Freud

Political and Social Thought

Paul Roazen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138523852
• eBook ISBN: 9781351310789
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sigmund Freud had broad ambitions about what psychoanalysis could add to human thought. But Freutfs own writings have rarely been assessed within the perspective of political philosophy. Political theorists will find in the school Freud established a rich storehouse of ideas. For us to link up with what Freud was saying means to join in the great conversation about what the ends of the just society should be, as well as what a fully developed person might be like. Written more than twenty years ago, the central interpretive theses found in Freud: Political and Social Thought still ring true.

In his new introduction to this classic text, Paul Roazen contends that today, from the point of view of intellectual history, Freud looms as a subject in an even larger way than he did back in the 1960s. His thinking has impinged, for good or ill, on how we think about character and the nature of human impulses. Privacy itself has been affected, so much so that political candidates now feel free to use intimate material from private life for manipulative public purposes. Yet after all this time political scientists remain reluctant to entertain the need to explore the psychological dimension of all political events.

Without reducing politics to psychoanalysis, or inflating psychological categories to embrace all of politics, Roazen provides an introductory look at the field of psychoanalysis. By bringing together the different disciplines of psychology and politics he breaks through parochialism. Roazen is no advocate for psychoanalysis, but believes that analysts have as much to learn from social science as the other way around. This volume is proof that at its best political theory has to be inherently interdisciplinary. As such, this volume will be of interest to intellectual historians, psychoanalysts, and political theorists.

Chapter I

Psychoanalysis and the Study of Politics

The Discipline

If one were to construct a spectrum of the social sciences on the basis of the attention that each discipline has paid to a psychoanalytic view of personality factors, the range would run from economics, where the impact of Freud would be close to zero, to cultural anthropology, where psychoanalysis has made its most notable contribution. Political science would fall toward the middle of the spectrum, but probably rather nearer to economics than to cultural anthropology. Although anthropology is not now moving in the direction of culture and personality, the thoroughgoing penetration of psychoanalytic concepts in the past has left a residue of sophistication in these matters which is unsurpassed within the social sciences.

Freud himself made the initial psychoanalytic contributions to anthropology, but they were scarcely of a kind to encourage anthropologists to be receptive to the rest of his ideas. Freud’s anthropological views ran directly counter to the mainstream of the profession as it has developed in this century. For example, Freud equated the customs of living nonliterate peoples with the early ancestors of man. He also spoke of the “primal horde” as if it were a historical fact, being unwilling to claim merely that it was a psychological truth. To make matters worse, Freud tenaciously held to the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics; the guilt over the slaying of the primal father was transmitted, Freud held, genetically. The whole tone of Freud’s anthropological speculations was bound to annoy any anthropologist; he repeatedly spoke of nonliterate cultures as “primitive” and “child-like,” phrases bound to offend those who had fought to emancipate anthropology from nineteenth-century ethnocentrism. Finally, Freud’s whole argument was grounded on secondary sources. Of course at the time Freud wrote Totem and Taboo (1912–13) there was hardly a better authority than Frazer, but as the commitment of anthropologists to field research became settled, Freud’s arguments seemed invalid on methodological grounds alone.

Nor was Freud particularly adaptable in the anthropological positions that he adopted; despite the criticism that was levelled at Totem and Taboo, Freud reiterated his theses to the end of his life. It is remarkable that despite the bad footing on which anthropology and psychoanalysis began, the relationship has developed to an extent unsurpassed in any other field.¹ Now that the intellectual battles are over, and much of the protests of the anthropologically oriented revisionists like Clara Thompson and Karen Horney have been accepted, it is possible to view the relationship of anthropology to psychoanalysis in historical perspective.

Anthropologists, in contrast to political scientists, were scarcely tempted to move directly from Freud’s own applications to the discipline in question. “Those aspects [of Freud’s work] which they find most useful are not the specifically anthropogical ones but rather those dealing with individual development.”² Weston La Barre has maintained that for understanding religion in nonliterate societies, “no anthropologist is competent to study such subjects unless he is also psychoanalytically sophisticated.”³ Further, “most modern anthropologists are now aware of the projective significance of folklore and mythology.”⁴

One major explanation for the anthropological use of analytic theories can surely be found in the intimate nature of the fieldworker’s involvement with his subjects of observation. As Clyde Kluckhohn has pointed out, both psychiatrists and anthropologists “operate with procedures that are essentially ‘clinical.’ ”⁵ Anthropologists during their field work are confronted with a range of apparently bizarre material which has required the use of an apparently bizarre theory, psychoanalysis, to explain it. In field research, moreover, one inevitably makes use of one’s own personality. Since what the fieldworker finds out is very much influenced by the limitations of his own personality, he becomes aware that his personality constitutes a valuable research instrument. It therefore becomes harder for him not to be aware of the importance of the variable of personality theory in general.

Within political science, no strong tradition of field work has ever developed. With the recent interest in problems of developing nations, more people than before are becoming involved in field work. But even here, the researchers usually spend considerably less time in the field, study many more societies, and in general become much less involved in the material than would be expected among anthropologists. In contrast to anthropology, there is a characteristic distance about much of the research in political science. There are many research projects in which the head of the project sends out graduate students to do interviewing for him. People analyze American state election returns without being intimately acquainted with the states in question. And social survey work relies on statistics, keeping at a distance from the living material. Political scientists like to deal with reality in large aggregates, rather than on a face-to-face basis. Samuel Lubell’s work on American politics would be the exception that proves the rule.

To some extent of course this situation is inevitable. The student of Russian politics cannot expect to be able to penetrate into the proceedings of the inner circles of the Soviet Communist Party. Yet the model of Kremlinology has become too central to political science. It seems as if by maintaining aloofness from one’s material one hopes in a magical way to control political reality. In this connection, it is well to remember how on a presidential election eve, and in forecasting, newscasters and the rest of us “give” state X to candidate Y. All of us share, in some measure at least, this particular attraction to the study of politics.

For the anthropologist, on the other hand, his involvement in field work helps to objectify parts of his own personality, revealing buried layers of his self. The very fact that he is confronted with human material in an alien culture makes it easier for him to reach self-awareness; within his native culture his own personality would be threatened by the same insights. Research in an alien culture provides the fieldworker with enough emotional detachment to overcome a good deal of his resistance to psychoanalytic theories, combined with sufficiently intimate contact with primary human emotions.

A decisive factor in the relationship of psychoanalysis and anthropology was the historical accident that Freud appeared on the scene after the thesis of cultural relativity had begun to wear thin. “Anthropologists now see that we have been so successful in establishing the relativity of cultures as to risk throwing out the baby with the bath: the universal similarities of all mankind. Understandably, then, there is now a strong movement back to the search for essential human nature.”⁶ Margaret Mead and others have begun to look for the universals underlying all cultures. Anthropologists have a tradition of challenging us “to think more deeply about what is specifically human about human society.”⁷ Hence there has been a sound foundation for a confluence between anthropology and psychoanalysis.

All human infants, regardless of culture, know the psychological experience of helplessness and dependency. Situations making for competition for the affection of one or both parents, for sibling rivalry, can be to some extent channeled this way or that way by a culture but they cannot be eliminated, given the universality of family life.⁸

By this point we can see that anthropologists have been preoccupied with problems quite traditional in the history of political theory. The interest in cultural uniformities, the quest for that which is humanly universal, links up with the whole tradition of natural law and natural rights. If natural law thinking has survived the well-known logical onslaughts upon it, whether by Hume or Bentham,⁹ surely in part this has been because the natural law advocates have been addressing themselves to an enduring perplexity: what are those basic human needs which underlie any culture, and under what circumstances has man been intolerably distorted from his deepest aspirations ? “Our political notions,” Sir Isaiah Berlin has written, “are part of our conception of what it is to be human.… ”¹ This then was the “kernel of truth in the old a priori Natural Law doctrines.”²

One difficulty with this tendency within the tradition of natural law, dating at least as far back as Ulpian, was an excessively rationalistic approach. Grotius, for example, ticked off the minimal qualities of a human being, the inalienable properties of a man. While human needs were implicit in the concept of natural rights, still natural law “notions about human nature were lifeless and abstract.”³ The place of the individual has been prominent within political thought, especially within the liberal tradition; generally, however, thinkers such as Locke and Mill have discussed a theory of education for children, and have then gone on to discuss adult life as if the child did not still persist in all of us.

With the growth of cultural anthropology and psychoanalytic theory, our understanding of human uniformities has been broadened by cultural space and deepened by psychological understanding. Margaret Mead, for example, considers as universal the existence of a category of murder, incest rules, and private property.⁴ Clyde Kluckhohn was in fairly close agreement:

Every culture has a concept of murder, distinguishing this from execution, killing in war, and other “justifiable homicides.” The notions of incest and other regulations upon sexual behavior, of prohibitions upon untruth under defined circumstances, of restitution and reciprocity, of mutual obligations between parents and children—these and many other moral concepts are altogether universal.⁵

Does this sound so very different from many of the natural law thinkers of old ? Their moral maxims were in part expressions of their sense of the existence of basic human needs.

There is a danger of course in this universalistic quest, one which has beset the natural law tradition for centuries. It is logically improper to deduce moral precepts from uniform customs; a moral ought cannot be logically entailed by a factual is. The use of natural law frequently invited confusion of the ought and the is, offering the “mental luxury of certainty, of feeling that what ought to be must be.…”⁶ It is possible, though, to be clear about the logical status of one’s principles, and yet retain the Enlightenment interest in accepting human urges and shaping them to their finest expression.

These are, of course, old chestnuts; but on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface to the 1986 Edition
• Preface to the Original Edition
• Introduction: Human Nature in Politics
• Chapter I Psychoanalysis and the Study of Politics
• Chapter II The Significance of a Theory
• Chapter III Religion: Realism and Utopianism
• Chapter IV Politics: Social Controls
• Chapter V Civilization: Tragedy and Possibility
• Epilogue: Woodrow Wilson
• Index