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This paper describes the transplantation of psychoanalysis from Europe to Los Angeles and the similarities and differences in followers, cultural attitudes, institutional organization, and patient symptoms. Psychoanalysis in both places attracted psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, artists, writers, and movie people, all committed to “modernism” and cultural change. But special American conditions created greater institutional rigidity, medicalization, and a more diffuse patient symptomatology centered on the maternal relationship. Such conditions also fostered bitter disputes over modifications of psychoanalytic theory and practice which have only recently become less acute as the status of psychoanalysis has declined in America. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reply to Bernd Hamm's critique of the transformation of Europe as a challenge to comparative sociology. The main thrust of Bernd Hamm's critique is that the article on the transformation of Europe is pursuing a comparative approach resulting only in the empirical description of similarities and differences between nations. Such an approach, accepting nations as the most important and meaningful entities for comparison, tends to confine research to a static and correlational logic. He asserts that it is characterized by a retrospective and conservative bias, not allowing for a true consideration of patterns of interlinkages between the units of observation nor the dynamics of change. While such an approach, according to Hamm, might have some merits, a truly fruitful comparative research within the context of Europe necessitates a significant different position, an evolutionary approach focusing on the changes going on in Europe. Here, the processes of building European institutions are particularly at issue; only by focusing on them can we contribute to the understanding of Europe as it becomes one society, and to learn lessons from such understanding. There are some specific arguments in Hamm's critique on which the author would like to comment briefly. The first concerns arguments about crisis phenomena in Europe in the first part of the paper. A second, quite important, issue raised by Hamm concerns the question whether nation-states are still the most meaningful units of observation in comparative research.