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Psychoanalytic sociology


Psychoanalytic sociology is the research field that analyzes society using the same methods that psychoanalysis applied to analyze an individual.

'Psychoanalytic sociology embraces work from divergent sociological traditions and political perspectives': its common 'emphasis on unconscious mental processes and behavior renders psychoanalytic sociology a controversial subfield within the broader sociological discipline' (as with psychoanalysis in academic psychology); and some sociologists consider the field to be insufficiently empirical and largely pseudoscientific.

Similarly, sociatry applies psychiatry to society itself.

'The desire to establish a link between psychoanalysis and sociology appears very early on in Freud's work. The articles "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907b) and " 'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d) are evidence of this'. Though the latter article was 'the earliest of Freud's full-length discussions of the antagonism between civilization and instinctual life, his convictions on the subject went back much further': however the 'sociological aspects of that antagonism form the main subject' in 1908.

The same mode of approach was also employed by Freud in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), where he argued that 'crowd psychology, and with it all social psychology, is parasitic on individual psychology'.Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930 formed however his fullest sociological study, wherein he 'anchored his analysis of social and political life in a theory of human nature very much his own'.

Indeed, in 'works, from Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) to Moses and Monotheism (1939a), Freud analyzed the events that presided over the foundation and modification of social links, the advent of civilization, and the rise of its current discontents'; while James Strachey described The Future of an Illusion (1927) as 'the first of a number of sociological works to which Freud devoted most of his remaining years'.

'Many of the early analysts were Marxists ... Reich, Paul Federn and Otto Fenichel the most notable among them', and were fully prepared, in Erich Fromm's words, to at least '"try to explain psychic structure as determined by social structure"'.Theodor Adorno's essays on psychoanalysis, reappropriated Freud's work and applied it to social phenomena, and in particular in his Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951), he outlined a theory of social psychology.


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