American's Turn to Therapy in Homes' In a Country of Mothers and Antrim's The Verificationist

Abstract

From the beginning of the 20th century, Freudian psychoanalysis dominated the American cultural landscape, bridging the divide between the therapeutic field as a niche and popular culture. However, the popularity of psychoanalysis decayed in the second half of the 20th century, as it was progressively overcome by a broader vision of psychotherapy. Following the turn to therapy, the American therapeutic field has come to encompass various models of therapy beyond psychoanalysis: therapy is nowadays an integral part of American life, shown by its overarching depiction in mainstream media and the high number of different self-help groups and books. Nonetheless, the adaptation of the American turn to therapy into fiction has not been widely examined in the literature. Accordingly, in this paper I argue that Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist (2000) and A.M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) provide a depiction of, respectively, the decline of classical psychoanalysis, and the rise of newer therapeutic approaches absorbed into American culture. This paper will compare these two novels in order to evaluate how Antrim and Homes illustrate and reflect on America’s cultural turn to therapy. After a broad evaluation on how the therapeutic is introduced in the two narratives, I will explore the texts’ treatments of conceptual and neurological advancements within psychotherapy. Lastly, I will examine how the texts comment on the spatial relation between therapist, therapee and therapy itself. Through these interconnected analyses, I will conclude that Antrim and Homes offer two radically different fictional representations of the evolution of the American therapeutic landscape.