Social Amnesia

A Critique of Contemporary Psychology

Russell Jacoby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138532663
• eBook ISBN: 9781351306423
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades.In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain - an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.

Notes

Introduction

1. William L. Langer’s essay was given as a presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1957 and subsequently published in the American Historical Review under the title, “The Next Assignment.” Preserved Smith’s study, “Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psychoanalysis,” appeared in the American Journal of Psychology (July 1913), pp. 360-77.

2. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York, 1958), p. 28.

3. What Norman O. Brown says in connection with this observation is directly relevant to the preceding discussion about the uses of psychoanalysis for historians. Noting that Freud “postulated a far-reaching but mysterious connection between the human body and human character and ideology” but found it difficult to specify the exact nature of the connection, Brown goes on to observe that the neo-Freudians, on the other hand, “opened the door to historical considerations,” at the expense, however, of everything that was original and penetrating in psychoanalytic theory. “They thus return to what are essentially pre-Freudian categories of man and history, decorated with unessential (and confusing) psychologists patter.”

Brown continues: “At the abstract theoretical level, psychoanalytical paradox and historical common sense are so far apart that one can only despair of ever unifying them. It therefore seems inevitable that progress will be made, if at all, by concrete empirical investigation. And since in general psychoanalytical considerations grope so far beneath the surface that they can easily be dismissed as arbitrary constructions not based on facts, such concrete empirical investigations must take as their point of departure, not psychoanalytical imputations as to what may (or may not) be going on in the Unconscious, but historical fact”—such as the fact of Luther’s revelation on the privy.

“In my profession,” Erikson writes, “one learns to listen to exactly what people are saying” (Young Man Luther, p. 64). This may be the most important thing historians can learn from psychoanalysis—not that ideas are rooted in a “pathological feeling of guilt.”

4. It is not only those trained as historians, of course, who take what purports to be a historical approach to Freud. The neo-Freudian strategy from the beginning was to show that “Freud was in many respects limited by the thinking of his time, as even a genius must be” (Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development [New York, 1950], p. 132). More recently such arguments have been taken up by feminists; see, for example, Ronald V. Sampson, The Psychology of Power (New York, 1966), pp. 45 ff.; Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (New York, 1970), etc. Even when historians have had no interest in the polemical issues that thus almost inevitably surround the historicization of Freud, their own bias as historians leads them to take such an approach. See, for example, H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958), p. 126: “However much Freud’s thought strove to be universal in its range, it was obviously bound by its creator’s own mental endowment and early experience.” Recently Carl Schorske has undertaken a historical and biographical interpretation of Freud’s concepts (American Historical Review, 1973). In what follows I am concerned with “historical” interpretations of psychoanalysis in general, not merely with the work of historians.

As Jacoby shows, Freud himself was well aware of the way in which these interpretations—later presented as a dazzling new way of approaching the subject—were used to discredit his work. “This theory,” he wrote in The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement—the theory, that is, that psychoanalysis was rooted in Viennese culture—“always seems to me quite exceptionally stupid.”

5. Incidentally, the historicization of Freud ironically obscures precisely what is historical in his thought. “Psychoanalysis is the most radically historical psychology: this is its basic challenge to all other psychologies, and it is only in terms of this challenge that historians can finally evaluate its usefulness to them. In liberating themselves from grossly nonhistorical principles of explanation—gods and demons, dialectical materialisms and idealisms, etc.—historians have come to see their task as that of understanding the interactions between the human agents of history with their environment. But this has not safeguarded them from neglecting their main task: to incorporate those human agents themselves fully into history. Freud made the most radical effort to explain the existence of these agents—‘mind,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ ‘instincts,’ the ‘individual,’ the ‘self,’ ‘human nature’ itself—in exclusively historical terms. The alternative to an historical psychology must be at some point simply to postulate the existence of something standard, normal and even normative that ‘behaves’ in history, and to do this, simply to postulate it, is to surrender the historical method” (Donald Meyer, review of Erikson’s Young Man Luther, in History and Theory, I, 3, p. 294).

6. To be sure, the origins of the “revolt against positivism” go back to the late nineteenth century. Jacoby’s formulation of the issues, however, seems to me more useful than that of Hughes (above, note 4), who overlooks the importance of the revival of dialectical traditions as an element in the revolt against positivism and who, on the other hand, exaggerates the importance of irrationalism as a pervasive feature of the cultural milieu at the end of the nineteenth century. Eager to show that thought is rooted in the Zeitgeist, Hughes’s treatment is open to the objection that the best thought of any age attempts precisely to transcend the cultural milieu.

7. Theories of American exceptionalism had certain tactical advantages, to be sure, when it was a matter of resisting dogmatic demands for the Bolshevization of the American socialist movement—themselves based on a refusal to recognize that the revolutionary wave had receded, perhaps for good. Thus the Debsian socialists were able to argue (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) that purging the movement of social democrats on the grounds that the social democrats had supported the war made little sense in a country where the Socialist party had opposed the war. The Debsian socialists also understood that the revolutionary crisis had passed and that the strategy of Bolshevization, which was based on the assumption of its continuation, was based on a misreading of recent events (see James Weinstein, The Decline of American Socialism [New York, 1967], and my Agony of the American Left [New York, 1969]). But this understanding of the tactical and strategic implications of the passing of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• Preface
• I Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues
• II Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory
• III Conformist Psychology
• IV Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism
• V The Politics of Subjectivity
• VI Theory and Therapy I: Freud
• VII Theory and Therapy II: Laing and Cooper
• Notes
• Index