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Despite all the well-meaning efforts to establish links between social science and medicine—and there is an interesting story about the repeated efforts throughout this past century to make sure that these two fields remain in contact with one another—I think that at the present time the existing bridges are about as fragile as they have ever been. It is true that there is a fascinating new interest in the history of psychiatry, and professional historians are working in this area in an unprecedented way. By and large, though, the whole topic of culture and medicine remains a subject that attracts rare attention.
Within psychoanalysis the situation has not been too promising. Freud started out with the belief that there was something that he called “applied psychoanalysis”; but implicit in that concept was the idea that psychoanalytic so-called truths already existed, waiting to be confirmed through social research. Freud himself relied on 19th-century style anthropology, for example, and seems never to have understood what modern field work could be like. As a result, his own writings in this area, and the kind of work he sanctioned, were of a far grander and more speculative nature than is apt to prove attractive to working social scientists. It is true that his perspective meant that the most general philosophical questions would be, if not explicitly approved by Freud, matters that others could readily seek to explore.
The problem is that Freud, and the early analysts in general, did not see the relationship between psychoanalysis and society as a two-way street. Social science has something important to add to our understanding of depth psychology, and yet there are, as far as I know, no preexisting institutions that educationally encourage people to be interested in both psychoanalysis and social science. Those people who have made a notable contribution in this area