The Social Voices of Psychoanalysis: A Participant Observer's Commentary

Our workshop is called “The Social Voices of Psychoanalysis: The 1960s and 1970s.” Perhaps a better description would be “Psychoanalysis, Generation, and the ‘60s,” or “Psychoanalysis, Collective Behavior, and the ‘60s.” The question asked by all of our authors can be summarized in Andrew Peto's question: “What are the immediate causes which precipitate the breakdown of what Freud (1921) called the human “acquirements“? What is the nature of regression which results in mob violence?” Peto, Erikson, and Greenacre are concerned with politics, but more specifically with emotive demonstrations—anti-war, feminist, and civil rights, to the extent that it involved the Black Panthers—and only in the background with peaceful marches, voter registration, equal rights for women, or civil disobedience.

In many ways, these writings could not be more germane to my own intellectual, psychoanalytic, and psychosocial interests and background. I'm a sociologist as well as an analyst. I come from the field that created the observation of crowds and collective behavior: Le Bon's The Crowd, and Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in which he names collective consciousness and describes how it develops and operates. My mentor, then colleague, and good friend, Neil Smelser, the first American psychoanalyst-sociologist (among three!) wrote the definitive Theory of Collective Behavior (that avid reader, Andrew Peto, notices Neil's collaboration with Bob Wallerstein).1 In California, Nathan Hale was a good friend. I am interested in the generations, getting to know the founder of this workshop, Sanford Gifford, during a period when I was interviewing

women analysts of the second and third generations—among others, Phyllis Greenacre, one of today's writers.

In 2020, I published a book called The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, in which Erikson, along with Loewald, is front and central