Psychoanalytic sociology

'Psychoanalytic sociology embraces work from divergent sociological traditions and political perspectives': its common 'emphasis on unconscious mental processes and behavior renders psychoanalytic sociology a controversial subfield within the broader sociological discipline' (as with psychoanalysis in academic psychology).

Similarly, "sociatry" applies psychiatry to society itself.

History

Freud

The desire to establish a link between psychoanalysis and sociology appears very early on in Freud's work. The articles "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" (1907b) and " 'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d) are evidence of this'. Though the latter article was 'the earliest of Freud's full-length discussions of the antagonism between civilization and instinctual life, his convictions on the subject went back much further': however the 'sociological aspects of that antagonism form the main subject' in 1908.

The same mode of approach was also employed by Freud in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), where he argued that 'crowd psychology, and with it all social psychology, is parasitic on individual psychology'. Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930 formed however his fullest sociological study, wherein he 'anchored his analysis of social and political life in a theory of human nature very much his own'.

Indeed, in 'works, from Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) to Moses and Monotheism (1939a), Freud analyzed the events that presided over the foundation and modification of social links, the advent of civilization, and the rise of its current discontents'; while James Strachey described The Future of an Illusion (1927) as 'the first of a number of sociological works to which Freud devoted most of his remaining years'.

Freudians

Freudo-Marxism

'Many of the early analysts were Marxists ... Wilhelm Reich, Paul Federn and Otto Fenichel the most notable among them', and were fully prepared, in Erich Fromm's words, to at least '"try to explain psychic structure as determined by social structure"'. Theodor Adorno's essays on psychoanalysis, reappropriated Freud's work and applied it to social phenomena, and in particular in his Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951), he outlined a theory of social psychology.

In 1946, Fenichel considered that '"Comparative sociology of education" is a new scientific field of the greatest practical importance', as well as concluding in general that it is 'experience, that is, the cultural conditions, that transforms potentialities into realities, that shapes the real mental structure of man by forcing his instinctual demands into certain directions'.

Lacanian

From a different angle, the early Lacan argued that 'any "concrete psychology" must be augmented by a reference to ethnology, history and law'; and later drew on 'Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology...[for] what will be termed the Symbolic'.

Post-Lacanians would continue to explore such sociological areas as 'the superego as the moment of common cultural binding', or the way 'the social bond, the Law binding us, is...a bond of the impossibility of obedience or disobedience'.

1960s and the Left

The 1960s saw a radical sociopsychoanalysis exert wide popular influence under the guidance of a number of different thinkers. David Cooper attempted to explore 'in terms of Freud's discovery...the social function of the family as an ideological conditioning device'. R. D. Laing 'has adapted Sartre's existential psychoanalysis..[as he] analyzes the concept of alienation': looking at the 'analysis of alienation in sociological and clinical senses', Laing concluded grandly that 'Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings'.

Norman O. Brown examined a 'politics made out of delinquency...even as the crime, so also conscience is collective'. Herbert Marcuse explored how in late modernity "repressive desublimation is indeed operative in the sexual sphere...as the by-product of the social controls of technological reality, which extend liberty while intensifying domination".