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Those trained as both psychoanalysts and sociologists grapple with their dual professional identity differently than analysts who are first historians, musicologists, lawyers, or bankers. The psychoanalyst-sociologist thinks simultaneously about the macro and the micro in ways each discipline might find alien in practice and theory. Compartmentalization of competing intellectual orientations is often required, though not always possible, when at work in one field or the other. The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Diverse Perspectives on the Psychosocial provides an invaluable set of reflections on such dilemmas and dual positions.
For two parties to be divorced, they first must be married. Sociology and psychoanalysis were never married; rather, they have been engaged in a series of flirtations and more or less advanced stages of courting for the entirety of their existence. In his essay “Estranged Labor,” Karl Marx argues that industrialized societies disrupt the natural relationship between human beings and work by making work into a slavelike obligation instead of a creative expression. Here the “divorce” and its terms are clear. But in the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis, it is hard to talk of estrangement because the two (unlike human creativity and work in Marx's example) were never truly coupled in the first place.
Nevertheless, some reasons for estrangement of the two disciplines from each other are the following:
Differing standards of empiricism: Sociology continues to follow a positivist bias; conclusions must be rooted in directly observed data. Psychoanalysis, alternatively, allows the feelings and intuitions of the observer to lead to conclusions. Ethnographic sociologists are closer to psychoanalysts in this
way and thus likely represent a majority of sociologists who become psychoanalysts.
Differing training requirements: In sociology there is no equivalent to the training analysis required of psychoanalysts. This lead