Psychoanalytic sociology
Encyclopedia
Psychoanalytic sociology is the research field that analyzes society
using the same methods that psychoanalysis
applied to analyze an individual.
'Psychoanalytic sociology embraces work from divergent sociological traditions and political perspectives': its common 'emphasis on unconscious mental processes and behavior renders psychoanalytic sociology a controversial subfield within the broader sociological discipline' (as with psychoanalysis in academic psychology
); and some sociologists consider the field to be insufficiently empirical
and largely pseudoscientific.
Similarly, sociatry applies psychiatry
to society itself.
The same mode of approach was also employed by Freud in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), where he argued that 'crowd psychology, and with it all social psychology, is parasitic on individual psychology'. Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930 formed however his fullest sociological study, wherein he 'anchored his analysis of social and political life in a theory of human nature very much his own'.
Indeed, in 'works, from Totem and Taboo
(1912-1913a) to Moses and Monotheism (1939a), Freud analyzed the events that presided over the foundation and modification of social links, the advent of civilization, and the rise of its current discontents'; while James Strachey
described The Future of an Illusion (1927) as 'the first of a number of sociological works to which Freud devoted most of his remaining years'.
and Otto Fenichel
the most notable among them', and were fully prepared, in Erich Fromm
's words, to at least '"try to explain psychic structure as determined by social structure"'. Theodor Adorno's essays on psychoanalysis, reappropriated Freud's work and applied it to social phenomena, and in particular in his Freudian Theory adn the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951), he outlined a theory of social psychology
.
In 1946, Fenichel considered that '"Comparative sociology of education" is a new scientific field of the greatest practical importance', as well as concluding in general that it is 'experience, that is, the cultural conditions, that transforms potentialities into realities, that shapes the real mental structure of man by forcing his instinctual demands into certain directions'.
From a different angle, the early Lacan
argued that 'any "concrete psychology" must be augmented by a reference to ethnology, history and law'; and later drew on 'Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology...[for] what will be termed the Symbolic
'. Post-Lacanians would continue to explore such sociological areas as 'the superego as the moment of common cultural binding', or the way 'the social bond, the Law binding us, is...a bond of the impossibility of obedience or disobedience'.
attempted to explore 'in terms of Freud's discovery...the social function of the family as an ideological conditioning device'. R. D. Laing 'has adapted Sartre's existential psychoanalysis..[as he] analyzes the concept of alienation
': looking at the 'analysis of alienation in sociological and clinical senses', Laing concluded grandly that 'Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings'.
Norman O. Brown
examined a 'politics made out of delinquency...even as the crime, so also conscience is collective'. Herbert Marcuse
explored how in late modernity 'repressive desublimation is indeed operative in the sexual sphere...as the by-product of the social controls of technological reality, which extend liberty while intensifying domination'.
's work has been of significance within feminist understandings, in particular The Reproduction of Mothering and The Power of Feelings. 'Although Chodorow uses a psychoanalytic approach, she rejects the instinctual determinism of the classic Freudian account in favor of a more nuanced, social psychological approach that incorporates recent developments in object relations theory
'.
Jessica Benjamin
has also been influential in this project of linking social theory to psychoanalysis, as with The Shadow of the Other. Juliet Mitchell
however has criticised the way 'Benjamin's injunction is made within a psychosocial, not a psychoanalytical framework'.
Others have since observed that 'efforts to link sociology and psychoanalysis have yielded varied results....[some], intoxicated by the success of analysis, have indiscriminately applied psychoanalytic concepts to social reality and have succeeded only in bastardizing psychoanalysis (making it a management tool) and disfiguring social processes'.
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
using the same methods that psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
applied to analyze an individual.
'Psychoanalytic sociology embraces work from divergent sociological traditions and political perspectives': its common 'emphasis on unconscious mental processes and behavior renders psychoanalytic sociology a controversial subfield within the broader sociological discipline' (as with psychoanalysis in academic psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
); and some sociologists consider the field to be insufficiently empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
and largely pseudoscientific.
Similarly, sociatry applies psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
to society itself.
Freud (1907-1939)
'The desire to establish a link between psychoanalysis and sociology appears very early on in Freud's work. The articles "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907b) and " 'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d) are evidence of this'. Though the latter article was 'the earliest of Freud's full-length discussions of the antagonism between civilization and instinctual life, his convictions on the subject went back much further': however the 'sociological aspects of that antagonism form the main subject' in 1908.The same mode of approach was also employed by Freud in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), where he argued that 'crowd psychology, and with it all social psychology, is parasitic on individual psychology'. Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930 formed however his fullest sociological study, wherein he 'anchored his analysis of social and political life in a theory of human nature very much his own'.
Indeed, in 'works, from Totem and Taboo
Totem and Taboo
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics is a book by Sigmund Freud published in German in 1913 under the title Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker...
(1912-1913a) to Moses and Monotheism (1939a), Freud analyzed the events that presided over the foundation and modification of social links, the advent of civilization, and the rise of its current discontents'; while James Strachey
James Strachey
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English...
described The Future of an Illusion (1927) as 'the first of a number of sociological works to which Freud devoted most of his remaining years'.
Freudians
'Many of the early analysts were Marxists...Reich, Paul FedernPaul Federn
Paul Federn was an Austrian-American psychologist who was a native of Vienna. Federn is largely remembered for his theories involving ego psychology and therapeutic treatment of psychosis....
and Otto Fenichel
Otto Fenichel
Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation".Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud...
the most notable among them', and were fully prepared, in Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Life:Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am...
's words, to at least '"try to explain psychic structure as determined by social structure"'. Theodor Adorno's essays on psychoanalysis, reappropriated Freud's work and applied it to social phenomena, and in particular in his Freudian Theory adn the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951), he outlined a theory of social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
.
In 1946, Fenichel considered that '"Comparative sociology of education" is a new scientific field of the greatest practical importance', as well as concluding in general that it is 'experience, that is, the cultural conditions, that transforms potentialities into realities, that shapes the real mental structure of man by forcing his instinctual demands into certain directions'.
From a different angle, the early Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
argued that 'any "concrete psychology" must be augmented by a reference to ethnology, history and law'; and later drew on 'Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology...[for] what will be termed the Symbolic
The Symbolic
The Symbolic is a part of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, part of his attempt 'to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real - a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis'.-The...
'. Post-Lacanians would continue to explore such sociological areas as 'the superego as the moment of common cultural binding', or the way 'the social bond, the Law binding us, is...a bond of the impossibility of obedience or disobedience'.
1960s and the Left
The Sixties saw a radical sociopsychoanalysis exert wide popular influence under the guidance of a number of different thinkers. David CooperDavid Cooper (psychiatrist)
David Graham Cooper was a British psychiatrist, theorist and leader in the anti-psychiatry movement....
attempted to explore 'in terms of Freud's discovery...the social function of the family as an ideological conditioning device'. R. D. Laing 'has adapted Sartre's existential psychoanalysis..[as he] analyzes the concept of alienation
Alienation
Alienation may refer to:*Alienation , the legal transfer of title of ownership to another party*"Alienation", the medical term for splitting apart of the faculties of the mind...
': looking at the 'analysis of alienation in sociological and clinical senses', Laing concluded grandly that 'Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings'.
Norman O. Brown
Norman O. Brown
Norman Oliver Brown was an American classicist.-Life:Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin...
examined a 'politics made out of delinquency...even as the crime, so also conscience is collective'. Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
explored how in late modernity 'repressive desublimation is indeed operative in the sexual sphere...as the by-product of the social controls of technological reality, which extend liberty while intensifying domination'.
Feminist contributions
Nancy ChodorowNancy Chodorow
Nancy Julia Chodorow is a feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst. She has written a number of influential books, including The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender ; Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory ; Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond ;...
's work has been of significance within feminist understandings, in particular The Reproduction of Mothering and The Power of Feelings. 'Although Chodorow uses a psychoanalytic approach, she rejects the instinctual determinism of the classic Freudian account in favor of a more nuanced, social psychological approach that incorporates recent developments in object relations theory
Object relations theory
Object relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory describes the process of developing a mind as one grows in relation to others in the environment....
'.
Jessica Benjamin
Jessica Benjamin
Jessica Benjamin is an American psychoanalyst and feminist.She is currently on the faculty of New York University's Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy...
has also been influential in this project of linking social theory to psychoanalysis, as with The Shadow of the Other. Juliet Mitchell
Juliet Mitchell
Juliet Mitchell is a British Psychoanalyst and socialist feminist, who was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at Cambridge University. In 2010, she's appointed to be the Director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at...
however has criticised the way 'Benjamin's injunction is made within a psychosocial, not a psychoanalytical framework'.
Criticism
Freud early warned of any 'attempt of this kind to carry psychoanalysis over to the cultural community...that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved'.Others have since observed that 'efforts to link sociology and psychoanalysis have yielded varied results....[some], intoxicated by the success of analysis, have indiscriminately applied psychoanalytic concepts to social reality and have succeeded only in bastardizing psychoanalysis (making it a management tool) and disfiguring social processes'.
See also
Further reading
- Anthony Elliott, Contemporary Social Theory (2009)
- Talcott ParsonsTalcott ParsonsTalcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973....
, "The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems", in Social Structure and Personality (1964)