Paranoid and Institutional Responses to Psychoanalysis among Early Sociologists: A Socio-Psychoanalytic Interpretation

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the paranoid and institutional responses of early American sociologists to the use of psychoanalytic ideas. Such responses began to be expressed mainly after World War II as sociology was constituted as a separate social science discipline in academia. My interest in paranoid responses began while I was working on a paper on the misalliance between sociology and psychoanalysis. Despite periods of acceptance and creative integration from the turn of the century until the mid-1950s, general trends since then suggest the gradual retreat, dilution, dismissal, and finally disappearance of psychoanalytic ideas from mainstream sociological discourse. How could this have happened? By analyzing the publications of early sociologists through a socio-psychoanalytic lens, I am trying to make sense of my own struggles, frustration, and ambivalence in combining my dual training as a sociologist and psychoanalyst. I wanted to understand the broader struggles between the disciplines that ultimately led to a decline of psychoanalytic ideas in sociology. In this context, and using a psychoanalytic framework, I argue that the struggle to position sociology as a science inflicted narcissistic injuries at both the individual and collective levels. In this paper I illustrate, within a specific socio-historical context, the reciprocal and mutually re-enforcing mechanisms linking paranoid anxieties and paranoid thinking as they were expressed in early sociologists' writings aimed at elaborating a professional identity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)