Sociology and the Psychoanalytic Method: Gregory Zilboorg. Amer. J. of Sociology, XLV, 1939, p. 341.

Freud's contributions had an early influence on sociology and anthropology. However, the psychoanalytic contributions to sociology extend little beyond the awareness that a new psychology has been born. There are two main reasons for this: first, objections to freudian theories; second, the impression was gained that the social reactions of the individual are direct criteria for the reaction of society as a whole. This assumption is the more misleading because to a great extent it is correct. Social schizophrenias are no more possible than social cancer and the existence of an 'interstitial psychology' is as unthinkable in nature as the blood circulation is unthinkable outside the circulatory system of an individual. However, one is led to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that one must study the individual in society in order to understand society as a whole. To understand the dynamics of social life one should look not for the characteristics of the individual's socialized reactions but for those outlets which society offers for the return of the repressed. If the fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis is properly understood and accepted, social scientists would be required to occupy themselves with the study of how a given civilization accommodates and gives expression to all the impulses which in private life are considered unsocial or antisocial.