On Psychoanalysis and Sociology

The following pages contain reflections which emerged in a long and slow process of communication between psychoanalytic and sociological staff members of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut—almost fortuitous excerpts of work in progress.

One feels strongly compelled to supplement psychoanalytic knowledge, i.e. psychological insights gained in observing individuals, with germane ideas concerning the psychic instigations which are active in groups of various sizes and structures. But such supplementary knowledge can no longer be acquired in scientific solitude. And yet, as soon as we gaze beyond the boundaries of our field of research, the problems of our own science appear in a new light, and new ones are added to the old.

Questions emerged in the cooperation of our sociologists and psychoanalysts which were touched on as early as 1927 in a discussion of Freud's 'The Question of Lay Analysis' (1926). Freud had drafted a most ambitious training programme for future psychoanalysts.

A scheme of training for analysts has still to be created. It must include elements from the mental sciences ('Geisteswissenschaften'), from psychology, the history of civilization, and sociology, as well as from anatomy, biology and the study of evolution (Freud, 1927a, p. 252).

This was to be added to the central training curriculum; for above all the analyst must of course

have learnt this psychology, this depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious, or as much of it at east as is known today (Freud, 1926, p. 206).

This central curriculum remained the 'retreat', the main task of the future therapist or researcher. However, Freud thought, an analyst who was unconcerned about orientating himself in a number of disciplines in the vicinity of psychoanalysis would be able to 'make nothing of a large amount of his material' (Freud, 1926, p. 246). As we all had to learn, it is impossible, in view of the 'knowledge explosion', to hammer as much knowledge into the single researcher as would be techn