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William Meyers’ Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry is a stunning and important contribution to an exploration of how our world turns. There are so many ways that the author examines interrelationships among fields, whether he is looking at our political life, the arts, the relationship of politics to art and science, or corporate America’s behavior, that one is led to more deeply appreciate how the unconscious drives all of our endeavors.
Meyers begins with an investigation of social science research methods, and relays that his aim is to make psychodynamic research scientific. He believes that there is a “deep inner irrationality on the political scene” (p. 3) and insists that many cruel and irrational acts are done without awareness of their unconscious motives. Terrorist attacks, denial of climate change, and other self-destructive attitudes and actions may well be engendered by unconscious desires, such as the wish to be invincible.
What makes Meyers’ work especially worthy of a wide readership is that its author does more than simply register the unconscious as an area in great need of research; Meyers also places psychodynamic research in “the context of other social science concepts” (p. 7) such as “mentalization” (a kind of empathy), “disconfirmability” (being open to proof that one’s thesis is incorrect) and “irreality” (a blending of the real and unreal). Very familiar with such concepts, Meyers’ scholarship is exhaustive, and the way he relates his own theories to those of others is both respectful and thorough.
In order to understand world events in terms of psychodynamic insights, Meyers strongly advocates empathy, or what he describes as “mentalization”: the ability to grasp how another feels. To understand others, he advises, one must first understand oneself. Meyers’ analysis of experiments conducted on artists leads him to hypothesize that these individuals tend to have a stronger capacity for mentalization than others. It is very refresh