Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. XIII, 1990: Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: Sacrificing Psychoanalysis to Utopia? C. Fred Alford. Pp. 483-507.

Alford argues that psychoanalysis is being used by three authors, Chodorow, Benjamin, and Dinnerstein, to corroborate their hidden utopian social theories. Specifically, they have chosen ideas of the British school of object relations to analyze the social relationships which they see as pathological, but then abandon these theories when trying to imagine an alternative society. Alford describes this as using psychoanalytic theory to climb to the top of the ladder, the top being a new social order, and then throwing away the ladder because the psyche has been transformed and now reflects the new order. He likens this to the work of the Frankfort school, particularly to Herbert Marcuse who blended Freud and Marx for the foundation of a communist utopia. The larger question raised is that these authors make use of psychoanalytic theory as a catalog of alternative accounts of human nature. Social theorists first figure out what kind of society they want and then pick from the catalog the view that best supports it. Psychoanalysis, however, is a world view; it is not being taken seriously by the authors mentioned, who abandon it for their own social-psychological theories.