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For at least a decade now a controversy has been gaining momentum in this country among researchers and publicists concerned with the scientific foundations and political relevance of psychoanalysis and sociology. Despite the accelerating pace of publication and the sharpening tone of the polemic,1 however, the lines of opposition have only recently achieved their present critical form. The following have been among the more important steps along the way:
1. Increasingly, in recent years, numerous younger sociologists have been engaging in pointed attacks on the alleged conservatism of “structural-functional” analysis and the apparent indifference of the acknowledged leaders of this school (Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton and others) to the positive potentials of social conflict, historical change, and unreconstructed generic human nature.
2. Sharp criticism has continued to be directed at the philosphies and programs of research advocated by acknowledged leaders in empirical investigation, notably Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. The research program associated with the so-called “theories of the middlerange” is being subjected to particularly heavy criticism despite the acknowledged sensitivity of its sponsor, Professor Merton of Columbia, to the structural strains to deviance, the dysfunctions of bureaucracy, conflicts in “role-sets,” and the extent of “anomie” in modern society.2
These relatively specialized points of contention, it is safe to say, could not have attracted general attention had they not become linked with better known and more resonant philosphies. If the intramural criticisms of prevailing trends in sociology have now achieved the force of a critical challenge, it is because they have been fused with fresh interpretations of the two thinkers who have continued to excite selected strata of university intellecutals since the 1930s, Marx and Freud. It does not matter that the accents of today's Marx and Freud seem