Crossing the Psycho-Social Divide

Freud, Weber, Adorno and Elias

George Cavalletto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317156901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

The prevailing view among social scientists is that the psyche and the social reside in such disparate domains that their proper study demands markedly incompatible analytical and theoretical approaches. Over the last decade, scholars have begun to challenge this view. In this innovative work, George Cavalletto moves this challenge forward by connecting it to theoretical and analytical practices of the early 20th century. His analysis of key texts by Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Norbert Elias shows that they crossed the psycho-social divide in ways that can help contemporary scholars to re-establish an analytical and theoretical understanding of the inherent interconnection of these two domains. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in sociology and social psychology, especially those in the fields of social theory, the sociology of emotion, self and society, and historical sociology.

PART 1
Civilization and the Psyche: Opposing Psycho-Social Paradigms in Sigmund Freud’s Writings on Civilization

[In regard to Freud’s earlier writings on civilization,] interpretation is unavoidably drawn into the area of cultural phenomena. The repressing agency makes its appearance as the psychological expression of a prior social fact, the phenomenon of authority, which includes a number of constituted historical figures: the family, the mores of a group, tradition, … political and ecclesiastic power, penal and, in general, social sanctions. In other words, desire is no longer by itself; it has its “other.”

– Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy

For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behavior of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psychology.

– Sigmund Freud, writing in the last decade of his life.
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Introduction to Part 1

Sigmund Freud’s two great books on civilization, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, present different views of the relationship between the social world and the psyche. Examining these differences establishes a way to correct a number of misconceptions perpetuated over the years by commentators who have attempted to portray the books as if they were essentially alike—indeed, many of the disputes among those who derive theories of society from Freud’s texts are traceable to this attempt. Moreover, the disentanglement of these books’ psycho-social views has an importance beyond the issue of the proper reading of Freud’s texts. For what we find here are two fundamentally different ways of seeing the relation of psyche and society, a difference that reverberates, in one form or another, far beyond any dispute of textual interpretation. I would argue, in fact, that every attempt to think psychoanalytically about the social world engages this difference at least implicitly, for it reflects a divide between two radically opposed conceptualizations of the psyche’s relationship to that world.

The first conceptualization begins with the assertion of a radical opposition between human instincts¹ and the social world (or, in another form, between the individual and society), an opposition that, to the degree it is explicitly psychological, results in a theory of the social world modeled functionally upon what psychoanalysts call a “reaction-formation,” wherein the social domain takes on the role of a repressive “other” diametrically opposed to instinctual drives. Alternatively (or, more likely, concurrently) this view results in a type of socialization theory wherein the social world is envisioned as imposing its prohibitions and norms on the psyche in the form of the internalized superego commands.

The second conceptualization begins with the assertion of a radical interrelatedness of human instincts and the social world, one grounded upon a view of the psyche as constituted within the interactions of social relations. In this view, instinct and the social world are depicted as linked in a complex figuration of interactive determinations and mechanisms, a complex interplay of psychical and social forces in which the social domain itself comes to assume psychodynamic characteristics, whether these be embodied in the symbolic order of culture, or in the more structurally determinant categories of instinctually embodied patterns of sociality.

1 My discussion of Freud employs the term “instinct” rather than the more appropriate term “drive,” as this is the rendition of the German term Trieb that is offered in the English translations of his texts examined here.

Chapter 1

Civilization as a Social Fact Imposed on the Psyche

In the opening paragraphs of The Future of an Illusion, Freud indicates that the scope of his interest extends to the “future of our civilization,” an analysis of which, he declares, must includes a broad understanding of civilization’s past and present conditions. He then devotes the first quarter of the book to thoughts upon this subject, which he terms “the general scheme of things.”¹ A macro-analysis of “civilization”—Freud’s larger interest, to which he will return two years later in his Civilization and its Discontents—thus sets the stage for the book’s announced subject, the future of religion.

Here, for the first time in his career, Freud fully expounds the theory of the civilizing process implicit in previous works. He resurrects and synthesizes within this book’s general framework notions and intuitions scattered across works written during his earlier formative and middle years, the period between 1900 and 1917 in which he also developed his first structural model of the psyche (with its division of the psyche into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious subsystems) and his first instinct theory (with its dynamic opposition between two types of instinctual drives: the self-preservative ego instincts and the libidinal instincts). Here, in some of his most brilliant writing on the sociology of the psyche, Freud brings to explicit definition the psycho-social paradigm that implicitly underpinned those earlier works, revealing both the theoretical power and the limitations of that paradigm.

In a more extended manner than in his earlier writings on civilization, the connection of the social to the psyche is made clear. On the level of concept formation, we discover that this connection is structured as a directional movement from ideas concerning external realities to those concerning internal realities: that is, the link between the two is, at this level, a shifting of the terms of analysis, a movement within conceptualization itself from the social to the psyche. Explicit expressions of this conceptual movement, of this shift of focus from ideas of external to internal realities, from ideas concerning the social world to those concerning the psyche, repeatedly appear in the opening chapters of The Future of an Illusion. For example, Freud notes at one point, “the emphasis has moved over from the material to the mental,” adding a few pages later, “we have slipped unawares out of the economic field into the field of psychology.”² We also discover that this same movement is embodied in the text’s conception of the social world itself. For, as the next sections demonstrate, the text tends to conceptualize this world in terms of the impact it has upon the psyche. Thus, in its very conceptualization of social reality, one discovers a shift in perspective that that redirects thought from its social composition to its psychic effects.

1. Translations of Social Economy into Psychic Economy

The first two chapters of The Future of an Illusion present an overview of the economic structures upon which civilization is built. Chapter 1 begins this discussion with the assertion that the material basis of civilization rests upon two socioeconomic achievements: the creation of knowledge-based techniques of production that enable humans “to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth”; and the establishment of social arrangements that regulate “the distribution of the [resulting] available wealth.”³ The beginning of chapter 2 repeats this distinction between the productive and distributive foundations of civilization: it would appear that “the assets of civilization,” Freud writes, consist in a society’s “available wealth and in the regulations for its distribution.”⁴

Throughout these two chapters Freud repeatedly draws upon this distinction between production and distribution to argue that, in the case of all known civilizations, the distribution of social wealth has always been out of kilter with the social arrangements involved in its production. Speaking specifically of the distributive inequalities that exist between the “classes of society,” Freud writes, “the satisfaction of one portion [of society]… depends upon the suppression of another.” A consideration of the history of various civilizations reveals that “civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion.” This inequitable outcome continues in “the case of all present-day cultures”; thus one finds that “it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share.” Contemporary civilization provides the social elite with the leisure and education to enjoy the fruits of civilization, including its artistic output, while this “kind of satisfaction … remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting work and have not enjoyed any personal education.” Freud’s judgment of these class-based inequities is definitive: “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”⁵

More than elsewhere in Freud’s writings on civilization, the constituent terms of the surface layer of his thought in these opening chapters of The Future of an Illusion are explicitly sociological—”classes,” “classes of society,” “underprivileged classes,” “the masses,” “the suppressed classes and the class who rules and exploits them,” “social strata,” “the economic field,” “wealth itself and the means of acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution,” “power,” “external coercion,” “the great experiment in civilization that is now in progress” [i.e., the USSR].⁶ Yet, another category of reality exists right beneath this sociological surface—that of the psyche. Consider this question: In what consists this wealth that is so inequitably distributed, the deprivation of which makes the masses discontent and in potential rebellion against civilization? The external materiality of goods and services, it soon becomes clear, is not the principal referent of Freud’s conception of societal wealth. At each crucial turn in his argument, Freud collapses wealth’s measure into an instinctual accounting.

For instance, “privation,” Freud states, is to be understood in his text as referring to “the condition which is produced by the prohibition” of instinctual gratification—“the fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied.” Hence, when he soon thereafter characterizes the “underprivileged classes” as suffering from a “surplus of privation,” the most pertinent referent of this comment is the notion of instinctual privation, not the material privation which, we discover, serves as its external sign. And when he then adds that “the satisfaction” of civilized privileged classes “depends upon the suppression” of the unprivileged classes,⁷ we begin to understand that the words “satisfaction” and “suppression” refer as much or more to instinctual suppression and satisfaction than to their material or social variants. The terms of material economy, we discover, operate here principally as the outward tokens of psychic economy; structured as class exploitation, estrangement is grounded upon the extraction and transfer of instinctual energies and pleasures from the underprivileged to the privileged classes.

Thus, social concepts become psychic concepts, as an inequitable distribution of the material goods of civilization is reconceptualized as an inequitable distribution of instinctual gratifications. Freud’s thought here presumes a translational correspondence between inner and outer, although the mechanisms by which this occurs are never spelled out. For example, in the first chapter’s discussion of the production and distribution of social wealth, Freud explains that these two processes overlap, since each in its own way can be a source of wealth: “an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another, in so far as the other person makes use of his capacity for work, or chooses him as a sexual object.”⁸ A person can gain wealth through the exploitation of another’s productive labor: this maintains the level of an explicitly material and sociological characterization of wealth. Or a person can gain wealth through taking pleasure in another as “a sexual object”: this, by contrast, is an instinctual and psychical characterization of wealth. The social (exploited labor) is equated with the instinctual (erotic gratification), as the frame of analysis itself again “slip[s] unawares out of the economic field into the field of psychology.”

2. The Internalization of External Coercion

The transformational logic of outward-to-inward, social-to-psyche movement that dominates Freud’s thought in the opening chapters of The Future of an Illusion is not limited to shifts in the framework of analysis from social economy to psychic economy. This logic is also embedded in the structure of Freud’s theoretical conceptualization of the historical development of civilization and of the psychic development of the individual.

For Freud, civilization is epitomized on both macro and micro levels by the introjection of authority, a historical achievement of the human race recapitulated as a developmental achievement of the individual, who is thereby transformed “from being opponents of civilization into being its vehicles.” On the macro-historical level (a perspective commencing from “the beginning of history”), “it is in keeping with the c...