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Psychotherapists, consumed by the day-to-day task of helping the troubled, tend to forget that their work is historically situated and that it plays a very real, albeit ambiguous, social role. More exactly, they have not so much forgotten the sociohistorical side of psychology as failed to consider it in the first place. The forgetting is done for them by bourgeois culture, which established a split between subjective and objective realms, made a fetish of the former, and turned it over to psychology to “cure” once the need for religion had been outgrown.
Paradoxically enough, the great conquistador of the subjective world, Sigmund Freud, is the one psychological thinker whose work leads us back to the actual social base of the psyche. This root is, however, fissured: the historical splitting between body and society out of which the mentality is generated. It appears in Freud's thought not so much as direct statement (in many examples of which Freud's work is sociologically crude, or tends to lapse into mechanism) as in his profound grasp of paradox and contradiction, the sense that what is truest in men is the irreconcilable conflict between their desire and civilization.
But this sits ill with the needs of therapy and bourgeois legitimacy. From the beginning of this century, therefore, psychology has been wrestling with Freud, stirred by his seminal enunciation of infantile sexuality and the unconscious, but chafing all the same under the limits he staked out. In consequence, under the banner of progress, Freud has been updated, improved upon, and generally repressed by a broad front of psychological thinkers, including psychoanalysts themselves.