Abstract
As I read Nancy Chodorow’s fascinating The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, I reflected on the “unhappy divorce of sociology and psychoanalysis” she explored in a co-edited volume of this name (Chancer and Andrews 2014). For one thing, I mused about career trajectories: psychoanalytically trained sociologists may find themselves constrained about exercising Freudian-influenced convictions without intellectual role conflict. Over the discipline’s history, Talcott Parsons tended to split his functionalist-influenced sociological theorizing from his psychoanalytic background such that the latter hardly revolutionized the field nor was thoroughly incorporated into it. Jessica Benjamin, author of the now-classic feminist and Frankfurt School-influenced The Bonds of Love (1988), began working as a psychoanalyst after finishing her dissertation at New York University’s sociology department in the 1980s. Other sociology professors—among them, Patricia Clough and Catherine Silver—turned, like Chodorow, to psychoanalytic practice post-retirement while continuing to contribute to social theories overall.
Indeed, Chodorow, whose long tenure in sociology classrooms renders her testimony noteworthy, posits that one can be a feminist and psychoanalyst at the same time—but not so easily a psychoanalyst and sociologist. Why, or, more aptly, why not? Another reflection evoked by this new work involves one major explanation for this reported incompatibility: individualism. Perhaps more than anything else I have read, Chodorow’s book brilliantly details how psychoanalysis is a theory and method par excellence for undertaking the study of individuals. Without persons, agents, meaning-making subjects, psychoanalysis would itself make no sense. As she writes, with passion and eloquence: Psychoanalysis, alone among all modes of therapy and thought, is based on a premise and valorization of internal life . . . . Psychoanalysis is the only field to have developed a method for the investigation, deepening, and expansion of their internal individuality. Unless you have spent a good part of your life in the academy—in the world of social science, where all psychic life is thought to be created in and through the social, or in the humanities, where there is often not even a self, but only a subject created discursively through power—you may take for granted psychoanalytic understandings of inner life. (p. 211, in the chapter “Beyond the Dyad”)
For Chodorow, this is a wondrous advantage of the psychoanalytic method, potentially enabling a person’s sense of unique agency to be more fully brought to life after some of unconsciousness’ often debilitating contents enter conscious awareness. Analysis can be a catalyst for relieving inner deadness, of coming to feel more fully alive. Moreover, psychoanalyses of myriad kinds, united by this focus on individuals, can free fantasies and fears, allowing projections, defenses, and introjections to be perceived that might otherwise stifle a person in their interactions and expressions of feelings. It is a viewpoint that Chodorow also explored in her last major book, The Power of Feelings (1999).
On the other hand—and equally relevant to this “why/why not?” query—individualism is as American an inclination as apple pie. It smacks, from de Tocqueville onward, of a long-standing distance from collective commitments, an isolating one-sidedness operating not in conjunction with but against the sway of distinctively social understandings. Social scientists, let alone policy-makers, have had virtually no choice but to grapple with this one-dimensional cult of individualism as it has affected American life past and present. To wit: a major gratification of teaching undergraduate sociology classes in the United States, for apprenticed adjuncts as well as more seasoned professors, is to have students no longer blame “the individual” for class inequalities, the effects of racism and sexism, nor the unbridled excesses of neoliberal capitalism so structural in etiology. It can feel like a victory to have students get Durkheim’s meaning in The Rules of Sociological Method about social facts existing “supra,” above and before the individual and definitely not of individuals’ making. It has been greatly satisfying for American sociology professors to expose the invidious (over)individualism that supposedly separates the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, or to have light bulbs go on in students’ heads when realizing that no matter how much given individuals try to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” you can’t make it any one person’s doing that there are not enough jobs or educational spots at elite institutions to go around.
Come on, then—the liberating potential of focusing on individuals? This can appear to have little to do with sociology except to make psychologism—already popularized in “how-to” books and the selection of career goals and majors—even more ingrained in our cultural mindset. Individualism, therefore, has long appeared anathema to the sociological imagination as it has unfolded in America; it can be a dirty word, capable even of stigmatizing a sociologist who dares to utter it. But however historically explicable, another association Chodorow’s work here evokes entails the consequences of sociologists’ dismissing psychoanalytic perspectives altogether. For Chodorow’s book investigates whether American sociology has veered reactively so far from “the individual” in favor of structural and cultural determinations as to paradoxically limit and flatten its explanatory powers.
The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye raises the specter of an intellectual cost to any one-sidedness—whether individuals without structure, or structures without individuals—that insufficiently accounts for the actual multi-dimensionality, and intricately mediated complexities, of the human condition. Take commonsensical examples abundant in everyday life. Without ample attention to external influences and internal variability—both, not either/or—how can we explain why one person is frighteningly sexist while, assuming masculine socialization in the same family or college dorm, a relative or fraternity brother is not? Then too, hypothetically: why did individual X commit embezzlement or murder whereas individual Y did not even though both were living in the same upper-class neighborhood and working in the same white-collar firm? Or, in another realm, does focusing only on social factors sufficiently illuminate the appeal of a politician like Donald Trump, whose actions seem both representative of typical Republican views and inexplicable without also accounting for individually distinctive psychic traits that could illuminate that appeal for some and not others?
But Chodorow’s The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye suggests more than only a habit of sociological oversimplification: she contends further that, in any case, the American psychoanalytic tradition has been less individualistic than usually recognized. According to Chodorow, U.S. psychoanalytic theories, while obviously centered on individuals, have also been socially oriented. This may be the book’s most original contribution, an argument Chodorow combines—at the same time—with urging psychoanalysts themselves to more deeply incorporate social factors in their clinical work as these interact with and impinge upon individual psyches. By my count, Chodorow elaborates on this mutual imbrication in at least four ways, each worth summarizing before turning to my own larger point in this essay: even if lately marginalized within sociology, psychosocial analysis may be having a contemporary resurgence.
Indeed, Chodorow’s advocacy of combining psychoanalytic and social scientific insights can be taken as part and parcel of a wider intellectual trend, arguably reminiscent theoretically as well as historically of earlier Frankfurt School efforts. As when fascism was on the rise, so current crises—whether the COVID-19 pandemic, racialized and sexist/heterosexist murders, devastating economic downturns, or the rise of populist authoritarian regimes around the world—again bespeak the inadequacy of one-dimensionally rationalistic frameworks. Recent events cry out for attention to the multidimensionality of people’s actions and reactions, as much emotionally as rationally motivated and consciously as well as unconsciously tinged. Both, not either/or—as feminist theorists have long understood and advocated for remembering.
First, then: Chodorow endeavors to demonstrate mutual imbrication by pointing to a distinctively American psychoanalytic heritage that developed from theories of “intersubjective ego psychology” in the work of more- and less-known U.S. psychoanalysts. Specifically, she discusses the work of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald while also reflecting on other recognizable figures in social psychology and psychoanalytic history like Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney. While Sullivan is often cited appreciatively by symbolic interactionists for his stress on language and relationality, Horney is referenced by gender scholars for having criticized patriarchal presumptions within the Freudian tradition.
Chodorow elaborates on Erikson’s and Loewald’s work in interesting detail. She foregrounds Erikson’s interest in culture, accentuating his belief that “each person is born into and lives within a social-cultural-interpersonal field.” As she shows, Erikson was deeply concerned with issues of “identity, especially with the particulars of racial-ethnic-cultural identities, spoiled and outcast identity” that are typically the province of sociologists (p. 13). Likewise, Chodorow revisits the less recognized (at least to sociologists) work of Loewald. In a long section devoted to Loewald’s ideas, she emphasizes his writings about the back and forth development of an individual “ego” from the original undifferentiated “unity of caretaker and child.” Chodorow takes issue with the reputation of American ego psychology as concerned solely with the “I,” suggesting that Loewaldian theory was at once relational and ego-oriented. Vis-à-vis Loewald, Chodorow posits, American ego psychology has long been as much intersubjectively attuned as concerned solely with an individual. As a result, she envisions the American independent tradition as consonant with rather than antithetical to Frankfurt School and object relations theories that are indubitably socially, and sociologically, germane.
Chodorow also devotes short chapters to the relatively obscure figures of James McLaughlin and Warren Poland, interpreting the former’s conviction about “listening to” rather than “listening for” as prototypically and pragmatically American. Rather than analysts rigidly expecting and waiting for evidence of (for instance) an Oedipal or Electra complex to emerge, McLaughlin interpreted the psychoanalytic process as one within which a patient’s own thoughts and impressions are primary and prioritized. In both McLaughlin’s and Poland’s practices, an analyst’s own psychic reactions to a patient—that is, counter-transferences—are carefully (and, in McLaughlin’s case, extensively) attended to, but not so much as to displace the patient as the central figure in the room.
Second, Chodorow demonstrates an already existing imbrication between the social and the psychic by positing that not only the American psychoanalytic tradition but Freud himself often incorporated considerations of historical and social context into his thinking. She uses late-career examples, riffing interestingly on a lecture of Freud’s—”The Question of a Weltanschauung,” penned after Civilization and Its Discontents (1933; 1930)—wherein Freud took great pains to differentiate the “scientific” attitude (nonjudgmental and evidence-based) from religious viewpoints (steeped in tradition and moralism). As Chodorow depicts, Freud was greatly interested in “culture-society-psyche” linkages (p. 58), envisioning “applied” psychoanalytic knowledge as necessary to comprehend large-scale historical events occurring around him by the early 1920s, including World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Politically, Chodorow comments, Freud was, “like many Jewish Viennese analysts, a Social Democrat” for whom “The strength of Marxism clearly lies . . . in its sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical, and artistic attitudes” (pp. 56–57).
Yet Freud was also critical of Marxism for having only a “partial understanding of human motivation” that kept it, by virtue of insufficiently connecting cultures and psyches, from becoming a genuine social science. Indeed, it was only with the theories of the Frankfurt School (during the time of the rise of fascism) that Marxists showed deep interest in individual subjectivities—a problem that Freud identified earlier—that is, prior to the rise of Stalinism and German fascism in the late 1920s and 1930s. But if Freud believed in a Weltanschauung that was interdisciplinary and psychosocially attuned, Chodorow frets about whether the majority of analysts who followed across divergent psychoanalytic traditions took to heart this broadly intellectual, social scientific orientation. As she writes, now critical of one-dimensionally psychoanalytic as much as one-dimensionally sociological tendencies, Is there a way that psychoanalysis today is (to draw a metaphor from Civilization and its Discontents) only a “shrunken residue” of Freud’s original “more inclusive—indeed, all-embracing” vision? Have we given up on the scientific weltanschauung on which Freud grounds psychoanalysis, a weltanschauung that claims a substantive and inextricable link between psychology pure and applied—sociology, politics, anthropology, religion, the history of culture, epistemology? . . . I am thinking about how few contemporary case histories pay attention theoretically or empirically to culture as a constitutive force drawn on by the patient in fantasy and conflict, or to society as a substantive ingredient in mental life . . . . Our scientific methodology—our weltanschauung—has become almost behaviorist in its required focus on details of process in a particular session and in the analyst’s mind, as if the only possible empirical data are the immediate who-said-what-to-whom . . . . The “real external world,” that is, the social and the cultural, and the links between psychoanalysis and the social, have gone missing, not only in our clinical work and case presentations, but in our theories, our interests, and our interdisciplinary curiosity. Our weltanschauung has moved toward religion and away from science. (pp. 58–59)
In addition to linkages already existing or in need of further development, Chodorow opens a third line of argumentation by turning to concrete issues: how do, or can, psychosocial perspectives potentially improve upon one-dimensionally rationalistic (and only sociological) analyses? While her book is much more theoretical than applied, Chodorow takes collective violence as a case in point, returning to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) as an early text proffering psychosocial insight. Even while deeply shot through with Freud’s own emotional dismay at World War I’s horrific death toll, and while positing aggression as innate, Civilization nonetheless treated society as playing a major role in whether collective angers become enacted outward (resulting in war and violence) or turned inward through guilt and sublimation (resulting in constructive cultural projects and achievements).
On the other hand, Chodorow is also critical of Freud for providing “no methodological guidance” about “when and under what conditions . . . violence erupts” (p. 31). In this respect, Freud’s work strikes her as insufficiently social-scientific, leading Chodorow to intellectually tap later psychoanalytic ideas—in particular, Erikson’s, but also those of Melanie Klein—for further illumination. In Chodorow’s view, Erikson took Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” in a more sociological direction to probe why, in specific times and places, people attach themselves to subcultural identities that become the “psychosocial” stuff of mass violent outbreaks. As Chodorow theorizes, people are on “Eriksonian territory” when envisioning identity as an ideological or cultural concept that consolidates and justifies genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and terrorism. We think of the Armenian genocide, the German Volk versus the Jews, Serbian versus Bosnian or Kosova, Jewish-Israeli versus Palestinian, Muslim and Hindu, Hutu and Tutsi, Shiite and Sunni. The list is endless, each pairing evoking horror and terror . . . . Yet it is useful to observe that ethnicity and religious affiliation here seem to operate both psychologically and culturally, as ego identity on a social scale, or the social equivalent of psychic selfhood. They seem to have the same deep roots and centrality to a sense of being recognized and being whole. Yet identity by itself does not explain collective violence: it only describes the collectivity in terms of which such violence operates. (p. 33)
For me, though, more thought-provoking yet was Chodorow tapping Melanie Klein’s work on splitting and projective identification to shed light on political divisions resulting in mass violence. On a psychoanalytic level, the Kleinian idea of splitting can be seen as corresponding, on a sociological one, to “them versus us” formulations that are well worn and familiar to many social scientists studying race or ethnicity, criminology, stratification, or other social problems. “Splitting” can be defined in psychoanalytic terms as an unconscious process originating in childhood whereby good and bad aspects of an object cannot be grasped simultaneously. Rather, projection takes place in which the “other” is completely “bad” (or “good”) whereas “I,” by contrast, am entirely “good” (or “bad”). Importantly, splitting is hardly confined to early caretakers or parents but can become an ongoing psychosocial pattern that also affects later relationships with peers or romantic partners or members of “other” genders, racial and ethnic groups, or nations. Splitting (everything is “wonderful” or “terrible,” “good” or “evil”) can also be defined and grasped vis-à-vis its opposite—that is, perceptions of ambivalences, complexities, gradations, nuances. For how likely is it that any of us are all good or all bad? Such complicated internalized recognitions are rendered unconscious and seemingly irrelevant vis-à-vis splitting and the binaries with which it correlates.
Now, though, an intellectual “payoff” emerges from using a psychosocial rather than an only sociological “them versus us” perspective. Psychosocial analyses by definition incorporate how neither individual nor social polarizations—that is, splitting(s)—happen merely quietly and cognitively but also (and very significantly) viscerally as well, on deeply emotional planes, with varying levels of passions and intensities. There may be unconsciously pleasurable aspects, momentary or more sustained, to “acted out” hostilities that psychosocial analyses are distinctive for helping—via conscious awareness and reflexivity—to identify and potentially redirect. Chodorow’s discussion of Klein left me free-associating as to whether, for example, our recent Trumpian-influenced era has indeed been one wherein splitting at psychosocial levels has become habitual and all too commonplace, with the world too often becoming characterized (and perceived?) as filled with “wonderful” or “terrible” people and events, (good) Republicans or (bad) Democrats, “bad” or “good” countries, “good” citizens versus “bad” illegal immigrants, “great” citizens or “radicalized” protesters. And it is a problem that can (and has) affected left-wing divisions and “splits” as well.
Binary simplifications are hardly limited to our present time and place but, wherever they occur, call out for simultaneously conceptual and emotional exploration. Moreover, without psychosocial awareness of these dynamics’ multidimensional character, other emotions that splitting may cover over—say, feelings of shame and humiliation, and of (social) fears and insecurities—remain hidden beneath the surface while more consciously experienced “them versus us” hostilities are acted out. In Klein’s terms, splitting fades with incorporation of the “depressive position,” a psychosocial idea that refers to growing acceptance of doubt as an individual realizes and accepts that in fact “you are not all bad, nor am I all good.” But incorporating the depressive position would likely require a society to embrace political and cultural messages that dilute rather than reinforce “split” binaries and that render more complex, rather than less, how groups as well as individuals conceive of themselves.
A fourth and likewise “applied” example that Chodorow provides of individual and collective imbrication is intergenerational transmission, discussed in a lovely and again highly evocative chapter called “Born into a World at War.” Here, Chodorow draws on in-depth interviews of people born during World War II—a cohort in which Chodorow places herself with an admirable lack of hesitation (theoretical or personal) about sharing her own experiences. In a way reminiscent of but also different from Erich Fromm’s earlier Frankfurt School interest in “social character” (i.e., personality types common to groups even across their individual differences), Chodorow discusses what might be called “historical character” formations in specific times and places. She emphasizes the culturally patterned, and not only individually idiosyncratic, dimensions of specific eras. For children born during World War II, issues of abandonment by fathers became prototypical as did complicated feelings toward mothers who attempted to compensate. These experiences bequeathed generational patterns and “psychosocial” effects later on even as, simultaneously, biographically unique differences between individuals still pertained.
And, again, I caught my mind wandering from the particular to the general(izable) of Chodorow’s examples—here, from the cohort born in World War II to cohorts whose lives are unfolding now. For what does it currently mean, psychosocially and in terms of intergenerational transmission, for children to have been born into a “world at war” with the COVID-19 pandemic—as a group, in nations, in different races and classes disproportionately burdened by the effects of co-interacting social inequalities? Long-term generational patterns may eventually emerge, too, in children whose parents experienced career/family/job conflicts and anxieties as these became (and become) exacerbated during or, eventually and hopefully, “after” the time of COVID-19. Likewise, college students of this generation may have patterned after-reactions to a traumatic and depressing time that pulled them from the relative security of shared experiences into much greater social isolation during 2020 and 2021.
When all is said and done, and on the basis of the combined effects of her interesting chapters and arguments, Chodorow’s new book is impressive for its deep and persuasive dual arguments: first, to sociologists, in advocating and legitimizing the need to accord far greater attention and study to individuals and inner life; and second, to psychoanalysts, in advocating for diverse practitioners to accord far greater attention and study to societal, cultural, and historical processes and their effects. Moreover, Chodorow’s book points us beyond where George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionist perspectives left off when calling for “putting ourselves in the minds of the other.” Since The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye is unabashedly and multi-dimensionally psychosocial (i.e., committed to exploring unconscious as well as conscious processes and defenses, and of course emotions as well as rationality), Chodorow’s work encourages social researchers to try to put themselves/ourselves not only in the minds but also in the feelings of “the other.” It calls for probing the defenses of individuals and groups psychodynamically as they/we feel shame, humiliation, desire, rage, envy, jealousy, loneliness, lack of recognition, and more—and, of course, not always with explicit awareness. No wonder Chodorow writes approvingly of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), a work wherein Hochschild attempted to shed greater light on world views, feelings, and beliefs of people with more conservative viewpoints.
Chodorow’s prose in places may be technical for the lay person (or sociologist) relatively unfamiliar with psychoanalytic terms and concepts. Others may find her discussions of Freud controversial in not stressing more critically the coexistence of “multiple Freuds.” There is the Freud who was often social-scientifically brilliant and potentially liberatory of individuals’ feelings, sexual and non-sexual; but there is also the quasi-literary Freud, who sometimes sounds quite prescriptive and not particularly self-reflexive (for instance, Erich Fromm brilliantly reinterpreted Freud’s arguably sexist, and very much not “listening to,” clinical work in the famous case of Dora). But these are small points within the overall context of Chodorow’s major and very smart contributions in The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye that leave one wondering: now what? Where do we go from here?
While Chodorow’s book is (again) mostly theoretical, it may nevertheless inspire scholars to return to some of the Frankfurt School’s key and not fully worked out questions, but now in contemporary contexts. Among many crucial queries that cry out for renewed psychosocial examination: why do people continue to enact stubborn biases through unfortunately repeating cycles of dominance and subordination? Why do the appeals of authoritarian politics continue to resonate, and what are the emotional and psychosocial appeals, to individuals and groups, of authoritarian dynamics in the first place? Why are capitalists (as individuals and groups, since both levels coexist) unable to bear living on far less money than they require even to remain tremendously wealthy? Or why, again quite recently, did “mask rage” occur during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, an “exceptionally American” reaction to a simple public health precaution that seemed—as it was happening—truly impossible to understand without simultaneously psychic and social, emotionally attuned as well as rationally cognizant, levels of analysis?
Much more careful empirical research is needed, especially if psychosocial methods and theories are to become more institutionalized within the American academy and the discipline of sociology—a possibility that Chodorow’s book may help, along with other noteworthy and important contributions, to turn into an intellectual agenda. For I wish to conclude by reemphasizing that Chodorow’s new book is not isolated but is part of a larger trend. Take, for example, Sasha Roseneil and other sociologically trained scholars in the United Kingdom who have organized the beginnings of psychosocial departments in that country. A new Journal of Psychosocial Studies was recently launched by Bristol University; and on the day before the 2020 American Sociological Association conference, a mini-conference took place on “The Psychosocial Turn.” Consequently, for its own contribution as well as in creative tandem with theoretical and empirical work happening elsewhere, I am extremely grateful to Chodorow for offering an intellectually tantalizing way forward in The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, and for incorporating feminist and Frankfurt School perspectives while calling for a next generation of political and intellectual psychosocial work that will be uniquely our—individual and collective—own.