The Link Between the Social and the Individual:

 In the previous part of this posting I postulated that the social precedes the existence of the individual and the psychological is a product of the social. My basic argument is that a gathering of individuals in some sort of a group changes their individual psychology, strongly implying that every group of people has its psychology, which goes beyond the psychology of each of its members separately. The other point is that the individual psychology of a member could undergoes changes while social psychology is not affected by the psychology of the individual, except when we deal with issues pertaining to leadership.

The recent predicaments the USA society is facing brings to attention a gradual closeness happening between whites and blacks, radicals and conservatives, higher and lower classes; even Republicans and Democrats. This is major change. Thus, the link between the social and the individual is the main issue in the phenomenon of change, as such. Change is always that gradual narrowing or widening of gaps between opposites in the society. In other terms, when we look closer to social change, we could notice a tendency to turning the social into psychological or separating the psychological from the social: at the present time whites are psychologically prone and inclined to condemn what was -maybe- accepted or ignored a few years or months ago. The point is that psychoanalysts reject to give social changes the deserved attention because they do not know how to fit that change in a psychological formulation of problems. As an example, dealing with racial discrimination from the narcissistic point of view is something recently accepted and integrated in the analysts view of the return of the repressed. Yet, if we introduce the notion that Blacks too have narcissistic issues that needs to be considered part of understanding the contemporary picture of racial discrimination, psychoanalysts get flustered because they thought only of a situation that their basic analytic training could make them deals with. (I can vouch for that from the responses I get to suggesting addressing Blacks’ narcissism in our thinking. The main objection is a wrong understanding of narcissism as self-love, and anything else would complicate of dealing with social narcissism and dividual narcissism (of blacks).

The move from the social to the psychological is a movement that most psychoanalysts neglect that it is happening all the time, even in the psychoanalytic organizations. As neglecting this fact in a society leads to social unrest and missing good chances to move ahead. My thought about that is coming from being an analyst and having experiences with my colleagues’ resistance to notice the forces of social change and the reluctant of the ‘individuals’ give up their dissections. Not being classical (or what one has learned in his training) is a common resistance to change in psychoanalysis.

Coming back to the main issue: the gradual and unavoidable social change changes the methods of rearing the young, male-female relations, and moral and familial concepts among many other things related to daily life. Social change creates new “human subjects”. Analysts, particularly in the USA are unable to look at psychoanalysis from the point of view that they can acknowledge change and still remain devoted to their traditional ways of thinking. Because what changes in the society is the individual and in the psychoanalytic society is the analyst then we could say that the subject matter of both ‘socials’ maintain their inner cores: a contemporary subject will be as moral or immoral as his ancestors but according to a new system of morality. In psychoanalysis, a modern analyst will remain advocate of psychoanalysis but with a better understanding of its discoveries about the subject. An example, a modern analyst will not understand narcissism as withdrawal of libidinal investment to the self, but as a disturbance in the sense of identity. The subject of the twentieth century deals with sexuality differently but guilt about sexuality would  still remain present in modernity.

We come now to the third point: is there a psychoanalytic theory of the society? Psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject. Any changes to the subject that is resulting from social change will require psychoanalysts to look closely at the psychodynamics of that new subject. It is expected that the psychodynamics will remain the same (defense mechanism or the usage of metaphors as the means of expressing the unconscious. The changes in the Oedipal triangle will be different and expressing the difference in new patterns of attachments will be the contemporary analyst’s job.  This change will dictate changes in the meaning of love, aggression, loyalty, etc. That might need reformulating aspects of the ‘social’ according to those changes but  the permanency of the psychical will not be affected by the social in a manner that will turn the subject into a human object with no psychological life.

 In a broader conception we could say that psychoanalysis will have a new theory of the subject of the ‘social’ of the time. The subject of the twenty first century will be replaced by contemporary issues that pertain to modernity. Although the ‘social’ is a multifaceted topic (economics, familial rules and structuring, morality and spirituality, etc.,) all those facets get internally organised in a way that permits the sociologist to have new social theories, but psychoanalysis will be limited in what has to be changed.