Freud and American Sociology

Philip Manning

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745669359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia sociale

Although Freud's impact on social science – and indeed 20th century social thought – has been extraordinary, his impact on American sociology has been left relatively unexplored. This ground-breaking book aims to fill this knowledge gap. By examining the work of pioneers such as G.H.Mead, Cooley, Parsons and Goffman, as well as a range of key contemporary thinkers, it provides an accurate history of the role Freud and psychoanalysis played in the development of American social theory. Despite the often reluctant, and frequently resistant, nature of this encounter, the book also draws attention to the abiding potential of fusing psychoanalytic and sociological thinking.

Freud and American Sociology represents an original and compelling contribution to scholarly debate. At the same time, the clarity with which Manning develops his comprehensive account means that the book is also highly suitable for adoption on a range of upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, including sociology, social theory, social psychology, and related disciiplines.

1

An Uncertain Place: Freud in American Sociology

For we do not consider it desirable at all for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medicine and to find its last resting place in a textbook of psychiatry under the heading ‘methods of treatment’…. It deserves a better fate and, it may be hoped, will meet one. As a ‘depth psychology’, a theory of the mental unconscious, it can become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.… The use of analysis for the treatment of the neuroses is only one of its applications; the future will perhaps show that it is not the most important one.

Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, 1966, vol. 20: 248

Had Freud lived long enough to enter more deeply into the technical analysis of the object-systems to which the individual becomes related, he would inevitably have had to become, in part, a sociologist, for the structure of these object-systems is – not merely influenced by – the structure of society itself. Essentially, Freud’s theory of object-relations is a theory of the relation of the individual personality to the social system. It is the primary meeting ground of the two disciplines of psychology and sociology.

Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality, 1964: 107

Introduction

This book is an investigation of some of the responses made by American sociologists, most of whom are associated with symbolic interactionism, to Freud and psychoanalysis. The premise of this project is that (1) elements of psychoanalysis can strengthen symbolic interactionism; (2) these elements were anticipated in some form by the founding figures of symbolic interactionism; and (3) there are non-clinical but empirical ways of pursuing symbolic interactionism “after Freud.” This project therefore offers, in Foucault’s suggestive phrase, a “history of the present” of one strand of the development of American sociology. Like other aspects of the emergence of American sociology, it is a complicated story relating how once famous but now largely forgotten figures argued about the value of psychoanalysis and its relevance to the social sciences.

From the first published responses to Freud by American sociologists there was disagreement, if not outright controversy, about the importance of psychoanalysis. For some, Freud was a potential ally, someone who had demonstrated that apparently medical conditions were in fact better understood as variations of normal behavior. However, for others, Freud was an imperialist who threatened to undermine sociology’s autonomy. Both these views are, in a sense, predictable responses. What is more surprising is that another group of American sociologists found Freud’s arguments to resonate with ones with which they were already familiar. Contrary to what we might expect, Freud was not understood by them as a revolutionary thinker, but rather as one among many contributors to an analysis of the “social self” that was already well under way. It is this last viewpoint that guides much of the discussion in this book. My intention is to show that the reception given to psychoanalysis by American sociologists reveals the strength they perceived in their own homegrown sociology. The task of this book is therefore to assess whether their perception was well founded.

The most prominent attempt to integrate psychoanalysis into American sociological thinking was undertaken by Talcott Parsons, who captained this group initiative in the mid-1940s and after, beginning at a time when his influence was at its zenith. However, even then the proposed integration brought out what he and other American sociologists perceived to be the inherently sociological character of psychoanalysis at its best. Even Parsons’ own formal training in psychoanalysis did not convert him. Despite the fact that psychoanalysis was from 1909 until the 1960s an increasing part of the intellectual context of American sociology, Parsons, and American sociologists generally, largely retained their confidence in their distinctive approach to the study of human behavior and social interaction.

I think that it is helpful to anticipate the arguments that will be presented in this book. I will argue that the first distinctively American contribution to sociology was symbolic interactionism. This “somewhat barbaric neologism” was first coined in 1937 by Herbert Blumer and defined by him in two different, but interconnected, ways. The first definition stressed that the term is a “label” for the “great” similarities between a group of American scholars clustered in the Chicago area whose work shows affinities with the ideas of Blumer’s mentor, George Herbert Mead (1969: 1). The second definition was more formulaic. Blumer stated that symbolic interactionism is based on three premises: (1) that we act according to the meanings objects have for us; (2) these meanings emerge in social interaction; and (3) meanings are modified over time (1969: 2). For critics, this language qualifies everyone and no one as a symbolic interactionist; however, in the context of his first definition, Blumer’s approach has real teeth. This is because symbolic interactionism was not just a general set of assumptions about the social world; it was also a way of studying the social world, of doing sociology. It fused theoretical and qualitative methodological concerns, allowing both innovative theoretical extensions to Mead’s framework and methodological extensions to the pioneering empirical work of W. I. Thomas and others.

I consider one endpoint of this line of inquiry to be the incredible study by Erving Goffman, Asylums (1961a). This book extended both the theory and method of symbolic interactionism by being both an ethnography of St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, and a comparative ethnography of the concept of the total institution (Manning, 1992). Further, Goffman was not just an observer; he was also a moral critic. Later, Goffman ridiculed sociologists who thought of their discipline as a kind of chemistry, likening them to children playing with Gilbert sets (1971: xviii). In my way of thinking, Goffman was therefore traveling down the same road as his colleague-to-be, Philip Rieff, who also understood sociology as a moral discipline whose role was to preserve both a social and sacred order. Both Goffman and Rieff also emerged at a time when Freud’s star was at its zenith, and unsurprisingly both wrote against the backdrop of psychoanalysis.

In my retelling of this story, Goffman’s genius was to see a vital connection between the comparative, classificatory, conceptually innovative work of an earlier outcast, William Sumner, and the ethnographic approach of one of his former teachers, Everett Hughes. Goffman therefore separated himself from the more introspective tradition associated with Cooley. Cooley’s most psychoanalytic book, Life and the Student (1927), has been overlooked and lost to the canon. Ironically, both the classificatory, observational approach of Sumner and the introspective approach of Cooley can be found in Mead’s seminal statements in Mind, Self and Society (1962 [1934]) and, arguably, it is the “plasticity” or malleability of Mead’s ideas which has allowed them to have an enduring appeal.

In separating himself from this introspective tradition, Goffman also severed all ties with a psychoanalytic view of the social world. Although he had a deep knowledge of both Freud’s work and psychoanalysis in general, he was not conciliatory at all: he considered the psychoanalytic perspective to be speculative and the work of psychoanalytically minded psychiatrists to be ineffective at best. The thread that ties Cooley to Freud (that was brilliantly analyzed by Rieff) was therefore of no interest to Goffman. As a result, Goffman accepted that the internal worlds of the people who populate the “interaction order” could not be studied sociologically. In Jonathan Glover’s telling phrase, Goffman’s sociology treated people as having no “inner story” (1988: 175). Goffman’s antipathy to psychoanalysis left him no choice. Nevertheless, Goffman’s achievements were extraordinary, one of which was to fuse the theories of Sumner and Hughes and demonstrate the empirical power of the union.

Goffman needed but couldn’t find a version of psychoanalysis that had an elective affinity with the qualitative, loosely symbolic interactionist, Sumner/Hughes work that he had mastered. Surprisingly, Talcott Parsons, hardly the sociologist associated with symbolic interactionism, found the key to unlock the door to psychoanalysis for sociology. However, Parsons’ curse was his inability to walk through it. The key was Parsons’ realization that sociology needed a stripped-down version of psychoanalysis. Parsons realized that an “object-relations” approach in psychoanalysis could jettison mechanistic and deterministic aspects of some other versions of psychoanalysis. Further, sociologists as sociologists had no stake in debates about the clinical efficacy or scientific standing of psychoanalysis. After all, sociologists who obtain a license to practice psychoanalysis and then do so are no longer acting as sociologists.

This led Parsons to treat Freud as heading down the road of convergence that took him to Parsons’ own unified action theory. By de-emphasizing Freud’s developmental schemata and assumption of sexual etiology, Parsons’ Freud became, as Parsons himself recognized, a version of Cooley and Mead. This realization, as Jonathan Turner (1974) suggested in a seminal paper, brought both Freud and Parsons into the purview of symbolic interactionism. Blumer (1975), of course, was both angered and genuinely mystified by the suggestion that both his (former) nemeses were now his bedfellows.

The key that Goffman didn’t find was therefore the realization that sociology could get what it needed from psychoanalysis without accepting the baggage of mechanistic and/or deterministic schemata. This left sociologists free to use the powerful psychoanalytic ideas concerning transference, counter-transference, projection and introjection, and the ambivalence that accompanies the construction of internal worlds. This was the path back to the inner stories that Glover had correctly seen as missing from Goffman’s work. Parsons, unfortunately, could open but not walk through the door, in part because he was, by his own admission, an “incurable theorist” and in part because he retained ambitions for an amoral, scientific sociology. As a result, he could not produce the empirical study that would accomplish for him what Asylums accomplished for Goffman. In the last decade of his life, Parsons made one last effort, producing a fascinating but poorly received study, The American University, co-authored by Gerald Platt (1973). Despite many appealing qualities, the book failed to incorporate psychoanalysis meaningfully and produced instead an increasingly confusing array of two-by-two boxes that incorporated themselves in an infinite regress. Parsons needed to revert back to the ethnographic work he had tried in the early 1940s when he studied Boston hospitals. But in truth, as he recognized himself, his talents lay elsewhere. Further, Parsons could not accept that sociology is inevitably a form of moral critique. This is one of the lessons that we are taught by Philip Rieff. Parsons preferred to hold onto the idea he obtained (independently) from Durkheim and Henderson; namely, that sociology has much in common with biology. The flukish coincidence that his own AGIL schema bore a surface resemblance to Crick and Watson’s four building blocks of DNA (the AGCT “schema”), and hence to the birth of molecular biology, simply led Parsons further astray.

In the 25 years since Parsons died, sociologists such as Nancy Chodorow and Jeffrey Prager have trained as psychoanalysts and continued the project of paring down psychoanalysis to its key elements. Although they both recognize that this project is compatible with sociology, they have both developed clinical careers, and their insights have been largely clinically oriented. The logic of the position they develop demonstrates that the transference and counter-transference seen routinely in clinical settings is in fact endemic to all social relationships. As a result, the counter-transference experienced by the ethnographer or symbolic interactionist can be a viable, empirical, non-clinical guide to the internal world – or inner story – of the people who populate Goffman’s interaction order.

To date, neither Chodorow nor Prager has produced a psychoanalytic, reflexive anthropology or sociology, but they both recognize that this project, though difficult, is possible. Symbolic interactionists identify this work as “auto-ethnography,” a phrase coined by David Hayano (1982) to describe his own investigation of the social world of poker players. With no sense of his research as a psychoanalytic project, and lacking the confidence that he was doing anything more than playing poker and pretending that it was research, Hayano stepped back from the radical implication that his own counter-transference to the world of poker was the most interesting thing that he had to say about that world. Very recently, Loic Wacquant (2004), who shows none of Hayano’s inhibitions, has investigated the world of boxing, drawing heavily on his own counter-transference to the sport. Nevertheless, like Hayano, Wacquant does not conceive of his project as an extension of the thread that runs from Cooley to Freud, to Rieff, to Prager, and beyond.

It is critical to recognize that the endpoint of my own studies is not a stark choice between the Sumner-Hughes-Goffman tradition and the Cooley-Freud-Rieff tradition. The critical task, as I see it, is to recognize, as Mead and Parsons did but could not demonstrate empirically, that the comparative ethnography of concepts that Goffman developed is in fact compatible with the counter-transferential work of contemporary auto-ethnographers. This new fusion promises exciting yields. The problem is that it will take someone of the caliber of Goffman to produce it, not just someone of the caliber of Parsons to recognize it.

The Intellectual Background

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, American sociologists had to clarify where they stood in relation to other, already established, cognate sciences. The space they chose to occupy in part covered the territory of social psychology, along with ecology and social organization. Therefore, insofar as psychoanalysis was understood as a kind of social psychology, sociologists were at least initially receptive to Freudian ideas. In the two decades following Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909, sociologists responded to Freud in different ways, ranging from a hostile dismissal to a receptive embrace. What is striking during this time is that Freudian ideas were not considered to be particularly revolutionary (by admirers and critics alike), and as a result they could be readily assimilated into sociological thinking and presented as a coherent, established theory. Thus, psychoanalysis was presented as a version of preexisting American sociological social psychology. Freud was understood therefore for the most part – and at best – as a contributor to and not the founder of an intellectual approach.

It is also important to recognize that the American reception of Freud was complicated by – and was also subservient to – political, moral and methodological debates in Chicago and elsewhere about the appropriate form for sociology to take. These debates concerned three issues. The first was the extent to which sociology could, even in principle, justify political matters. This is hardly surprising, given that American sociology emerged following the Civil War and at a time of tremendous political and economic turmoil. Sociologists themselves had divided loyalties: some advocated socialist, some Progressive and some free-market principles. In some cases, sociologists changed their minds or just dithered, as in the case of Albion Small, who flirted with socialism for many years (Smith, 1988: 76). Second, sociologists debated whether their discipline could be a non-religious moral science of society, as many of its early proponents wanted it to be. Notably at the University of Chicago, but elsewhere also, sociology emerged as a discipline with a distinctive agenda. It was, in Abbot’s (1999) telling description, part academic discipline, part outreach effort. The third concern was more focused and technical: it was a debate about the specific role of positivism, quantification, and the role of qualitative research in sociological investigations.

The initial reception of psychoanalytic ideas in the first half of the twentieth century has to be understood against this intellectual background. For example: initially, sociologists who favored an engagement with psychoanalysis could not identify a way of collecting psychoanalytic data. That is, they could not answer the question of what a non-clinical version of psychoanalysis would look like. The developing life-history research at Chicago, associated initially with W. I. Thomas in sociology and William Healy in psychiatry, offered an answer to this question, and in the 1930s John Dollard formalized this, first by demonstrating the role psychoanalysis could play in a case study and then by establishing methodological guidelines. Louis Wirth (1931) offered a separate but commensurable argument when he advocated a “clinical sociology.”

It is interesting to note that, until the 1930s, American sociologists for the most part presented Freudian ideas as established theory, even though Freud himself continued to be productive – and to publish – until his death in 1939. In the 1930s, émigré psychoanalysts and American converts to psychoanalysis – notably Karen Horney, Eric Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan – began to advocate revisions to Freud that both sparked controversy and demonstrated that Freud’s work could be interpreted in different ways and with different points of emphasis. At this time, Herbert Blumer, himself an ardent critic of psychoanalysis, attempted to demonstrate that a powerful union of social psychological ideas, sociological research methods, and substantive interests emanating largely from Chicago could be coherently packaged together into the field of “symbolic interactionism.” Blumer understood that psychoanalysis was a potential imperialist force that must be resisted, and, in any case, Blumer had his own imperialist ambitions for his symbolic interactionist synthesis. Without particular knowledge of psychoanalysis, Blumer promoted efforts within soci-ology to resist any movement toward Freud. Blumer’s quasi-successor, Erving Goffman, was extremely knowledgeable about psychoanalysis (unlike Blumer), but he too viewed it as an inferior approach to the homespun symbolic interactionism that covered the same ground as psychoanalysis, but in a more convincing way, both theoretically and methodologically.

In the 1940s, the waters were muddied by Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who was most committed to the integration of sociological and psychoanalytic ideas. In fact, Parsons believed that this integration had to be recognized rather than constructed, because from his vantage point Freud’s ideas already “converged” with those of leading sociologists. Unlike the majority of American sociologists before him, Parsons believed that the way forward for the discipline was to draw upon European intellectual ideas. His initial emphasis was on the works of Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Marshall. Later, he emphasized Freud’s foundational role in sociological theory. It is striking that Parsons did not initially look to the American sociologists ...