Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology

This paper is an advocacy for the employment of psychoanalytical concepts within sociological theorizing about the individual. Through an exposition of Freud's views on the development of intra-psychic structure and a critique of Parsons' reduction of psychoanalysis to a branch of learning theory, I attempt to show that the sociological approach to the individual is implicitly behavioural and imprisoned in a series of assumptions which, among other things, treats subjectivity as epiphenomenal and identity as an unmediated reflection of some external reality. In contrast, psychoanalysis presents to us a picture of the individual as flawed and ambivalent in his relation to society, formed by but at odds with the demands of culture. In particular, the psychoanalytic concept of identification reveals that the acquisition of identity is a hird-won achievement marked by the renunciation of lost and forbidden objects. I argue, following Freud and Lacan, that the ego, far from being an agency of reason, somehow directly 'plugged into' reality, constitutes itself in the fantasied image of another and that the quality of this identification crucially affects the way the world is experienced and believed by the individual. This argument is elaborated through a discussion of Peter Berger's remarks on the social causes of identity crisis which, when set against the work of object-relations theorists on those suffering from disturbances of identity such as, for example, schizoid personalities, are shown to be both superficial and misleading. I conclude the paper by arguing that while psychoanalysis can enhance our understanding of the way in which the individual is formed by and through culture it also cautions us against making simple generalizations about the impact of culture upon the person, showing that the individual never submits himself unequivocally to its demands and interdicts

Criminology · Epistemology · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociological theory · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology

• Social Theory of International Politics

  Open Access•Alexander Wendt•Social Theory of International…•1999

  Add to list

• Ideology and Utopia in South Africa

  Peter Du Preez, Peter Collins•Politikon•1985

  Add to list