Psychoanalytic Thought and Sociological Inquiry*

Community sociologists always search for the ways in which national and world affairs influence the communities they study. In The Eclipse of Community,16 I used community studies to trace the influence of certain events in each decade on various types of communities. One of the more revealing instances, reported by the Lynds in Middletown in Transition,11 was the way in which the people of Muncie responded to the depression. The citizens in all classes strove desperately to interpret the setbacks occasioned by the depression within the established symbol system, which had promised unending success and progress, A later study, Small Town in Mass Society18 by Vidich and Bensman, shows the more complicated social psychological mechanisms through which people in Springdale, a small upstate New York town, retain false images of their own community and of the relation between this community and the larger society without allowing these images to interfere with their daily activities. One need only mention the enormous symbolic distortions under which southern communities labor when they avoid comparing southern social realities with the American Creed. Here, some of the ways in which the sociological community disconnects itself from larger social realities will be examined, and some ways that psychoanalytic thought might help us reestablish significant connections will be suggested.

C. Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination,14 has outlined several ways in which sociologists avoid contact with larger sociopolitical realities. His analysis is quite brilliant, especially when he