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Psychoanalysis and Sociology: Outline of an Introduction to Some Current Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Georges Friedmann
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Extract

The relations between psychoanalysis and sociology pose a difficult problem. The complexity of psychoanalysis, the evolution of certain features of Freud's theories, the diversity of doctrines and interpretations encountered among its representatives (and this is often true even within the same country), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the youthfulness, one might say, infancy, of sociology—that latecomer among the sciences of man, which derives its concepts and its methods from research itself and from the problems with which our civilization confronts it—all this would justify labelling as imprudent—even rash—any attempt to study their relationship and their prospects for collaboration. We readily accept the reproof. And yet, however rash it might be, this venture, in our opinion, is in no sense a concocted one. The necessity of attempting it is evident. For more than twenty years, the studies, inquiries, researches which we have been involved in concerning collectivities of men at work, the interpretation of their attitudes, of their reactions to new techniques and to the constraints of rationalization from “higher up,” as it evolved from Taylor through the diverse stages of so-called “scientific” organization, the attempts to measure their “satisfaction,” to explain the variations in their output, their absences, their professional fluidity, and, last but not least, their behavior when not at work, the forms and content of their “leisure” —all these experiments have continuously and increasingly stimulated our interest in psychoanalytical concepts and interpretations. Frequently this evoked in us the temptation to indulge in “unseasonable extrapolations,” utilizing analytical theories which, having been discovered in the field of individual psychology, ran the risk, at first glance, of not being transferable to the field of collective behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 4 , Issue 14 , June 1956 , pp. 17 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © 1956 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. Cf. J. Lacan and M. Cénac, "Introduction théorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminolgie," Revue Française de Psychanalyse, Jan.-March 1951, pp. 13-14.

2. In a study which, in other respects, is suggestive and illustrated by personal memoirs, it is this factor that seems to us to misconstrue the thinking of Heinrich Meng: "Siegmund Freud und de Soziologie," Frankfurter Beitrage zur Soziologie, Band I, Mélanges Max Horkheimer (Frankfort, 1955), pp. 67-76.

3. Moses and Monotheism (New York, Knopf, 1939), p. 188.

4. Ibid.

5. An interesting empirical documentation on this subject can be found in the collection of "Communications made to the International Seminar" on L'entrée des jeunes dans la vie de travail et la communauté, organized by the UNESCO Institute of Social Sciences (Cologne, Ian. 3-11, 1954).

6. Cf. particularly Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2d ed. (New York, Harper Bros., 1949).

7. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, Cape & Smith, 1930), p. 35.

8. Ibid., p. 18, footnote I.

9. Communication of the 10th of Jan. 1924 to La Société de Psychologie, cf. Anthropologie et Sociologie (Paris, P.U.F., 1950), p. 293.

10. Roger Bastide, Sociologie et Psychanalyse (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 109 ff.

11. As is evident from Roger Bastide's fine exposition, op. cit., and particularly chapters V and VI. Since then, the publication of the important work of Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York, Rinehart, 1955), has shown that this evolution is far from being completed.

12. Harry Stack Sullivan has stressed over and over again the analysis of interpersonal relations in illness, treatment and recovery. We must cite, among his publications, "Psychia try : Introduction to the Study of Interpersonal Relations" (Psychiatry, I, 1938); "A Role in Formulating the Relationship of the Individual and the Group" (American Journal of Sociology, 1939) and, mainly, the book which, in the light of his long clinical experience, contains the final expression of his thought: The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York, Norton, 1953).

13. D. Lagache, "Definition et aspects de la psychanalyze," Revue Française de Psychanalyse, July-Sept. 1950, p. 407. Having himself observed that in the psychoanalytical treatment social factors intervene at first only in the form of the interpersonal relationship between the analyst and the patient, S. A. Shentoub ("Remarques méthodologiques sur l'analyse psycho-sociale" Revue Française de Psychanalysis, July-Sept., 1950, p. 438), remarks quite correctly that "the psychoanalytical technique tends to place the social situations in which the patient finds him self on a concrete and real footing." The psychoanalyst observes the social data "as a real and living fact within the experimental framework of the cure. In contrast to the sociologist, who tries to apprehend the collective experience of the social fact, the psychoanalyst looks upon it from the standpoint of the individual's experience of it." Here again we see how the individ ual's psychic experience can be expressed with a study of collective facts from this point of view and the contribution that the psychoanalyst's clinical observation can make to sociologi cal research. To know how the social data, for example, how the individual conscience-even the so-called "morbid" one-reacts to being part of an economic, political or religious collec tivity, is surely not a matter of indifference to the sociologist.

14. Thus Erich Fromm considers the family as the "psychic agency of society, the institu tion whose function it is to transmit the demands of society to the child during the course of his growth (The Sane Society, p. 82).

15. D. Lagache, La Psychanalyse, "Collection Que Sais-Je?" (Paris, P.U.F., 1955), p. 37.

16. The Neurotic Personality of our Time (London, Kegan Paul, 1937), p. 290.

17. Erich Fromm, Escapefrom Freedom (New York, Rinehart, 1941), p. 277. In The Sane Society (pp. 81-82), Fromm stresses the necessity of distinguishing between factors that explain the particular content of the social character and the methods by which the latter is produced. "The structure of society and the function of the individual in the social structure may be considered to determine the content of the social character." The family, the "psychic agency of society," has a preponderant influence on the manner in which the social character is pro duced.

18. Escape from Freedom, p. 278.

19. Op. cit., p. 109.

20. La Psychanalyse, p. 37.

21. Art. cit., 407-8.

22. Ibid., pp. 407 and 409.

23. Ibid., p. 406.

24. Ibid., p. 414.

25. Besides the "new psychoanalysts" (cf. particularly K. Horney, op. cit, and E. Fromm, "Individual and Social Origin of Neurosis," American Sociological Review, 1944, pp. 380 ff.), Otto Fenichel has stressed the importance of the problem in his classical work, The Psycho analytical Theory of Neurosis (New York, Norton, 1945).

26. John Bowlby, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life (London, Baillière, Tindal and Cox, 1946).

27. La dissociation familiale et les troubles du caractère chez l'enfant (Paris, Edit. Familiales de France, 1944).

28. Carmen Khouri, Les facteurs sociaux, économiques etfamiliaux des troubles du caractère chez l'enfant (Paris, Vigué, 1950).

29. Lajeuness coupable vous accuse (Paris, Recueil Sirey, 1950, pp. 97 ff.).

30. Cf. the works of Andrée Vieille: "La population vivant en meublé: quelques données sur le département de la Seine," Population, 1954, No. 2; "Relations parentales et relations de voisinage chez les ménages ourvriers de la Seine," Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. XVIII, 1954; "L'enfant, victime de la chambre meublée," C.I.L, Revue de l'Habitat populaire, No. 71, March, 1955.

31. Cf. Où va le travail humain? New ed. (Paris, Gallimard, 1954), pp. 150-51, 235-36, 343-48.

32. C. R. Walker, "The Problem of the Repetitive Job," Harvard Business Review, May, 1950; D. Cox and K. M. Dyce Sharp, "Research on the Unit of Work," Occupational Psychol ogy, April, 1951; D. Cox, assisted by D. H. Irvine, "Women's Reaction to Repetitive Work," National Institute of Industrial Psychology, Report No. 9, Oct., 1953.

33. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.

34. We must note in passing that C. J. Jung, for his part, in his Psychology of the Uncon scious (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1923), having asserted that "the best liberation is insured by regular work," adds: "Nevertheless, work is salutary only if it is a free action and contains nothing of infantile constraint."

35. Cf. the memoirs of B. Zeigarnik and M. Ovsiankina in Psychologische Forschungen, 1927, pp. 1-85, and 1928, pp. 203-379, and G. W. Allport, Personality (New York, Henry Holt, 1937), p. 198.

36. On the subject of the behavior of workers employed in assembly-line jobs in the large automobile industries of Detroit, cf. Où va le travail? pp. 148-150.

37. Cf. for example the figures that C. Wright Mills gives, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 229.

38. E. Fromm, The Sane Society, pp. 296-97.