Abstract
Far from accepting the common rejoinder, that psychoanalysis belongs in the consulting room, limiting its aim to understanding and interpreting the individual psyche, I argue that psychoanalysis can and should extend to the social world. I also propose a methodology for this social analysis, and I argue that we could, and must, speak of a ‘social subject’. I do not claim that there is a social mind, but that the social has properties of a subject. We can model the social as if it were a subject and can show that it is methodologically viable to do so. We can, and should, therefore, introduce psychic reality into historical understanding, including affective states, such as guilt. I provide extensive clinical examples to support this case.
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- 1.
I want to emphasize that I am referring to the work of historians, rather than studies in psychobiography or more generally in social sciences. Exceptions include Saul Friedländer (1978), who explores the possibilities of a theoretically and methodologically grounded contribution to history, which he thinks essential for historical research. Joan Scott (2012) has given a thorough review of historians’ and psychoanalysts’ views of psychoanalysis as part of historical enquiry. She argues for the fruitfulness of the disruptive impact of the ‘unruly unconscious’ of psychoanalysis on the flattening character of normative historical narrative. Daniel Pick, historian and psychoanalyst, has written on a number of historical topics, including The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (2012). Lyndal Roper (1994), a historian of early modern Europe, has written a psychoanalytically informed study of masculinity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Kohut (2012), also a historian and psychoanalyst, has explored the history of National Socialism as an experiential history, based on interviews with members of the New German Circle, a post-war gathering of the pre-war German youth movement. Roger Frie (2017) combines clinical and historical methods. Stephen Frosh has written in a number of areas in which psychoanalysis can contribute to the understanding of social, cultural and political situations. For an overview, see his Psychoanalysis outside the Clinic (2010); also, Rustin (1991). Overall, however, I think that historians rarely turn to psychoanalysis as part of detailed historical research.
- 2.
This attention to change as a moment of discontinuity, which pushes underlying dynamics into the open, accessible to observation and interpretation, is akin to Lorenzer’s ‘scenic understanding’. Rothe (2009, 2012) has used it to explore forms of not-remembering in a group of Germans who, in childhood, observed the deportation of Jews (see Chap. 7).
- 3.
I am following Freud’s theory of narcissism here, which also links with his theory of groups and therefore with my thesis on what makes a society out of individuals. There are two main currents of the theory of narcissism, roughly ctaegorized as ‘normal narcissism’, associated with ego psychology and self-psychology (Federn 1936; Kohut 1971), and ‘pathological narcissism’, associated with the Kleinian and broadly ‘British School’. The former stresses the idea that ego strength, ego esteem and ordinary psychological development, build on an appropriate infusion of an unquestioned support, which is carried forward from the earliest feelings of satisfaction in which the ego first experienced itself as a reservoir of libido—primary narcissism . Freud was in no doubt that it was an illusion of autonomy, based on the mother’s original provision of a libidinal object, which later allowed the child to experience itself as the source of its independence as an autoerotism (1922, p. 245), a fortunate illusion that buttressed the experience of being oneself. Too much narcissism became an omnipotent defence against the disillusionment at the hands of reality; but insufficient narcissism left the ego in a state of weak deficit in libidinalized esteem and strength.
Pathological narcissism in the British School stresses the defensive side of all narcissism. In 1922, Karl Abraham wrote a brief letter to Freud, which showed his direction of thinking about the relationship between mourning and melancholia, the former engaged in the tough work of accommodating reality; the latter defensively ignoring reality in a manic , narcissistic preservation of the ego’s independence from reality. Inherent in this narcissism is the triumph over the object. He was seeing a necessary relationship between what would later be called normal and pathological narcissism. Melanie Klein makes the link between mourning and a manic defence against it explicit (Klein 1940); and Rosenfeld (1964) highlights a perverse attraction to a protective and exciting cover offered by an internal gang of shady customers, whose promise includes the trashing of the object. In this way, he makes a link between the ‘normal’ but defensive manic —melancholic—phase of mourning and the perverse excitement of an ego overriding any dependence on the (lost, any) object and the reality that it represents. So, in fact, the two current do converge, albeit leaving areas unclear.
On the normal narcissism side, it is clear that triumph over the object can occur if the narcissistic component of an ego suffering loss is too great, but it is left to detailed clinical accounts to demonstrate such a surfeit as if it were also a theory of the ego. On the pathological narcissism side, it is clear that there is a ‘normal’ ego that can triumph, but is weakened and drawn to the perversity of the promised protection. In this case, detailed clinical description again demonstrates this attraction and the denegation of the object that follows from it, as if it were a theory of the ego.
In both traditions, there is a theory of a normal ego energized, supported, experienced as the source of itself as an independent agency, and a theory of the ego sourced from an object, and a theory of an ego that cannot tolerate dependence and overrides it in an illusion of autonomy. That surmounting of dependence on an object by narcissism can be more or less triumphal, denigrating and annihilating to the object, and more or less drawn into a perverse relationship with exciting internal objects who substitute excitement for the experience of degrading dependence.
- 4.
Anzieu (1975) has elaborated on this model, proposing that the groups as a whole can become the group ego-ideal, akin to the leader in Freud’s analysis of the mechanism of group cohesion . Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985a) considers the same system from a different angle. Individuals acting in concert produce the same group cohesion, in that their synchronized movement constitutes an identification in their egos and posits a leader-ego-ideal in the group as a whole. Interestingly for a dialogue between history and psychoanalysis , the historian, William McNeill (1995), has extensively documented the binding force of co-ordinated activity—a ‘muscular bonding’—in religious and military groups.
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Figlio, K. (2017). Psychoanalysis and the ‘Social Subject’. In: Remembering as Reparation. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59591-1_3
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