On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> >I'd like to propose an LBO corollary to Godwin's law: invoking Freud,
> >Lacan, and/or psychoanalysis in an LBO thread is a reliable indicator
> >that the thread's content to noise ratio is approaching zero.
>
> That's your occupational symptom. You're some kind of empirical
> psychologist, right?
>
> Doug
You say that like it's a bad thing. To be fair, clinical researchers have found that psychoanalysis (like a number of other psychological therapies) is an effective treatment for psychological disorders. I think it has its place. As a way of understanding economic and social relations, it's irrelevant.
For instance, the concept of the unconscious cannot explain why economic inequality exists in a society. Sure, you can posit unconscious desires that are subliminated into accumulation of wealth, but that analysis simply begs the question: how do these unconscious desires become translated into the social reality of economic inequality? To really answer the question, you need to analyze social relations: economic production, laws, socialization into specific norms like the sanctity of private property.
So whether or not the unconscious "underlies" social facts like inequality, you still need to analyze social relations, and that analysis is completely orthogonal to an understanding of the unconscious.
Miles