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What's American about American psychoanalysis? The question posed in 2004 in a special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and reprised at the January 2016 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, has generated, amongst a good many other things, an interesting anthology of lectures, essays and occasional pieces by Nancy Chodorow, which have now been collected in The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye. The book provides a range of overlapping personal, professional and clinical reflections on how to articulate psyche and society, and how to reconcile the premise of ‘individuality’ with the mathesis universalis of modern thought. Chodorow is particularly exercised by the problem of how to put what she sees as the mutually hostile disciplines of psychoanalysis and sociology together, a preoccupation that relates to her own career as a professor of sociology and an analyst. There seems to be a never-failing urge to revisit this problem. More importantly, however, Chodorow's personal preoccupation points to the phenomenon of ‘hybridity’ in the history of psychoanalysis itself. In fact, I found the autobiographical narrative, which I felt was rather self-aggrandising at times, far less engaging than the wider theoretical and practical theme concerning the therapeutic integration of separateness and commonality, singularity and universality.
Chodorow considers psychosocial studies explicitly in the first part of the book. Her self-defined ‘hybrid location’, or ‘dual identity’ (social scientific and psychoanalytic), provides a point of departure for a discussion of Freud's ‘drive-based sociology’ (p. 24). I am not sure what is meant by the latter, nonetheless, in a deliberately