You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 194-4, in “Psychoanalysis and Sociology,” Heinz Hartmann, who would be a most important psychoanalyst in the United States for years to come, stated that many problems belonging to the social sciences must be examined with the help of psychoanalysis. Six years later, Hartmann (1950a) argued for the creation of a common conceptual language for the social sciences to define sociological problems in terms of their psychological meaning and, vice versa, to formulate psychological ones in direct relation to the social structure. The following year, at a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Section of the American Psychiatric Association, Talcott Parsons, the preeminent American sociologist, stated that the influence of psychoanalysis had “deepened and enriched the understanding of human motivation and had become pervasive in the social sciences” (p. 17).
Only 15 years before, Rudolf Loewenstein, who would become Hartmann's coauthor of the most central concepts in so-called American ego psychology which would come to dominate psychoanalysis worldwide, had taken what I would consider the most standard “biological” approach, which he had based squarely on the Oedipus complex (Cénac and Loewenstein, 1936). How did Loewenstein get from his classification in 1936 of the four phases in the development of male sexuality, that “normally constitute the genital automatism”—desire, erection, ejaculation, orgasm—to his concept in 1949 of “pertinent propositions for interdisciplinary co-operation?”