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Psychoanalysis in Sociology

Q. What is distinctive about psychoanalytical accounts of the 'self' and of social behaviour? In what ways can psychoanalytical insights increase our understanding of 'social issues'?

Psychoanalytical descriptions of the self are unique because they refer to unconscious as well as conscious contents. In its usual sense self is defined as 'consciousness of your own identity' (Oxford, 1989) or 'a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others' (Oxford, 1989). The assumption here is that one's self is closely if not exclusively related to one's ego, and therefore is defined by and limited to everything that a person knows and experiences through his consciousness. In psychoanalysis the description is radically different. The term self is used of the totality of the personality: one's ego-consciousness, but also the unconscious contents of the psyche - those parts of the personality that one is not aware or conscious of. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud contest for supremacy in the literature of psychoanalysis, and both made new definitions of the self. But it is Jung's description that goes furthest and deepest, and so is chosen as the subject-matter for discussion in this essay. This discussion will show how a psychoanalytical conception of the self affects one's attitude and behaviour towards society in general, and towards two contemporary concerns in particular: political participation and ethnic diversity in society.

As an empirical concept, the self designates the whole range of psychic phenomenon in man. It expresses the unity of the personality as a whole (Jung, 1971)

The self is a quantity that is superordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche , and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we also are (Jung, 1917)

At the turn of the nineteenth-century Freud made a great extension to man's definition of self by showing that it and the ego are not produced and ruled exclusively by consciousness and our waking thoughts, but are powerfully affected by unconscious and repressed thoughts and tendencies that we are unaware of, but which can be illuminated by analysis of our dreams. Thus in Freud's definition of self all unconscious influences upon the personality must be included alongside conscious influences. Freud still thought that the territory of consciousness was larger than that of the unconscious, but he demanded that the unconscious be considered as an influence upon the self.

One can visualize the psychoanalytical model of the self by thinking of a cross-section of the Earth. The territory and height from the surface to the sky is that possessed by consciousness, and the crust, just beneath the surface of the Earth, represents the shallow territory of the unconscious. So for Freud the dominant force in this model is the ego which rules the conscious world. But this model was extended still further by Freud's leading pupil, Carl Jung. During an intensive examination of his own dreams and visions between 1913 and 1917 Jung discovered that the unconscious does not end in the crust found by Freud (named the personal unconscious by Jung): instead it drops through the crust, down through the thousands of kilometers of mantle (the collective unconscious), until it finally reaches the core. It is this core that Jung names the Self. This last sentence tells how radical Jung's model is. Most academics identify the self exclusively with consciousness (i.e., with the atmosphere in our model) and deny that it has any subterranean existence at all. With Freud this view is modified to take account of a thin layer of unconsciousness; but it is still clearly consciousness that generates and has the most profound effect upon the self. In Jung the picture changes totally. As the two quotations cited above show, the self is no longer seated in the word of consciousness but at the centre of the world of the unconscious. And the unconscious is described as a territory far vaster than that of consciousness. The ego is thus demoted to a subordinate position to the self. The self is the centre of the unconscious and the ego the centre of consciousness, but the ego is generated out of the unconscious and therefore the self is master of both the ego-consciousness and the unconscious. Thus the psyche and one's personality are made of two halves, and the purpose of life is to unite these halves - a process Jung named individuation.

Freud was the first to discover what Jung later named the 'personal unconscious': the first layer of the unconscious, which is a storehouse for the painfully repressed thoughts and feelings of an individual. Jung's great discovery was the collective unconscious: a autonomous, historical and living layer of the unconscious beneath the personal unconscious that is not the possession and collection of a single person but the age-old fund of all humanity: a vast treasure-house in the psyche of all the experiences, emotions, repressions and passions that the species homo sapiens has ever endured and cherished. Within the collective unconscious are archetypes: typical collective experiences of humanity that appear to us in our dreams in the mythological motifs of antiquity, and other symbols such as the mandala. The collective unconscious is a reservoir of the wisdom and experience of all ages, and when we enter it in our dreams all these experiences are made available to us. Thus for Jung the self is twofold: it is the ego of the individual which is the seat of consciousness, but at a deeper level it is the substratum shared by all humanity.

A belief in the collective unconscious, the archetypes and individuation profoundly affects the relationship between the individual and society. It can also transform how one understands and practises sociology.

When first observed the ideas of the collective unconscious and of individuation are anathemas to all things sociological. Sociology is the observation of how people live and interact together in groups; sociology assumes that the healthiest society is a gregarious one where there is the most interaction and collective effort between its various members. But individuation demands as an absolute principle the development of the individual in solitude with himself, and exalts self-discovery to a supreme level, appearing to discard one's collective responsibilities in favour of personal responsibilities. Individuation is a principium individuationis in the style of Aristotle, an affirmation of the Apollonian maxim 'Know thyself'. Self-realization is not a collective activity and so it is hard to see how sociologists' and analytical psychologists' views of society could be more different. One seeks to build an ant-farm, the other a city of tigers. But this rift is not necessarily what it seems, and is has so far been stated too simplistically.

Individuation can profoundly affect one's attitude to the politicization of society and to its ethnic makeup. Central to analytical psychology is the idea that the best society is one where each of its members must have maximum self-knowledge of themselves before they can come together for the mutual benefit of one another. Individuation is a training-ground for moral and political responsibility. An individuated man believes that a government that is be elected by a majority of citizens who have each endured the difficult journey into the self, into the passions, repressions and base instincts that are latent within all humanity, has more legitimacy and is likely to do more good than a government that is chosen by a herded electorate who understand little of themselves and who succumb to the nebulous promises of only a few of its members. Thus in the beginning individuation is certainly a highly personal and introspective activity. Nothing can spare the individuated man the 'torment of ethical decision' (Jung, 1995, p362) or the need to consult the 'spontaneous and decisive impulses on the part of the unconscious' (Jung, 1995, 362) before he can enter political decision in a responsible way. The aim of the process is to realize the self in its totality: to integrate the conscious and unconscious halves of the personality -- by self-examination of one's dreams, fantasies, and imagination. Individuation is thus a creative act of self-completion. Jung explained this integration by reference to the 'two million year old man' (Jung, 1977, p88)) who is alive in each of us. Individuation means adding the historical aspect of our humanity, the collective experience of our species over thousands of millennia, to the particular social circumstances that arise in our particular society at our particular time. When this integration fails the unconscious and consciousness fall out of equilibrium and unleash evil phenomenon such as Nazism, Stalinism and other modern totalitarian regimes.

Individuation makes it impossible to be a willing supporter of any kind of totalitarian or authoritarian political regime; or, in the case of modern Western politics, to timidly acquiesce to the will of the herd. Responsible political citizens must 'learn the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinions and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans' (Quoted in Stephens, p158). An individuated citizen could never submit to the mendacious deceptions of a Hitler, a Stalin or Milosevic. Equally his conscience does not bend or become fooled by what Orwell called 'the mass of lies, deceptions and evasions' (Orwell, 1940) that is modern politics. The individuated man has seen and experienced truth, and this prepares him to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the society he belongs to. Anthony Stevens has defined the cultural contribution of analytical psychology well

To use these years (of individuation) to become as complete a human being as we can within the limitations of our culture is to contribute to the well-being of society as much as to the personal fulfillment of our lives Well individuated people are, and always have been, the repositories wisdom, for they have time to reflect , to reflect all they have learned with a life of experience. (Stevens, 1994)

Reflect is the key word. Once individuation is complete, the reflection of this wisdom is back out into the society one is part of and so benefits that society enormously. Psychoanalysis is highly individualistic at first, but then shows an efflorescence of wisdom that diffuses throughout society.

So too an individuated person aware of the collective unconscious understands ethnic diversity in a fresh way. He knows that at the base level all races, skins and tribes of men are essentially the same: they share the same biological and cultural histories, they can succumb to the same latent tendencies for violence and destruction, and they are capable of the same high excellence in art and organization of society. It is only the outward appearance of consciousness that is superficially different amongst races and peoples: the substrata of the unconscious are the same in all peoples, and so no one is superior to any other at bottom. The archetypes of the collective unconscious affect all men equally with the same power and numinosity. Someone who thinks like this has a maximum amount of tolerance towards his fellow man despite all outward differences. The individuated Englishman knows that the emotions, instincts and aspirations of the Ugandan, the German and the Malaysian are the same. For someone with this attitude racism, extreme nationalism and ethnic discrimination of all types are anathema. And such an attitude is ideal and necessary for constructing the cosmopolitan societies that will dominate the twenty-first century.

A sociologist's final judgment about the worth of psychoanalysis ought to be balanced. His instincts can tempt him too quickly into prejudiced denouncements of psychoanalysis, and the aids it can extend to sociology. Psychoanalysis will not become the foundation stone of sociological practice or theory, but it arguably has much to teach about how the psychology of the individual affects the way people behave in the society they belong to. Jung's critique of Western society in Psychology and Religion, Civilization in Transition and Aion was perhaps the most powerful and insightful of the twentieth century. In its early years his confrontation with the unconscious was necessarily highly individualistic and introverted; but once Jung understood clearly his discovery of the collective unconscious he spent the next fifty years promoting knowledge of it as widely within to society as he could. He spoke of his work as 'a compensation for our times' (Jung, 1995, p249); and any sociologist who seeks to know how individual temperaments and attitudes affect members of a society should at least have considered that compensation, even if they do not adhere to it themselves.

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