Psychoanalysis and Social Thought: The Endogenous Origin of Society

Abstract

A recent book by Frosh on the relation of psychoanalysis to social-political thought is reviewed, and the book's paradoxical conclusion is noted, namely, that those psychoanalytic schools explicitly intent on the primacy of the ego and of interpersonal object relations seem less relevant to the political dimension than those stressing the primacy of instinctual drives, which are yet presented as incompatible with cultural socialization. Following, an attempt is made to propose an approach to socialization that could overcome the logical anomalies inherent in current psychoanalytic thinking concerning socialization. It is suggested that society should not be treated as something merely outside the person that somehow has to be learned, nor as something genetically present in the form of a social instinct or an innate collective mentality. Rather, if human psychology is conceived as evolutionarily selected for constructing a societal world, the necessary connection between the human individual and society can be made without resorting to an outside imposition, at the same time as full recognition is given to the constitutive but largely unconscious aspects of social institutions.

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