PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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me that the discussion has veered between the analysis of a culture
allegedly in disintegration or severe change and an intact body of
psychoanalytic knowredge or wisdom which somehow fails to make
contact with that culture. I wonder whether these are the correct
terms of discussion. It seems to me that, in their very different ways,
both Steve Marcus and Bob Lifton came closer to some of the
difficulties that we face.
In the social sciences-it's a fact that after all these years of
contact, interpenetration, discussion of the integration of the social
sciences with psychoanalysis, most of the reception or utilization of
psychoanalysis has been extremely shallow.
It
consists mostly of
programmatic or very general statements, occasionally certain kinds
of detailed observations which are available to anybody.
There has been very little utilization of the real core or theoreti–
cal structure of psychoanal ysis in the analysis of social and historical
phenomena. Dr. Person just mentioned some of the newer work, or
newer preoccupations of the analysts. It would be very very difficult
to find work on narcissism, the self, object relations theory or ego
adaptation in the work of social scientists. And this poses, it seems to
me, an interesting kind of theoretical and cultural problem. Namely,
that the difficulty with the response of the social sciences to analysis
probably has to do with the fact that in its origins analysis was both
critical and historical; not a pure science but a critical and historical
science with a broader political end in view, which was certainly
Freud's end, namely the opening up of the possibility of a different
kind of human nature and a different kind of society. This end is not
shared by those who seek to use analysis as a closed system.
And, there are even two kinds of psycho-history: a kind of
psycho-history that seeks to apply analysis as a fixed system to
invariant or historical phenomena, and the kind of psycho-history
done by another group, which some of us like to think we participate
in, which is a study of the history of the psyche, which was in fact
Freud's original intention, as much as he used the language of
laboratory science or Darwinian theory.
It seems to me therefore that there is no sense in looking at these
phenomena from the viewpoint of the recent past. The phrase
" bourgeois society'" is not a political phrase but a historical phrase
and the correct way to begin the new discussion of the relevance of
psychoanalysis is, in fact, an effort to situate ourselves again histori–
cally, just as Freud was very well able to situate himself historically
in his own period.
