>>"Society" is not an individual organism writ large.
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>Agreed, individuals are society writ large.
An analogy between an "individual" and "society" is what makes a psychoanalytically inflected "social theory" very Platonic. Plato says in _Republic_:
***** I [Socrates] told them what occured to me: 'We're undertaking an investigation which, in my opinion, requires care and sharp eyesight. Now, we're not experts,' I pointed out, 'so I suggest we conduct the investigation as follows. Suppose we were rather short-sighted and had been told to read small writing from a long way off, and then one of us noticed the same letters written elsewhere in a larger size and on a larger surface: I'm sure we'd regard this as a godsend and would read them there before examining the smaller ones, to see if they were really identical.'
'Of course we would,' said Adeimantus. "But how is this analogous to our investigation into morality, Socrates, in your view?'
'I'll tell you,' I replied. 'Wouldn't we say that morality can be a property of whole communities as well as of individuals?'
'Yes,' he said.
'And a community is larger than a single person?'
'Yes,' he said.
'It's not impossible, then, that morality might exist on a larger scale in the larger entity and be easier to discern. So, if you have no objection, why don't we start by trying to see what morality is like in communities? And then we can examine individuals too, to see if the larger entity is reflected in the features of the smaller entity.'
'I think that's an excellent idea,' he said....
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...'To be self-disciplined,' I [Socrates] replied, is somehow to order and control the pleasures and desires. Hence the opaque expression "self-mastery"; and there are other expressions which hint at its nature. Yes?'
'Absolutely,' he [Glaucon] said.
'Isn't the phrase "self-mastery" absurd? I mean, anyone who is his own master is also his own slave, of course, and vice versa, since it's the same person who is the subject in all these experssions.'
'Of course.'
'What this expression means, I think,' I continued, 'is that there are better and worse elements in a person's mind, and when the part which is naturally better is in control of the worse part, then we use this phrase "self-mastery"....But when, as a result of bad upbringing or bad company, the smaller better part is defeated by the superior numbers of the worse part, then we use critical and deprecatory language and describe someone in this state as lacking self-mastery and discipline.'
'That sounds plausible,' he said.
'Have a look at our new community, then,' I said, 'and you'll find that the first of these alternatives is attributable to it. I mean, you must admit the justice of describing it as having self-mastery, since anything whose better part rules its worse part should be described as having self-discipline and self-mastery.'
'Yes, I can see the truth of what you're saying,' he said.
'Now, children, women, slaves, and (among so-called free men) the rabble who constitute the majority of the population are the ones who evidently experience the greatest quantity and variety of forms of desire, pleasure, and pain.'
'Yes.'
'Whereas simple and more moderate forms, which are guided by the rational mind with its intelligence and true beliefs, are encountered only in those few people who have been endowed with excellence by their nature and their education.'
'True,' he said.
'And is it clear to you that this is a property of your community, where the desires of the common majority are controlled by the desires and the intelligence of the minority of better men?'
'It is,' he said. *****
Observe how Plato makes use of the interlocking organic metaphors of individualized communities and communalized individuals. (Note here that "individual" once meant "indivisible.") And as you can see, individuals' reasons, desires, & pleasures are ranked in terms of social class, while social control is justified through the metaphor of self-discipline. This is what psychoanalysis does in fact when it masquerades as "social theory." It's a circular reasoning: "Society is like an individual mind. After all, an individual is a miniature polis, so it makes sense to analyze society in terms of an individual mind."
The whole is the false. Divide and conquer.
Yoshie