Kelley wrote:
> mike: psychoanalytic theory IS a theory of how the social shapes the
> individual.
Kelley, this may be. It is *a* theory. The question is is it a correct theory -- and the basis for saying that it is not a correct theory is that it is not, from its foundations, based on anything real, but rather appeals *either* to concealed religious *or* concealed vulgar biologjist premises -- and hence its explanations of *anything* are not to be trusted.
Actually, I suspect, psychoanalysis has never been anything else but a theory of literature, which is why it is so much more appealing to literary critics than it is to people actually concerned with individual behavior of actual people. I have been reading a short article in Vol. 1 No. 1 of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, "Psychoanalysis as the Enemy and Ally of African Americans." Much of it is a lengthy analysis of a rather dull and racist joke that Freud was excessively fond of. As long as it sticks to that joke it is highly entertaining, and while not very convincing in what it says about Freud's inner motives, highly convincing it its exploration of the [possible] verbal reverberations of the joke. Put otherwise, the analysis does not uncover the joke's *unconscious* meaning (for "unconscious meaning" is an oxymoron) but rather spreads out for inspection all the quite rational and conscious states which might find expresison in the joke. So -- as long as the psychoanalyst has a real or imaginary text in which to romp about, he/she is fine, but as soon as she/he turns to people, it becomes dull and detached from any concrete reality or connection to actual human life. This also explains why Harold Bloom's *Anxiety of Influence* is so excellent as literary history and so dull and unconvincing as an explanation of human motive.
But even that is not the worst of it. You say it is a theory of how the social shapes "the individual." That is not possible. Every actual individual is enmeshed in a web of contingencies that make it absurd to speak of explaining that particular life, by psychoanalysis or any other means. Society is not one thing, the individual another (like a potter and his clay), which is implied when you speak of society shaping the individual. Neither my skin nor my skeleton nor my nervous system shapes me or. I *am* them. It is just as absurd to speak of society shaping the individual. All forms of psychology (cognitive, behavioral, psychoanalytic) end up with a mechanistic conception of the human person. You can have a theory of how GM shapes the Chevrolet -- but not of how society shapes the a human personl. All Chevrolets are the same; every person is a unique history -- *is*, NOT *has* a unique history. It is an utter fantasy, and an arrogant one, to believe that there can be a science (or systematic knowledge) of individuals.
> marxist and socialist feminis,.for ex., drew on
> psychoanalytic theory when marxism seemed to fail to provide an account of
> why sexist oppression was so extraordinarily hard to get rid of [cf.,
> juliet mitchell, dorothy dinnerstein, nancy chodorow, etc] they argued
> that it was entrenched in the very process of psychic development.
And therefore preached a politics of despair, for if sexism is entrenched in the process of development, then it is eternal and outside history.
> i've
> got problems with lacan/zizek but of all the psychologies i've ever
> studied, it is among the most capable of pressing toward an analysis that
> addresses the social structural concerns you raise. some ppl like
> cognitive sci, but if you look closely it's founded on the basic principles
> of psychoanalytic theory.