Sigmund Freud

Robert Bocock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134443130
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 2002. To those who see Freud solely as a psychologist and a psychotherapist it may be surprising to find him discussed as a major contributor to sociology. In this book, Robert Bocock argues that Freud's work, far from being exclusively concerned with individual personality seen in abstraction from the social and cultural environment, does have important implications for social theory and is not always given the serious sociological study it deserves. Bocock demonstrates Freud's central relevance to sociological discussions about gender, sexuality, the family, religion, ideology and symbolism, political authority, and language, and examines the considerable influence that Freud's theories have had upon sociological schools.

1
Introduction

Freud has had a mixed and uneven reception from sociologists. All sociology courses worthy of the name discuss Marx, Weber and Durkheim—even if the discussion is fairly minimal and the theories and methods developed by these three are later ignored or rejected in the degree programme. With Freud the situation is different. Some sociology courses have ignored Freud’s ideas about socialization and about culture and society, while others have given them considerable attention.

One reason for this difference is that Freud is seen as being primarily a psycholgist concerned with the individual, at least in his ‘best’ work. The more social aspect of Freud’s work is often seen as being intellectually weak both by psychologists and Marxists. Sociologists who accept these judgements of Freud will not see any good reason for considering him alongside the major sociologists who founded the subject.

On the other hand there have always been some sociologists, now more than earlier this century, who have not shared these judgements of Freud. Some have taken the view that Freud’s work is not only about individuals. For example, the concept of superego in the Freudian schema is one which links well with more sociological views of the way in which we learn and internalise values during socialization. It is not a purely individualistic concept. Freud wrote about the cultural superego too and linked this with his concept of the superego in the individual. There is in Freud, for instance, a theory of religion, its values, beliefs, symbols and rituals which is usually treated seriously by sociologists of religion. This is not to say that the theory is accepted as being true, but that it is not rejected out of hand because it is not a ‘proper’ sociological theory.

Such views, as will be seen in more detail later, have been developed by Talcott Parsons, a non-Marxist sociologist, and by more Marxist critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse. The influence of both these major schools of thought, the Parsonian and critical theory developed by the Frankfurt school, have had an influence on many sociologists who now do treat Freud as an important contributor to social theory and to sociology.

More recently, in the last decade or so, there has been a third major influence on the re-assessment of Freud as a major theorist in the social sciences, including sociology, which has come from France. This structuralist approach has fed into debates about gender, culture, and politics in many countries as the texts of Louis Althusser, a French social philosopher, and Jaques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, have been translated into English and Spanish particularly. Sociologists who have been involved in social and political movements concerned with sexual and gender issues, or with the study of contemporary culture, for example, have taken this work seriously and used it in their writing, research, and teaching.

Psychoanalysis has not been developed within universities, but has established its own organizational framework for the training of analysts and for publishing case material and theory. One consequence of this has been the relative isolation of analysts from other academic disciplines which might be relevant to their work. It has also insulated disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism from informal contacts with psychoanalysts which could otherwise take place within an academic setting.

The reasons for this isolationism come form the academic world, which has typically been suspicious of psychoanalysis, and from psychoanalysts who have maintained a rigid system for training and licensing analysts. Academics have suspected that psychoanalysis is not really a science, but that it is closer to a religion or a theology. One department of theology in the universities has seemed to be quite enough to most social scientists. Psychoanalytic organizational structures have seemed to confirm this view of the religious character of psychoanalysis, in that their doctrines seem to be maintained by the authority structure of the training process rather than by free, open-ended discussion of various propositions which would be found, so it is thought, within a truly scientific discipline. There has been then a mutual complicity in this separation of the academic world from the psychoanalytic world.

Recent developments suggest that there is some loosening of this rigorous separation of psychoanalysis from the academic setting. As has been suggested above there are some courses in sociology, as well as in other disciplines, in which Freudian theory is now discussed. The theory is discussed alongside others which is not at all the same as the way in which analysts are taught the theory for use in their therapeutic work. In the academic setting there are many competing theories, all of which can be discussed openly and assessed for their intellectual merits. In the psychoanalytic setting of training it is assumed by those outside the profession that there is little open-ended discussion of Freudian theory—how could there be when the analysts depend on maintaining the efficacy of the theory and therapeutic practice for their livelihood? However, there has recently been a spawning of therapeutic approaches alongside the one started by Freud and the first schismatic breakaway around Carl Jung. There are now numerous therapies and theoretical schools competing for attention from clients and would-be trainee therapists [2]. The old order of one dominant organization centred on Freud has now completely disappeared.

Within the academic setting, however, it is Freudian theory that is discussed, with little attention paid to other positions. The reasons for this are partly historical and partly intellectual. Historically the major writers who have contributed to the discussion about psychoanalytic theory and various academic disciplines (sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism) have used Freudian theory. The contemporary discussion takes off from these earlier writers. Intellectually Freud’s work is organized in a more rational way then that of others. The later non-Freudian writers tend to concentrate on therapeutic success rather than developing a rationally sustainable theory, and hence their works are of little help to other disciplines such as sociology.

In this book the work of Freud will be discussed in the light of the ways in which various groups of writers have used his ideas within sociology and social theory. This entails selecting from the corpus of works written by Freud those which are most relevant to the later developments within sociology. The aim here will be to outline the major concepts of Freudian theory which are used in many of Freud’s papers, books, and case histories, and which are important for understanding later developments in social theory and sociology. The focus is essentially on what might be termed Freudian social theory produced both by Freud and by later writers.

This focus upon Freud’s social theory is distinct from the way in which Freud is sometimes approached by writers who stress the personality theory in Freud. This is done by both psychologists and by sociologists; it can result in a distorted presentation of Freud’s work because the social dimension is overlooked. It is important to focus on the writings of Freud again after many years of discussion about them because various distortions inevitably creep in after different generations of sociologists have taken from them what they need to do for their purposes.

What does Freud’s work contain which has attracted the attention of various groups of sociologists? Probably the most important thing is his concept of the unconscious.

Although the term was used before Freud, it was he who gave it a special meaning which can be understood only in relation to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis as a whole. Freud took the insights of poets, artists, novelists, and religious mystics into the workings of this aspect of human life and made them into propositions formulated as part of a rational, scientific theory of ‘the unconscious’. He was well aware that poets and artists had had the insights he was trying to think about, but they had expressed them aesthetically in works of art, or in religious texts, whereas he aimed to produce a theoretical structure of concepts and propositions which could be used to generate rational, usable knowledge when used in therapeutic practice.

THE UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE FREUD

What were these earlier insights and concerns? They are too numerous to give here, but a few examples may help. The child is father to the man’ is one such poetic insight which Freud uses indirectly in his theory of the influence of early infant experiences on later adult life.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact: …

Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, v. 1.2)

And Goethe (1749–1832):

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the Unconscious, for his root lives there.
Men are to be viewed as the organs of their century, which operate mainly unconsciously. [3]

There were also some philosophers who developed general statements in the form of a philosophical theory not linked with any methods for relating the theory to concrete, specific, areas, but which nevertheless foreshadow Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote:

The exposition of the origin of madness…will become more comprehensible if it is remembered how unwillingly we think of things which powerfully injure our interests, wound our pride or interfere with our wishes; how easily…we unconsciously break away or sneak off from them again… In that resistance of the will to allowing what is contrary to it to come under the examination of our intellect lies the place at which madness can break in upon the mind…[4]

And Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote:

“We flatter ourselves that the controlling or highest principle is our consciousness’. And ‘All our conscious motives are superficial phenomena:
behind them stands the conflicts of our instincts and conditions.’ …The great basic activity is unconscious.’ …‘Our consciousness limps along afterward.’ …‘Every extension of knowledge arises from making conscious the unconscious.’ [5]

The work of Feuerbach (1804–72), which directly influenced the young Marx, has important parallels with the later work of Freud. This is true of their understanding of religion as based on people’s desires and wishes, and whose symbolism is based on dreams. [6] Marx’s critique of religion takes off from a similar insight.

Schiller (1759–1805) advised a friend to release his imagination from the restraint of critical reason by employing a flow of free associations.

Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an Italian sociologist whose main work Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916) was translated into English as The Mind and Society (1935), developed a view of society as a system of both external and internal forces seeking equilibrium. He was particularly interested in the internal forces which consisted of nonlogical residues, as he called them. These were of six main types which included sex residues, sentiments of pity and cruelty among the residues of sociability, beliefs in astrology, the institutions of the family and religion, political ideologies, and a residue of self-preservation. Pareto, like Freud, was influenced by both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and their stress on the importance of the non-rational in human societies.

The point of these examples is not to show that Freud was less of an original thinker than he is often claimed to be. All original theories can be found in the works of predecessors in one form or another. The point is that there is a sense in which no one knew the insights were there in the earlier writers before a thinker like Freud, or Marx, or Darwin, produces a rationally formulated theory applied to specific concrete materials. Once the theory has been so formulated by someone like these major thinkers then it becomes possible to see the ideas present as insights in earlier writers. They were, indeed, present there, but in an unusable form—in a form which has an emotional effect as in poetry, or as an essay in philosophy, but not in a way which is replicable, usable by others, and can generate new knowledge in a ‘science’.

USES OF FREUD BY SOCIAL THEORISTS

Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, which he claimed was a contribution to science. Indeed it was to be a specific science with its own theory and methods of investigation. According to Freud psychoanalysis was to be the only secure foundation for the future development of the social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. Many anthropologists and sociologists have not paid much attention to Freud, although some in both disciplines have taken Freud seriously. Within sociology other major writers have been treated as being more central than Freud —especially Marx, Weber and Durkheim. However, some sociologists have examined and used parts, if not all, of Freud’s ideas: first there has been Talcott Parsons, and some influenced by his work; secondly, writers in the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas; finally the French structuralists and post-structuralists, such as Althusser, himself influenced by Lacan, a French psychoanalyst.

These three groups, or schools, of writers sometimes address problems which involve treating sociology as a wide-ranging discipline, with links on the one hand with philosophy, and on the other hand with history and politics. Their use of Sigmund Freud’s ideas is different in each case, but they do all share a concern with using Freud to help them in conceptualizing and understanding the process of socialization, the entry of the child into human language and culture, and the part played by the irrational in history and politics. These are central problems for the discipline of sociology, and are not just luxurious extras.

It is a central problem in sociology to understand the ways in which people acquire the values and ideas which affect their view of society, and of their role in it. This problem has been of importance to Marxists, for example, concerned with the lack of interest in revolution on the part of many proletarians in West European and North American societies especially from 1914 onwards. Many Marxists had thought it quite possible that the German workers, once in the army, would join with French and British workers in overthrowing the capitalist system which had produced a world war. Hopes were especially high when the Russians had their revolution in October 1917, during the First World War. Looking back, one plausible explanation for the failure of the workers, once armed, to act to produce an overthrow of capitalism, seemed to some to be that they had deeply internalized values and feelings surrounding their respective nationalisms. They found it difficult if not impossible to think of not fighting their country’s enemies, so deep were feelings of national identity among ordinary soldiers. This is not to claim that this is the correct explanation—it is being used here to illustrate the reasons why some Marxist sociologists turned to Freudian theory to aid their understanding of the irrational forces in history.

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), who was at one stage both a psychoanalyst and a Marxist, became one of the first to try to develop wha...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• PREFACE TO 2002 EDITION
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. SOCIALIZATION: LANGUAGE, GENDER, SEXUALITY
• 3. FREUD'S SOCIAL THEORY
• 4. METHODS AND METHODOLOGY
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING