Patriarchy and Phantasy: A Conception of Psychoanalytic Sociology

In Western intellectual history, the beginning of sociologically informed psychoanalysis is frequently marked by the 1913 publication of Freud's Totem and Taboo. However, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis laplanche contends that Freud's collected works are a continuous, and often contradictory, debate about the relative contributions of biology and society to human thought and behavior.¹ If so, psychoanalytic social science is least developed in Freud's early, physiologically oriented “Project for a Scientific Psychology” ² and most developed in the late anthropological trilogy: The Future of an Illusion ,³ Civilization and Its Discontents ,⁴ and Moses and Monotheism .⁵ ‘The fluctuation in Freud's writings between medical investigation and a theory of culture,’ Ricoeur writes, “bears witness to the scope of the Freudian project.”⁶ As his first major work in anthropology, Totem and Taboo undertook for the social sciences in the twentieth century what Darwin had accomplished for the physical sciences in the nineteenth: an account of the origin of human society, the psychoanalytic parallel to The Descent of Man.

Of the early followers of Freud, many were exercised by the nature versus nurture debate, and their work may be classified as to whether it emphasizes chiefly biological processes (Abraham) or social processes (early Reich, Adler, Ferenczi, and Jones) in mental life. In fact, it is correct to say that many splits within the psychoanalytic movement have occurred precisely over this issue theoretically, with the young Reich and Adler, for instance, in their unique ways, each accusing Freud of giving insufficient weight to the social, or political, world.⁷ Jung, on the other hand, concerned with the internal world, criticized Freud for overbiologizing the concept of the unconscious by making the oedipal phantasy literally sexual rather than a more emotional and spiritual idea.⁸, ⁹