Freudian Theory has been criticized by feminists for espousing a patriarchal social formation. The most vocal critique among Second Wave feminists is Betty Friedan, whose cornerstone work Feminine Mystique (published in 1963) took issue with Freudian psychoanalysts. She perceived Freudian Theory to comply with a subordinate role for women in and outside the household. The 1950s was a time when working-class and middle-class women were “suffering from suburban domesticity”. (Rorty, 2008, p.56) Second Wave feminists fought against this view of social formation. They found a natural ally in the cause of black Americans for their civil rights. Hence the 1960s witnessed a strong social movement along the twin axis of race and gender. In the beginning feminists were sceptical – if not antagonistic – to psychoanalysis. They marked it as spawning patriarchy and with it the earlier quiescence of women. But by 1973,
“women psychoanalysts, psychologists, and writers began to demonstrate that the women’s movement could benefit from the thought of Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, and Melanie Klein, as well as from that of the younger women who were linking psychoanalytic ideas to hormonal, chromosomal, and embryological research, to psychological studies of traits and bisexuality, and so on. New avenues for investigation opened up into the genesis of femaleness, gender roles, and all sorts of cultural influences. Investigators expected to unravel the impact “culture” may have on “nature.”” (Kurzweil, 1995, p. 6)
Freudian understanding of social formation was complemented by the works of sociologists such as Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault. Kristeva’s analysis of the process of abjection from the maternal inherent in social formation “supplements Freud’s thesis that the social is founded on the murder of the father and the incest taboo.” (Oliver & Trigo, 2003, p. xxxiii) Kristeva interpreted the incest taboo in terms of ‘abjection’ through which we try to ensure the division of culture and nature. This perspective is useful for not only extending Freudian Theory but also for cultural theorists. Kristeva concluded that the process of abjection is never finished. Instead, like all things repressed, it will manifest through other mental mechanisms. In what is a useful insight for feminist theorists, “although language and culture set up separations and order by repressing maternal authority, this repressed maternal authority returns, especially in literature and art, where imagination frees up unconscious fears and desires in a way similar to dream-work.” (Oliver & Trigo, 2003, p. xxxiii) Central to social formation, according to Kristeva, is collective identity formation and by extension individual identity formation. For Kristeva,
“abjection is coextensive in both individual identity and collective identity, which operate according to the same logic of abjection. Whereas an individual marks his difference from the maternal body through a process of abjection, society marks off its difference from animals through a process of abjection. In her analysis, however, the animal realm has been associated with the maternal, which ultimately represents the realm of nature from which human culture must separate to assert its humanity.” (Oliver & Trigo, 2003, p. xxxiii)
Freud’s conception of social formation is contested by those who place Freud outside the scientific tradition. The Freudian discursive formation is handicapped by the difficulty in associating with any established schools of thought. The conceptual novelty of Freudian Theory is too unfamiliar to be regarded a continuation or tradition. As a result, the idea of Freud as a humanist – as against a scientist – has taken currency. In this view, he is a discoverer of the ‘social formation of sexuality’. This discovery resonates with the time-tested formulations of Aristotle and Plato, whose conception of ‘eros and ethos’ finds congruence with Freud’s coining of ‘the id and the superego’. The dialectic, then and now, is between the opposing forces of desire and moral uprightness. The association of Freudian Theory with the wisdom of the Hellenistic Age has its benefits and costs. One major drawback is that it reduces Freud’s most unique and historically momentous discoveries through the suggested familiarity. (Shepherdson, 1999, p. 187)
Freud’s contribution to sociology is in forwarding an alternative to the traditional biomedical and socio-historical modes of analysis. At the core of the psychoanalytical model is the distinction between nature and culture. But specific features of Freudian Theory such as the unconscious, free association, repression, etc can be problematic as contemporary discussions of the body have brought to light. Under the psychoanalytic model, embodiment is understood to be remote with respect to conventional biological and historical approaches. In this respect, “the theoretical specificity of psychoanalysis is constantly effaced, and we are offered two contradictory images—biological essentialism and social construction—even though it is acknowledged that psychoanalysis is distinct from both.” (Shepherdson, 1999, p. 187)
In modern times, Freud’s ideas are often fused along with that of Karl Marx and Ferdinand de Saussure into one amalgamate theory of social formation. Under this theory, the commodity form, which is fundamental to capitalist exchange, is “complemented by a paradoxical alteration in the relations of consumers and products, through, first, the evolution of a sign exchange system and a change in the consumer in the direction of intensified narcissism.” (Gane, 1991, p. 61) Baudrillard chips in to synthesize this theory, by suggesting a ‘concept of personalization through the commodity.’ (Gane, 1991, p. 61) He contends that under the capitalist exchange human beings are to varying degrees alienated from one another. They also suffer depersonalization to the extent that what passes for popular culture is one of people acting like combinatorial machines. Instead of being an intricate and intellectually engaging experience, culture is reduced to the ‘smallest marginal difference in style and status’ among the constituent individuals. Extending on Freudian Theory, Braudrillard asserts that the new culture is far from being a complex syntax. Instead, its basic elements are mixed together “in multiples such as the structure of the basic question and response survey. The individual is summoned to choose from a range of objects, and a range of questions, and a range of credit companies. This is a consumer society.” (Gane, 1991, p. 61) It is fair to claim that Freud would have assented to this condemnation of social formation witnessed in capitalist societies.
One of the key contributions of Freudian Theory is its articulation of family relationships in terms of assuaging primal fears or satisfying primal instincts. The development of the concept of the superego is of particular interest as it showed “the admixture of childhood fear and idealization of the father as essential elements of the internalization of authority, both the personal authority of the father and bourgeois authority relationships in general. This meant that children of either sexes tend to willingly submit to paternal authority in the knowledge that it would offer them a protective figure. Sacrificed in this bargain is expectation of unconditional love from the father, which is naturally sought from and offered by the mother figure. The psychological aspects of family structure and organization inform and build Freud’s theorization of social formation. (Langman, 1991, p. 168) For example, Freud believed that many of an adult’s predispositions toward politics and cultural sensitivities are determined to a great extent by parental values and socialized character. Authoritarianism as a dimension of character “could explain a number of seemingly unrelated aspects of economy, class and political ideologies.” Through the theory of depth psychology Freud helped augment another dimension to modern Marxist thought. In particular, it threw light on the processes of socialization
“through which a society transformed desire and domination into willing assent to secure its reproduction. Just as ideology obscured the operations of an economy, the individual’s defences mystified his or her behaviour to the person. But further, it showed in more precise ways how the social formation fostered suffering.” (Langman, 1991, p. 168)
Freud explains at length how repression of desire (sexual, sensual or otherwise) is fundamental to how human behaviour transpires. He termed the superego as the individualization of repression and in consequence a key determinant of character development. Freud’s key insight is how the processes specific to the individual is not exclusive from larger socio-political phenomena. Thus, though the superego was partially based on “the child’s internalization of the father’s superego, the resulting character structure did not always fit hand in glove with the economy”. (Langman, 1991, p. 169) In reality, individual character could be more resistant to modification than established socio-economic structures. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the individual is the basic unit for the construction of culture. This is especially evident in capitalist cultures. But as the character structure was “shaped not only by contemporary experiences but the legacies of earlier generations, more archaic legacies endured sub rosa and could sustain particular values and beliefs despite social change.” (Langman, 1991, p. 169) Hence Freudian Theory has contributed to exposing the interdependence of social formation and individual identity formation.
Further, Freud was one of the first to introduce the idea of the unstable subject, profoundly and uncertainly divided between the conscious and unconscious. This separation comes transpires due to the movement of the individual from being into meaning,
“whereby the raw material of human subjectivity (the infant) encounters the laws of culture and the demand to take up a position within the symbolic structures of that culture (meaning). This means giving up original anarchic and asocial drives and desires in favour of those acceptable to the social order. In doing so, the individual is required to repress those drives and desires into the space that at that moment opens up for them, that of the unconscious. Thus, the movement from being into meaning inevitably involves the founding principle of loss.” (Easthope & Mcgowan, 2004, p. 73)
The function of language is important to understanding the psychological and social formation of the self. Both Lacan and Freud have formulated their ideas on the subject. Lacan, who belonged to a later generation of psychologists than Freud, was of the view that all experiential and existential phenomena discussed in Freudian Theory could be studied in linguistic terms. This is a radical idea that attempts to understand complex cognitive processes in quasi-mathematical terms. The act of internal or external speech “involves intricate, imaginary projections and cross-identifications in which otherness opens up the privileged site of the unconscious.” (Przybylowicz, 1986, p. 5) Hence, a path is paved for understanding individual psychology via an analysis of “the narrative’s rhetorical structures which reveal displaced, repressed desire.” (Przybylowicz, 1986, p. 5) Freud found it problematic in applying his theories and techniques in the study of art and literature. To see the process of literary creation in terms of ‘wish fulfilment’ (which is the basis for human motivation and thought) is neither intuitive nor conventional. Freudian Theory reckons that what manifests as fantasy is actually the unfettered energy of the unconscious.
In conclusion, Freudian Theory goes a long way in helping us understand social formation. It is interesting to note that many sociologists from the generation succeeding Freud either embellished or added interpretation and comment to the theories set out by Freud. Louis Althusser is one of them and in his influential work Lenin and Philosophy expounds on the ideology of social formation as a conflation of Marx and Freud. He says ideology had no history or, in other words, it was ‘external’. This stance was later seconded by Michel Foucault, who noted that “on the Marxist side, power was posed only in terms of the state apparatus.” (Godiwala, 2003, p. 186) Hence Freudian Theory has far reaching impact and implications well beyond the discipline of psychology. Addendums to Freud’s work in the form of Althusser and Foucault underscore how Freud’s views on social formation have relevance to political science, sociology and even the study of history and anthropology.
References
• Brickman, C. (2003). Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Easthope, A., & Mcgowan, K. (Eds.). (2004). A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd ed.). Maidenhead, England: Open University Press.
• Gane, M. (1991). Baudrillard’s Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture. New York: Routledge.
• Godiwala, D. (2003). Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since C. 1980. New York: Peter Lang.
• Kurzweil, E. (1995). Freudians and Feminists. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Oliver, K., & Trigo, B. (2003). Noir Anxiety. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Przybylowicz, D. (1986). Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James. University, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Rorty, A. O. (2008). Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Weiss, G., & Haber, H. F. (Eds.). (1999). Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. New York: Routledge.
• Wexler, P. (Ed.). (1991). Critical Theory Now. London: Falmer Press.