You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a substantial collection of 18 papers, intended by its editors and authors to address a damaging lack of connection in intellectual life between the fields of psychoanalysis and sociology. It has articles by leading figures who have bridged these boundaries in their own careers – Nancy Chodorow, Neil Smelser and Gilda Zwerman, for example – who each write about the discomforts of working across these fields. All of them describe
* This paper has been typeset and published by the previous publisher.
the sceptical attitude of most of the sociological field to the psychoanalytic affinities of their work.
After a Foreword, Preface, and Editorial Introduction to establish the seriousness of this intervention, the collection begins with a review by George Cavalletto and Catherine Silver of relations between these two fields, from a survey of references to psychoanalysis in articles in the two major sociological journals of the United States, between 1900 and 2004. This reveals in its empiricist way that sociological interest in psychoanalytical ideas began to rise during the mid‐1930s, reached a peak in the mid‐1950s, when such references occurred in about 10% of all articles and reviews, but has since fallen back, with a few blips along the way, to its original level of around only 2%. In other words, to a state of marginality. Here are the raw facts of the changing sociological interest in psychoanalysis.
A second article by Silver attempts to explain the meaning of this change, suggesting that unconscious responses to ideas perceived by sociologists as alien lie behind their rejection of psychoanalysis. But although such factors have no doubt been present, it is unhelpful to psychoanalysis to argue in these terms. Paranoid responses to differences have always been present in academic life and there is little to suggest that the field of sociology is exceptional in this respect. Those familiar with the inner life of psychoanalytic institutions may well have encou