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When Freud theorized that the ego mediates among id, superego, and the external world, he did not anticipate how his followers would neglect the third factor. Our field tends to assume that reality can be taken for granted as some average expectable environment that doesn't need to be explored seriously in its own right (p. 3). On the contrary, the complexity of human interactions and behaviors, as shown in social psychology research, reveals a separate universe of unexpected patterns, norms, and conflicts. These challenge any simple version of the external world and require the analyst to think—and work—beyond mere focus on a patient's internal dynamics. Paul Marcus, a training and supervising analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, as well as the author or editor of more than 20 books, contends that social psychologists can expand the psychoanalyst's grasp of counterintuitive social forces that contribute to shaping a patient's life, and that psychoanalysts can expand the social psychologist's grasp of ambivalences in normal human dynamics, which are misconstrued when reduced to deviations from group averages. The conversation between psychoanalysis and social psychology is a match made in heaven (p. 7), except that it hasn't started yet. Marcus offers nine chapters as prototypical dialogue, each chapter focusing on a classic experiment in social psychology and interweaving his views on congruence and dissonance with psychoanalytic thinking.
If names like Solomon Asch, Leon Festinger, and Stanley Milgram are not familiar to the psychoanalytic reader, they soon will be as Marcus explores, respectively, the influences of conformity (chapter 2), cognitive dissonance (chapter 3), and obedience (chapter 5) on the individual's perceptions, sense of self, and interactions with others. A corollary, the puzzle of the bystander effect, has been studied by Bibb Latane and John Darley (chapter 6). Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment demon