On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:
> From its original, psychoanalysis has *always* been about social
> theory. It is a tremendous failure of nerve to claw it back merely to
> the lab or the couch. Is anyone *seriously* going to entertain the
> idea that North American culture *isn't* narcissistic? Come on. And
> by using terms, neurotic, paranoid, psychotic and such to describe
> objective social processes, aren't we actually *destigmatizing*
> 'individual' (bah!) designations? - by shifting the responsibility
> away from the 'individual' to the collective?
>
It seems pretty bizarre to claim that psychoanalytic theory has always been social when its founder claimed that war was the inevitable product of individual aggressive impulses (see any of Sigmund's 'metapsychological' work). --and that women do not have the moral capacity of men because their superegos are underdeveloped.
By using obsolete psychodynamic terms like neurotic, I think you're reinforcing the Freudian idea that the analysis of society can be reduced to basic individual psychodynamic processes. You claim that this destigmatizes the individual, but the effect is just the obverse: calling a culture "narcissistic" implies that we can understand culture in psychological terms. I don't really see the usefulness of calling a society narcissistic or psychotic; these are just rhetorical devices that have persuasive appeal if you're enthusiastic about psychodynamic theory. I don't see how they contribute much to our actual understanding of social relations and the perpetuation of social inequality.
Miles