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Neil Smelser is one of the most productive and respected American sociologists of the past forty years. Educated at Harvard over a period
of ten years , where the intersection of sociology, psychology, and psychoanalytic theory permeated the intellectual environment, Smelser' birth as a scholar was realized. His teachers included the foremost scholars of psychology, sociology, and the social sciences of the day, most of whom were also deeply involved in psychoanalysis: Henry A. Murray, Robert White, Clyde Kluckholn, Talcott Parsons, Gardner Lindzey, Alex Inkeles, Robert F. Bales.
By 1962, Smelser had already published significant sociological work and began nine years of training in psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Always the prolific sociologist, but informed and influenced by psychoanalytic theory and method, his eleven essays in this volume represent his dialogue with and appreciation of psychoanalytic theory. In the process and at times in collaboration with such psychoanalysts as Robert S. Wallerstein and Erik Erikson, his essays offer an intellectual challenge and treat to analysts and social scientists interested in the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and method with American empirical social science.
The essays span the spectrum of his sociological interests, ranging from his first analytically informed essay, first published in 1969 (Social and Psychological Dimensions of Collective Behavior) for presentation at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, to a tribute to his departed friend and colleague, Erik Erikson (Erik Erikson as Social Scientist, ). Even though Smelser pronounces that “psychoanalysis is not a major force in the behavioral and social scientists empirical research” (p. xi), it is evident that, at least implicitly, his professional and personal experience with analysis has had a profound, if ambivalent, impact in him. All the essays seek to clarify and/or utilize the conceptual, theoretical, and me