Psychoanalysis and Social Theory

Freud and Social Theory

Since its origins, psychoanalysis has been inextricably linked with the history of twentieth-century social theory. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, responded to unprecedented events in his own political culture, particularly World War I, the resurgence in Austria of anti-Semitism, and the rise of Nazism, fascism, and other mass movements, and applied his developing science to a theory of society. Psychoanalysis is predicated on a fully elaborated set of postulates concerning human nature, a metapsychology that describes the inner world of a human being as governed by both rational and nonrational impulses. In various writings beginning in the 1920s, Freud sought to explain the ways in which the psychological makeup of the individual, rather than helping to realize it, limited the achievement of reason in the social world.

The theorist of the unconscious described the special problem faced by “civilization” that required for its survival the thwarting of human instinct. Developing in particular a theory of the death drive, or Thanatos, Freud explored its expression in individuals, its necessary repression by social systems, and the pathology that can derive from it, to explain the mass politics with which he was confronted. Here Freud appears to be a more modern Thomas Hobbes, suggesting that social institutions are required to limit, restrict, and restrain these fundamentally antisocial inclinations of individuals. Consistent with Freud's elaboration of an individual's intrapsychic conflict that requires repression of pleasure on behalf of a reality principle, he posits that the social order too insists upon repression of instinct, and as such, society, from the family to the state, inserts itself as the agency of individual domination.

Unlike Hobbes, who posits an identity of interest between the needs of the individual (i.e., to prevent premature death through the war of one against all) and the interests of the sovereign (i.e., in place to preserve the Leviathan), Freud identifies an inherent conflict between the needs or requirements of social institutions and their capacity to distort or pervert individual possibility. Here, more like Nietzsche than Hobbes, Freud insists that society, rather than establishing the conditions for human selfrealization, can impede them. While civilization ensures greater happiness for the species, because without it disease, war, and earlier death would be more common, society nonetheless interferes with a person's pleasure principle, creating a social being at war with authority and, as that authority becomes internalized, at war with itself.

This is the Freudian conundrum: Individuals are dependent upon a social world that makes possible instinctual gratification. Nonetheless, they find themselves in a struggle against social power that requires of them excessive restriction both of libidinal or erotic and aggressive impulses. The result is the internalization of external authority in the form of moral conscience, generating often an overly repressive form of self-discipline and restraint. Because of these contending sentiments and imperatives, the lived experience of individuals is defined by the production of ambivalence and dominated by the experience of guilt. Love and hate coexist, directed at times at oneself, at others, and at the social world that enables those feelings. While the victory of a reality principle over pleasure alone is the aim, the result often is pathology. The individual drive to satisfaction with socially imposed restrictions on gratification defines the dialectical relationship that, for Freud, is a permanent feature of the world in which we live and is always fraught with the possibility for failure. While much of Freud's career was devoted to exploring the ways in which psychological illness was a product of an individual's inability to successfully navigate the waters of pleasure and restraint with which he or she was confronted, Freud's later writings increasingly turned to the inextricable connection between the death drive of individuals and the forces of social order and constraint that colluded in the simultaneous production of excessive repression and pathology.

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