the organized factions of Freudians and other psychoanalysts. Like most of what
Fromm wrote, this was carried out in public. In an essay for the Saturday Review, Fromm
blasted the Freudians, calling them a “movement” (1958, p. 11) to be compared to the
Stalinists who “call those who defected and rebelled ‘traitors’ and ‘spies’ of capitalism,”
pointing specifically to how former members of Freud’s inner circle were dismissed as “psy-
chotic” and otherwise slandered through “psychiatric lingo” by Freudian loyalist Ernest
Jones. A broader critique can be found in Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959), where Fromm sur-
mised that the popularity of psychoanalysis was linked to the American middle class, “a mid-
dle class for whom life has lost meaning” and whose lack of “political or religious ideals”
leaves them in search of “an explanation of life which does not require faith or sacrifices”
(1959, p. 106). The result was a movement of “authoritarian and fanatical character.” As
Fromm saw it, “Most psychoanalysts, and this holds true even for Freud, are not less blind to
the realities of human existence and to unconscious social phenomena than are the other
members of their own social class” (1959, p. 109).
These jibes were often aimed at the inner circle of Freudians, but Fromm also distanced
himself from the broader practice of psychoanalysis. He suggested that “the psychoanalytic
situation looks sometimes like that of a man [i.e., the analysand] wanting to learn how to
swim” and observed that “if we see him going on talking, talking, talking” in an analysis, “we
become suspicious that the talking and understanding have become a substitute for the real
swim” (1957, p. 11). In other words, psychoanalysis had become a way of avoiding real life.
Elsewhere, he argued that psychoanalysis “made the mistake of divorcing psychology from
problems of philosophy and ethics” (1947, p. 6), insisting that man cannot be understood
“without understanding the nature of value and moral conflicts” (1947, p. 7). He accused psy-
choanalysis of failing to account for what makes us human.
Fromm was even less restrained when taking on other types of psychological inquiry.
Instead of blurring the lines between himself and the professions, he maximized his own out-
216 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

sider status through an explicit disavowal of professional psychology. He claimed that psy-
chology had become “dangerous and destructive to human spiritual development” (1957, p.
9). Specifically, he pointed to “market psychology” as a professional backslide into commer-
cial interests, where the individual was reduced to his or her role as a consumer. He derided
another new development in psychology, “human relations,” as a propagandizing mistreat-
ment of truth and concluded that “what Taylor did for the rationalization of physical work the
psychologists do for the mental and emotional aspect of the worker” (1957, p. 9). Fromm
foretold dire results from this expansion of the psychological purview, as he described how
“the practice of democracy becomes more and more distorted by the same methods of ma-
nipulation which were first developed in market research and ‘human relations’” (1957, p. 9).
Again, the criticism of psychology provided Fromm with a way to cast himself as the stand-
out—the rebel (or, perhaps, revolutionary) of psychological inquiry.
Fromm also identified his own marginality through the rejection of psychiatry. He ar-
gued that in psychiatry, the “patient is considered as a thing, the sum of many parts . . . like
the parts of an automobile,” and as the car has defects, the patient has symptoms. The prob-
lem was that the psychiatrist “does not look at the patient as a unique totality” (1957, p. 11).
Related to this was the idea that psychiatrists failed to understand the dynamic between indi-
viduals and society. As Fromm saw it, “Most psychiatrists take the structure of their own so-
ciety so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigma
of being less value” (1941, p. 139). Fromm considered psychiatry’s diagnostic labels—such
as “infantile” or “neurotic”—as ways “to denounce” those who do not fit the “conventional
pattern” (1955, p. 246). “This kind of influence,” claims Fromm, “is in a way more danger-
ous than the older and franker forms of name-calling.” Before, the victim could respond in
kind, but as Fromm put it, “who can fight back at ‘science’?” (1955, p. 246). Fromm identi-
fied himself with his own audience here, suggesting that, like them, he was not a “scientist”
and was therefore on the audience’s side in this conflict.
This opposition of orthodox professionalism against the people’s authentic needs for
originality and spontaneity became part of Fromm’s larger critique of the psychological pro-
fessions, where he accused psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis of “becoming a seri-
ous danger to the development of man . . . [T]heir practitioners are evolving into the priests
of the new religion of fun, consumption and self-lessness, into the specialists of manipulation,
into the spokesmen for the alienated personality” (1955, pp. 168–169). Pitting these profes-
sions against man, Fromm aligned himself with man and the fight against manipulation.
This dovetails with an even broader rejection of the professions tout court. Fromm
opined that experts of all kinds had turned their backs on the people. These experts wielded
“the assertion that the problems are too complicated for the average individual to grasp”
(1941, p. 250). As a result, the individual “waits until the specialists have found out what to
do and where to go,” resulting either in “a cynicism towards everything which is said or
printed” or in a “childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority” (1941, p. 250).
In this manner, Fromm constructed a zero-sum-game model of expertise, where the experts’
knowledge necessarily implied a corresponding lack of power on the part of the laity.
The notion of “optimal marginality” suggests that the marginal position sometimes has
some surprising advantages attached to it. When applied to the position of the expert in the
media, we can understand how an intellectual’s optimally marginal position can be parlayed
into a role in the mass media, and how that position then shapes the cultural authority laid out
by that intellectual.
The public face of marginality can be seen in Fromm’s popular writing. His claims to cul-
tural authority were largely fashioned out of assertions regarding his own distance from—and op-
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 217
position to—the orthodox practices of psychology. He asked his audience to believe him not be-
cause he was a properly credentialed expert, but because he was not. This was a way for Fromm
to close ranks with his audience and enlist them as peers in his own opposition to psychology,
psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. The fact that he did not partake of those fields’ professionalism
was made out as a marker of his own allegiance to the authentic needs of his own audience. The
in-group he created for himself and his audience was the category of “humans,” a category op-
posed to the professions. Doing this, he clearly anticipated the symbolic profits that came from
placing himself on the side of the large lay audience he could certainly anticipate.
A more direct symbolic benefit of Fromm’s opposition to professional psychology was
that it provided him with a way to recast his own lack of professional credentials. Bourdieu
described how “the denunciation of professional routine is to some extent consubstantial with
prophetic ambition, even to the point where this may amount to official proof of one’s charis-
matic qualifications” (1993, p. 124). Fromm’s situation can be compared with what Bourdieu
described as a “double-break” (1990, p. 150), a strategic self-identification that occurs when
an authority claims to be separate from those who themselves claim to be more expert or au-
thoritative than their audience.
The example of Erich Fromm demonstrates how this assertion of a double-break pres-
ents itself as a convenient manner in which to translate a marginal position in the professions
into a powerful rhetorical appeal. Through the double-break, Fromm successfully turned his
isolation from the rest of psychoanalysis into a symbolic asset, one that served him well for
the better part of 20 years. In this sense, marginality from the professions could be played off
as solidarity with another important group of people: the audience. Certain types of margin-
ality, it would seem, make a good match for popularization.

MARGINALIZATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN SWEDEN

In our third case study, we shall explore the problem of marginalization on a macro level,
using the Swedish historiography of psychoanalysis as our point of reference. We shall examine
how Swedish historians have presented the reception of psychoanalysis in Swedish medicine and
how they have used the idea of marginalization as a rhetorical device. We have chosen Sweden
rather than some of the bigger Western nations as our case study for a number of reasons. First,
the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden is much less familiar to the international audience than
its history in the countries that usually represent “the West” in international studies on psycho-
analysis: the United States, England, France, and German-speaking Europe. Second, the history
of psychoanalysis in Sweden includes elements that are both similar to and different from its his-
tory in other Western countries; thus, in focusing on Sweden, we wish to “test” the sociologist
Edith Kurzweil’s thesis that “each country creates the psychoanalysis it needs” (Kurzweil, 1989,
p. 1). Third, the question of the marginalization of psychoanalysis is an intriguing one in a coun-
try such as Sweden, where therapeutic ideology and the “psychologization of everyday life” have
shaped how social and individual problems have been conceptualized and solved (in its heavy re-
liance on psychological expertise, the post–World War II Sweden has had close resemblances
with the Netherlands). And, fourth and last, the ways in which Swedish scholars have raised the
question of the marginalization of psychoanalysis make an analysis of the formal properties of
their arguments interesting and instructive to scholars of marginality.

On the Sociocultural Context of Psychoanalysis in Sweden

The history of psychoanalysis in Sweden reflects the peculiar characteristics of the na-
tion’s history in the twentieth century (for a short overview of the history of psychoanalysis
218 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

in Sweden, see Johansson, 2003b). Unlike most Western nations, which were materially dev-
astated and mentally affected by the two world wars, Sweden remained neutral during both
wars. After World War I, social democracy became an increasingly powerful political force
aiming to unite the nation rather than to seek radical solutions to “class conflicts,” and the
Social-Democratic Party, which stayed in power continuously from 1932 to 1976, saw the
peaceful and prosperous development of Swedish society as its main goal. According to the
developing social-democratic ideology of Folkhem (“People’s Home”), all citizens should be
included in the national community, which meant that those who were regarded as different
or deviant (the poor, the mentally ill, the asocial, the criminals, etc.) should be integrated into
society through nonintrusive, rational methods (including therapy, psychology, pedagogy, so-
cial work, and social medicine) that would replace moralistic judgments and the “law and
order” discipline by the scientific “treatment and management of people” (människobehan-
dling). Although the new authorities considered psychoanalysis to be too impractical and the-
oretical, the political emphasis on the rational, science-based “management” of people was
conducive to the dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas in Sweden, especially from the 1940s
onward. However, unlike the situation of psychoanalysis in the United States, psychoanalysis
did not succeed in becoming a major force in medicine, even if psychoanalytic ideas were in-
corporated and talked about in the post–World War II Swedish medicine and psychiatry in the
guise of psychosomatic medicine.
The rise of psychomedical disciplines (first psychiatry, then psychology, psychoanalysis,
and psychodynamically oriented social work and pedagogy) and thought patterns in Sweden
during the first half of the twentieth century invites comparisons with other countries where
psychomedical ideas have been applied not only to the more immediate therapeutic needs, but
also to the nonauthoritarian “management of people” (or, “government of the soul,” as the
British sociologist Nikolas Rose [1999] puts it). From the 1920s onward, Swedish health ide-
ology was shaped by international psychological and mental hygienic ideas and practices that
put a premium on preventive measures, enlightenment, information, and psychological inter-
pretations of malaise and maladjustment. In the formation of psychomedical language in
Sweden, psychoanalysis played a considerable role in establishing the idea that mental mal-
adies such as neuroses resulted from psychic conflicts or traumas rather than, as used to be
the case in the turn-of-the-century medical discourse, from overtaxing of the nervous system
or the constitutional weakness of nerves.
In the 1960s, the rise of clinical psychology and the environmentalist mentality led to an
increase in the number of clinical practitioners who endorsed psychoanalytic theories and
methods. The younger generation of Swedish psychiatrists had a relatively benign attitude to-
ward psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular, and these “reformist” psychia-
trists, who were keen on deconstructing the heavy structure of the asylum psychiatry, helped
legitimize psychoanalysis as an essential part of mental medicine in Sweden. From the mid-
1960s to the 1990s, psychoanalysis was part and parcel of “official” Swedish psychiatry, but
toward the end of the century, biological psychiatry made a triumphant return all over the
Western world, and psychoanalysis has been in retreat since.
In Sweden, as in most Western countries, psychoanalysis lacked institutional support,
scientific prestige, therapeutic merit, and broad clinical application, and it was also de-
nounced on moral grounds. What made the Swedish experience of psychoanalysis unique was
not the fact that, during the first half of the twentieth century, the medical profession in
Sweden tended to regard it as inadequate as a psychomedical specialty, but rather that psy-
chodynamic ideas were integrated into the social-democratic policy of social engineering,
which paid increasing attention to the psychological methods of child rearing, family and
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 219
marriage counseling, disciplining, therapy, and the overall education of character.
Independent of the social-democratic interest in the rational treatment and management of
people, leading Swedish psychiatrists and neurologists often found some aspects of psycho-
analysis intellectually intriguing and exciting, even if they had a rather low opinion of its ther-
apeutic value.
Next, we will examine a few cases from the late 1960s to the 1990s through which the
medical position of psychoanalysis can be assessed. Then we will draw some conclusions
about the formal properties of arguments that were presented in favor of the view that psy-
choanalysis was a marginalized discipline in Sweden.

Was Psychoanalysis Marginalized in Sweden?

In 1968, a popular exposition of Swedish psychiatry, Modern Svensk Psykiatri (Modern
Swedish Psychiatry) was published (Holmberg, 1968). The volume included contributions by
the leading psychiatrists, who discussed all aspects of mental health, including organizational
and philosophical issues. Two chapters in the book reviewed the Swedish development of psy-
chotherapy and psychoanalysis, respectively (Harding, 1968; Ekman, 1968). The authors,
both psychoanalysts, observed that during the first decades of the century, psychiatrists had a
strongly skeptical view on psychoanalysis, but that the situation has changed for the better
since World War II, and especially in the 1960s. They did not portray psychoanalysis as a mar-
ginalized discipline in Sweden.
Three years later, in 1971, a collection of papers on psychotherapy, Modern Svensk
Psykoterapi (Modern Swedish Psychotherapy), appeared (Rosengren & Öfwerström, 1971).
The contributors were psychiatrists and psychologists of the younger generation who wanted
to establish psychotherapeutic training programs in state universities. They discussed recent
developments and noted that psychodynamic therapy had been provided by a growing num-
ber of mental health professionals—in their view, the prospect of a further “psychody-
namization” of psychiatry was very good. An expansion of psychodynamic psychotherapy
was considered beneficial to the whole society, since, as one psychologist put it, “none of us
is totally free from problems to which psychotherapy can offer a solution” (Öfwerström,
1971, p. 248) (this and the following translations of direct quotes are our own). None of the
contributors to this volume claimed that psychoanalysis was marginalized or that it had been
marginalized in the past (although they complained that a natural-scientific view on the
human personality had prevailed in the institutes of higher learning).
Five years later, in 1976, psychologist Henry Egidius wrote in the beginning of his his-
torical overview on psychoanalysis in Scandinavian countries, “Let me say at the outset that
psychoanalysis has a strong position in Nordic psychiatry and that it also has a significant role
to play in psychology departments” (Egidius, 1976, p. 236). Far from claiming that psycho-
analysis was marginalized in Sweden, he observed that Swedish psychiatrists, especially child
psychiatrists, had been interested in psychoanalysis from the start.
So far, none of the authors we have mentioned have raised the issue of marginalization
of psychoanalysis. In fact, we have to move forward to the 1990s to find such claims, which
were presented not by psychiatrists or psychologists, but by historians. Franz Luttenberger, a
historian of Swedish psychoanalysis, argued in 1997 that Swedish psychiatry was once totally
dominated by the biological approach to mental illness, and that the then-prevailing psychi-
atric paradigm did not permit any changes to this approach. While he believed that psycho-
dynamic thinking had a secure position in contemporary psychiatry, Luttenberger also
lamented that the development of dynamic psychology in Sweden had dragged behind coun-
tries with “great scientific traditions.” In Germany, for example, approximately one-third of
220 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

all chairs in psychiatry were occupied by professors who espoused psychodynamic psychol-
ogy, whereas Sweden lacked a chair in dynamic psychology (Luttenberger, 1997, p. 44). He
conjectured that it had been easier for “laymen” than for psychiatrists to accept Freud’s ideas,
because the latter group tended to see psychoanalysis as a threat to their own professional
identity. Interestingly, the title of the volume including Luttenberger’s contribution is
Psykiatrins Marginaler (The Margins of Psychiatry).
In his 1989 book on the reception of psychoanalysis in Swedish medicine, Luttenberger
writes that the psychotherapeutic groups established in the late 1960s and early 1970s “rep-
resent a progressive force in Swedish psychiatry and psychology” (Luttenberger, 1989, p.
370). There is no doubt on whose side Luttenberger is on in the alleged tug-of-war between
biological psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.
Another Swedish historian, Per Magnus Johansson, has written an ambitious three-vol-
ume work on the history of psychoanalysis, the last two volumes dealing exclusively with
Sweden (Johansson, 1999a, 1999b, 2003a). At the end of Volume 3 (The Heirs of
Psychoanalysis in Sweden, Part Two), Johansson surveys critical literature, both Swedish and
international, on psychoanalysis. He claims that psychoanalysis in Sweden has survived in
less than favorable circumstances, since even the most talented psychoanalysts experienced
difficulties in their work, having to deal with opposition organized by academia in general
and by the representatives of psychology, analytical philosophy, and the established medical
community in particular. He goes on to write, “The influential representatives of Swedish
universities have seldom understood the value of Freud’s theory, in contradistinction to indi-
viduals who have occupied equivalent positions in countries such as France and Argentina,
where Freud . . . has been an important frame of reference and a source of inspiration”
(Johansson, 2003a, p. 429). He also associates psychoanalysis with the “democratic human-
istic tradition,” contrasting this tradition with what he presents as the emerging biologistic
weltanschauung, which robs individuals of their self-determination and responsibility (in the
Swedish public discussion, democracy and humanism are often presented as the corner-
stones of modernity in Sweden). As Johansson presents it, psychoanalysis is part and parcel
of an intrinsically valuable cultural tradition, which is undermined by the gene-determinis-
tic agenda of modern psychopharmacology and by nonhumanistic cognitive behavioral ther-
apy (2003a, pp. 465–466).
Luttenberger and Johansson are the two scholars who have studied the history of psy-
choanalysis in Sweden in the most detailed fashion and with a professional approach.2 Other
historians of psychiatry and psychology have expressed views on psychoanalysis that resem-
ble those of Luttenberger and Johansson. In one study (an intellectual biography of Poul
Bjerre, the grand old man of Swedish psychotherapy), the authors—two historians—have
even adopted Alice Miller’s psychodynamic theories as a methodological tool (Bärmark &
Nilsson, 1983). With the exception of one scholar—an educator and a harsh critic of Freud,
to put it mildly (see Scharnberg, 1993)—we have not seen in any of the studies on the history
of psychoanalysis in Sweden that we have gone through that the somatic, biological orienta-
tion of psychiatry would have been favorably contrasted with psychoanalysis. Thus, it is safe
to say that Swedish historians of medicine and psychology tend to have a positive or at least
neutral attitude toward psychoanalysis and, conversely, a negative attitude toward what they
perceive as “somatic,” “medical,” “positivistic,” or “biological” psychiatry.

2. By presenting these historians as advocates of psychodynamic thinking, we do not mean to imply that their schol-
arly work is of lesser quality because of their (moderate) partisanship. Both Luttenberger and Johansson have made
valuable contributions to the historiography of Swedish medicine and psychology, and their studies are indispensa-
ble sources for future students of Swedish mental medicine.
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 221
A study of the literature on the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden gives evidence for
the claim that in their inclination to contrast the predominantly “good” psychoanalysis with
the predominantly “bad” biological psychiatry, historians of psychoanalysis have used the
idea (if not the word) of marginalization as a rhetorical strategy. In the historiography of
Swedish psychoanalysis, we have found the following formal types of argument:

1. Dichotomization: Two antagonistic psychomedical “schools,” psychoanalysis and

“biological” psychiatry, are set against each other. Through dichotomization, oppo-
nents and proponents, friends and foes, the good and the bad, are easily identifiable.
2. Dramatization: Conflicts and tensions in the relations of these schools are either
highlighted or conjured up if the evidence does not easily permit interpretations
stressing confrontational aspects. In order to dramatize the conflict, the technique
of exaggeration has been employed. Thus, as the drama unfolds, the reader learns
that somatic psychiatrists not only did not support psychoanalysis—they directly at-
tacked it and denounced it. The psychiatric establishment was the academic Church
to psychoanalytic Galileos.
3. Debunking: The very foundation of the “enemy” school is questioned or denounced
as scientifically inadequate (or “one-sided,” “irrelevant,” and “dogmatic”) and/or
morally dubious. Thus, “biological psychiatry” represents, first, regression to
“brain mythology,” a mechanistic frame of reference, and a neglect of phenomeno-
logical, subjective, and idiosyncratic aspects of human personality. Second, it rep-
resents morally questionable knowledge. In the moral reading of “biologism,” it is
assumed that if the general public begins to believe that biology in general and the
study of the brain in particular can (partly) explain the human mind and psychic
processes, this belief may have deleterious social and political consequences, not
only because “biologism” undermines the humanistic tradition that sustains the dig-
nity of humans, but also because it may give scientific credence to the conservative
or right-wing ideology. Conversely, a public support of psychodynamic views
would promote “humanistic morals” and, to the extent it increases our knowledge
about ourselves and our fellow humans, contribute to human flourishing. The pro-
psychoanalytic writers imply that it is our moral obligation to defend a value sys-
tem that opposes “biologism” and supports psychodynamics.

In conclusion, our examination of the historiography of Swedish psychoanalysis shows

that the idea of marginalization is partly a construct created and utilized by scholars friendly
to psychoanalysis. Such a marginalization thesis is not clearly supported by historical evi-
dence concerning the development of psychoanalysis in Sweden. Our case study strongly sug-
gests that marginalization is not only a “real” phenomenon that can be contextualized and ex-
plained, but also a form of rhetoric. The purpose of such a rhetoric of marginalization is to
give support to particular beliefs through arguments that dichotomize, dramatize, and debunk,
and which communicate the message that the marginalization of something intrinsically
“good” can make us morally and culturally impoverished.

CONCLUSIONS
These diverse yet related case studies show us that marginalization need not only be un-
derstood in terms of lack. Marginalization is something different from being merely the neg-
ative space of power. It has a positive identity as well, because if marginalization is not about
222 JAAP BOS, DAVID W. PARK, AND PETTERI PIETIKAINEN

exclusion or segregation but about positioning, then the marginal position is a position in its
own right. In other words, to understand marginality we should not (only) think of it in op-
position to centrality. The central and the marginal position are not mutually exclusive but
share a common interest. The position of the marginal contains the raison d’être of the dom-
inant, but also the conditions and terms under which the latter are built. We should thus think
of marginalization not taking place at the outskirts of scientific practices per se, but at the cen-
ter of it. Marginalization can be looked at as a necessary element in constant negotiation and
redefinition of what is “normal science.”
A common thread that runs through the marginality of the works of Freud’s earliest fol-
lowers, Erich Fromm’s public face, and the story of a “marginalized” psychoanalysis in
Sweden is the notion that marginality can accomplish certain strategic goals. A marginalized
place in the field of positions gives to those identified with the margins a set of symbolic re-
sources that can indeed be most valuable. What we see in Stekel, Groddeck, Andreas-Salomé,
Fromm, and Swedish historians of psychoanalysis is an embrace of the margins that would
seem less sensible were it not for the benefits that accrued to those on the margins. Thus, to
represent oneself (or others) as being “marginalized” or an “outsider” can be a rhetorical, ma-
nipulative strategy, a way to find a new and professionally profitable niche for oneself; to fa-
vorably contrast one’s position from those conformists at or close to the center who do not
dare to show intellectual independence; and to win positive attention from groups that repre-
sent other centers. When an “antipsychiatric” psychiatrist (such as R. D. Laing), for example,
plays up his marginalization within his professional community in his popular writings, his
voice is heard by individuals and groups (radical therapists, artists, journalists, left-wing in-
telligentsia) who share his values and who can help him carve a high-profile niche for him-
self as a “radical dissident thinker.” A construction of one’s marginality can be an effective
means to garner positive publicity, and “ambitious outsiders” can get to the position in which
it is precisely the presentation of their marginalization that is conducive to their professional
lives. Thus, the marginals must be differentiated from those who never win the attention of
the ones who are at the center in the first place, and therefore they never get to the position
in which they can be “marginalized.”
The potential benefits of a marginal position lead us to the observation that marginal-
ity—as seen from these case studies—is something that involves a surprising degree of co-
operation between the center and the margins. What one finds in marginal figures is often an
active agreement between center and margins regarding what can be understood to be on the
margins. Margins are constructed through this oddly cooperative process. The center of the
field dismisses the marginal, and the marginal responds by embracing their marginality for all
it is worth. But both need to acknowledge each other. Thus, it is through this collusion and
mutual consent that such a notion as “optimal marginality” becomes possible at all.
As is hinted at in this idea that marginality involves a surprising amount of mutual con-
sent between the center and the margins, these case studies also show how marginality can be
thought of as a dynamic process. This means that marginality is not a fixed part of the iden-
tity of an individual, group, or idea. Instead, it is best to appreciate how what was once cen-
tral can become marginal and how the marginal can be brought into the center (although it
may be a different center). To be certain, the process of constructing the margins and the cen-
ters is linked very closely to the power structure of a given field and to the history of a field.
Finally, we observe that marginality is a conceptual tool of particular relevance to those
who concern themselves with the history and structural position of psychoanalysis. Freudian
psychoanalysis was, from its inception, put forth as a putatively radical pursuit; Freud often
chose to don the cloak of marginality in his own descriptions of psychoanalysis. The structure
 STRATEGIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION: THE CASE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 223
of Freud’s inner circle led to a fragmentation of this logic of marginality, as the goals of pro-
fessional consolidation and movement unity spawned new fertile margins. Here, Stekel and
others found their place as a marginal foil for Freud. Psychoanalysis gained professional cre-
dence in the United States, where it became institutionally joined with academic psychiatry.
Erich Fromm’s popular psychoanalytic writing shows how his marginal position outside the
psychoanalytic mainstream could be parlayed into a viable public face. And today, as histori-
ans tell the story of psychoanalysis, as in Sweden, we see marginality again appearing as a
tool that historians themselves use in their attempts to locate psychoanalysis and to increase
its cultural significance vis à vis other therapies and psychomedical paradigms.

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