On Fri, 18 May 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> And just what is "socialization into a society," if it doesn't
> involve the creation of certain psycho-ideological structures that
> frame the way people see the world? The psychic life of power, in
> other words?
>
> Doug
>
Hey, I teach and do research in psych--no argument here. But I still don't exactly see what the psychoanalytic viewpoint adds to, say, developmental psychologists' work on the creation of self-concept via family interactions. It sometimes surprises people who aren't Psychologists that many research psychologists and even therapists don't really think of psychoanalytic theory as a necessary basis for a psychological understanding of human beings. That is, we can study the psychic life of power without using psychoanalytic concepts at all!
That said, I'm intrigued by psychoanalytic explanations for these kind of ideological processes; I'm just wondering what they offer above and beyond the basic principles of cognitive and developmental psychology.
Miles