Abstract
Human experience does not come divided up into categories such as biological, psychological, social, cultural, or economic. These words rather reflect the domains of separate academic disciplines organized in different academic departments, the result of an historical process dating from the end of the nineteenth century and the breaking up of “philosophy” into the fields of study we recognize today. Relations between the disciplines claiming these various dimensions of human life as their own field of study have varied over the course of the last century. By and large, the trend has been for the various disciplines, and their institutional organizations, to have narrowed their focus and excluded contacts with other disciplines. This is of course partly due to the fact that there is only so much one scholar can master in a lifetime, the current range and volume of the literature in each discipline now exceeding the ability of any one person to absorb it. But it is also a matter of turf-guarding and a belief on the part of each discipline that its special sector of the vast totality of human experience is the one that holds the key to understanding the larger whole.
The eighteen essays in The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis variously depict, bemoan, and exemplify the relations between the fields of psychoanalysis and sociology, each having sprung into existence more or less simultaneously at the end of the nineteenth century through the efforts of a single founder: Freud in the case of psychoanalysis, and Durkheim (Freud’s near contemporary) in sociology. The idea that there has been a divorce, unhappy or not, between the two fields implies there was once a marriage. And this is in fact the case. Freud himself, and later analysts such as Reich, Fromm, Horney, and Erikson, were deeply engaged with the study of the social dimension of life. And in sociology, psychoanalytic ideas once pervaded the field. Thinkers in the highly influential Frankfurt School of sociology, figures including Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, were deeply versed in analytic theory. At Harvard’s seminal Department of Social Relations, Talcott Parsons incorporated ego psychology into this ambitious model of the social system, and not only studied analysis but expected all members of the faculty to undergo analysis themselves. And the great Chicago School of symbolic interactionism in sociology, exemplified by C. H. Cooley and G. H. Mead, conceptualized the relations between mind and society in ways compatible with and used by analysts as different from each other as Harry Stack Sullivan and Jacques Lacan.
Yet it is clear from the essays in this book that the era of cross-fertilization is over and has been so since the 1960s. The first papers in the book document this development. George Cavalletto and Catherine Silver track the psychodynamic content of two leading sociology journals over several decades to prove the point. A key finding of their review is that the paradigm for a sociological research paper has come to be based on a scientific (or scientistic) model, displacing the discursive essay form that previously dominated both psychoanalysis and social theory.
In the next paper, Silver attributes the growing rejection of psychoanalysis to institutional paranoia in the field of sociology, showing how metaphors of contagion permeate discussions of analysis in the literature, and linking the phenomenon in part to the general paranoia of American academia in the McCarthy era. Thomas DeGloma, turning to a later time, shows that a reaction against academic conservatism led to the rise of more radical social developments in the 1960s. He focuses on the gay rights movement and the recovered memory episode, both of which framed psychoanalytic doctrines as conservative and wrongheaded and favored democratic social action and explanations based on social construction over the introspective stance of psychoanalysis.
Nancy Chodorow elaborates on this point, speculating that “people attracted to the social sciences have a pretheoretical, emotional predilection to feel and believe that things come from society or from culture,” that they are “paranoid externalizers” rather than “depressive narcissists,” like the people who become psychoanalysts (p. 131). She posits a fundamental antipathy on the part of social scientists to the emphasis in psychoanalysis on complex personal psychology, which she argues they fear would turn attention away from social problems like sexism, racism, and so on, by blaming the victim.
The next set of papers focus on the place of several leading sociologists in the “divorce.” Neil McLaughlin tries to reverse the relative neglect of Erich Fromm, while Lynn Chancer addresses the question of why C. Wright Mills did not employ psychoanalytic concepts. Of particular interest is the article by George Steinmetz, who argues quite convincingly that Pierre Bourdieu was much more influenced by psychoanalysis (by way of Lacan) than he was willing or able to admit.
The book having thus far focused on documenting and attempting to account for the “divorce,” it presents in its second half a set of papers seeking to reunite the estranged pair. The first, and far and away the most original and striking of these, is an account by Gilda Zwerman of her work over many years with Judy Clark, a “1960s radical” and early joiner of the Weathermen, now serving a seventy-five-year sentence for her part in the 1981 attempted robbery of a Brinks truck by the Black Liberation Army, an “action” in the course of which a Brinks guard and two policemen were killed. Fascinated by Clark’s apparent lack of remorse, the dissociation that allowed her to separate a normal self from a doctrinaire radical one, and the puzzling fact of her having committed her crime and then provoked the court into throwing the book at her just shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Zwerman made contact with her and was ultimately allowed fairly unimpeded access to her by prison authorities. In the course of their conversations over the years, in which Zwerman established rapport with Clark, listened attentively to her, but finally did not refrain from confronting her with her responsibility not only for the fate of her daughter but for that of the children of the three slain lawmen, Clark overcame her dissociative compartmentalization and has since become a model prisoner after years in solitary: “She was eager to return to school and finish her associate degree, and continue on to major in Psychology. She planned to organize a program for women inmates with AIDS. She wanted to find a girlfriend and try to have a personal life” (p. 257). She reconciled with her parents, her daughter, and the daughter’s father and clearly had achieved a more integrated personality.
This whole story is riveting in itself, as is Zwerman’s role in helping effect Clark’s dramatic change; but what makes the paper even more powerful is the author’s avowal of her own motives for pursuing this project: her own mother, a feminist and integrationist radical from an earlier era, had been incarcerated in a state mental hospital when Zwerman was fourteen, and she is open and honest about her identification with the plight of Clark’s daughter and her curiosity about the psychology that enabled Clark to go to jail in defense of her political ideas at the expense of robbing her daughter of an accessible mother.
Nor does the story end there. When Zwerman began presenting her research, she encountered Charles Tilly, then the doyen of the sociological study of social movements. He was interested in her work, but pressed her to substitute the kinds of data and vocabulary shared by social movement scholars, rather than view her material through what he called “the dreamy lens of psychoanalysis” (p. 260). The vivid anecdotes that once animated her writing were eliminated, as she says, by the peer reviewers and gatekeepers of the discipline. Her later work thus shows no sign of her earlier dependency on “Freud, feminism, or the Frankfurt School.” She concludes: “When Charles Tilly died in 2009, I regretted never telling him about Judy and hearing what would undoubtedly be his cutting, wry response to learning that the entire study was really all about my relationship with my mother” (p. 262).
In this paper the mismatch between a psychoanalytic perspective, with its focus on individual motivation, including countertransference, and deep and protracted listening, on the one hand, and the scientific pretensions of academic sociology, with its emphasis on objectivity, big data sets, and methodology on the other, is dramatically illustrated. One can only assume that writing this paper was a cri de coeur, the author’s declaration of independence from the strictures of the latter approach. It is thus all the more compelling for its candor and audacity. The paper alone is worth the price of the book.
Given the chasm between the two fields illustrated in Zwerman’s paper, one may reasonably doubt whether a reunion of the estranged couple is either possible or desirable, so different do their perspectives on what constitutes legitimate research appear. Indeed, as the noted psychoanalyst and anthropologist George Devereux (1978) argued long ago, doing psychoanalysis and doing ethnography (including the sort of long-term field research Zwerman did on radicalism and prisons) exist in a complementary relationship: one can do one or the other but not both at the same time. One entails a first-person perspective, the other a third-person perspective, and the best one can do is alternate between them.
This doubt notwithstanding, the remaining papers in the volume attempt to find ways to enliven the study of sociological issues and problems with perspectives that attend to the kinds of individual motivation that psychoanalysis typically deals with. Among the issues considered are racism in both the U.S. and Britain, collective trauma, neoliberalism and its discontents, and coming out as lesbian in Turkey—with what success readers may judge for themselves. Most of these attempts seem to me to be manifestos calling for psychosocial analysis, rather than actual detailed examples of it.
One of the major problems appears to be that psychoanalysis, in at least some of its current forms, may not contain an arsenal of concrete, usable theories robust enough to allow it to be convincingly “applied” to illuminate sociological facts. Many analysts today do not subscribe literally or solely (or at all) to Freudian metapsychology, classical ego psychology, or the libido theory, and these tropes, once the mainstay of psychoanalytic interpretations of social and cultural phenomena, are completely absent from this book. Middle school object relations, self psychology, and relational psychology are likewise conspicuous by their absence.
What is left, if this collection is any indicator, are some elements of either Kleinian or Lacanian theory. Thus, Jeffrey Prager’s thoughtful and rather melancholy essay on racism in America, and Anthony Elliott’s discussion of the contemporary phenomenon of what he calls the “new individualism,” use the concept of mourning, and hypomanic defenses against experiencing it, to account for the intransigence of these contemporary social ills, while Silver and Chodorow both point to the “paranoid position” to account for the Freudophobia so rampant in contemporary academic social science. Siamak Mohadevi, George Steinmetz, and Vikash Singh, for their part, make use of Lacanian theory to bridge the gap between the psychic and the social, helped in this endeavor by the fact that Lacan’s theory itself sees individuals not as autonomous agents but as effects of collective symbolic discourses.
As a sympathetic observer from the nearby field of anthropology, which, as Chodorow points out, dealt at length and in detail with the relationship between the individual and society in the “Culture and Personality” school that dominated the field between the 1930s and the 1960s, but now seems completely forgotten, I wish the contributors to this volume success in their endeavors to craft a unified field theory encompassing both individual psychology and sociocultural reality in each one’s fullness and depth, a project for which this book serves as a sort of prolegomenon. I also wish, having mentioned Devereux, that people would read his neglected book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967), in which he argues (in part) that many attempts to introduce scientifically objective methods into the study of human life and eliminate observer bias in fact represent so many defensive maneuvers against the anxiety that would otherwise be aroused in observers by too close involvement with the subject matter of their studies—a caveat that needs to be heeded in every generation and that Zwerman’s paper illustrates to such devastating effect.