The social unconscious: Then and now

Abstract

Abstract This is a brief introductory paper about the history and centrality of the social unconscious in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The term―Social Unconscious―was introduced into our literature more than 100 years ago by the first formally trained American psychoanalyst―Trigant Burrow. It opens new pathways for understanding the social and collective dimensions of the unconscious, allowing us to extend our reach with our patients and our relevance with fellow citizens. Despite its potential, the social unconscious and the theories that undergird it were denigrated by Freud. In the early 1930’s, Freud instructed the American Psychoanalytic Association to remove Trigant Burrow from its membership and to excise this scholarship from its curricula. Coordinated attempts to suppress these ideas harmed the field’s development and retarded its relevance. Understanding the social dimensions of the unconscious is necessary because the unconscious is largely structured by social, cultural and collective coordinates. Fortunately, the turn into the 21st century is seeing a proliferation in analytic scholarship regarding the centrality of the socio‐cultural in structuring the unconscious of individuals and groups. New terms are being introduced such as vinculo, normative unconscious, interpellation, semiotic code, and ego‐habitus that aim to elaborate the various ways culture, ideology, large‐groups, and geopolitical processes shape the unconscious. Their potential to deepen our contact with patients across the spectrum of human difference is immense. I suggest using the capacious term―social unconscious―as a core conceptual category that organizes this vein of expanding analytic scholarship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.