The unconscious in social psychology and psychology: A metaphor for their crises

Abstract

This theoretical essay analyses critically a metaphor, advanced by Brown and Stenner (2009), for the crises in social psychology and psychology, their objects of study and related philosophical anthropologies: Moby-Dick. In interpreting it symbolically as a myth, we argue that the core question for the crises was the concept of unconscious. Thus we reassess the social history and origins of such concept, centered around Freudian Psychoanalysis and its myth, the "Freudian legend" - how its notion of a subject, model of psychology, and concept of unconscious impacted (social) psychology, culminating in an analysis of the unconscious in social psychology today. We conclude by advancing a proposal: a different philosophical anthropology based on the rescue of a humanist concept of the unconscious, and the symbolic realm, as foundation for both the social (culture) and the subject, and thus for a new social psychology that re-unites Naturwissenschaft- and Geisteswissenschaft-models.