![]() This pursuit to squeeze more productivity out of workers while also managing worker discontent in the cheapest way possible has spawned innovations in labor management which reflect the institutional milieu of the respective time. Maintaining the delicate balance between a worker who is just “not-unhappy” enough or desperate enough to continue working while also cutting costs to the bone presents a continuous challenge for business interests. 294).Capitalism has always and will always depend on a compliant workforce. The alternative to an historical psychology must be at some point simply to postulate the existence of something standard, normal and even normative that ‘behaves’ in history, and to do this, simply to postulate it, is to surrender the historical method” (Donald Meyer, review of Erikson’s Young Man Luther, in History and Theory, I, 3, p. Freud made the most radical effort to explain the existence of these agents-‘mind,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ ‘instincts,’ the ‘individual,’ the ‘self,’ ‘human nature’ itself-in exclusively historical terms. ![]() But this has not safeguarded them from neglecting their main task: to incorporate those human agents themselves fully into history. In liberating themselves from grossly nonhistorical principles of explanation-gods and demons, dialectical materialisms and idealisms, etc.-historians have come to see their task as that of understanding the interactions between the human agents of history with their environment. “Psychoanalysis is the most radically historical psychology: this is its basic challenge to all other psychologies, and it is only in terms of this challenge that historians can finally evaluate its usefulness to them. Incidentally, the historicization of Freud ironically obscures precisely what is historical in his thought. ![]() In what follows I am concerned with “historical” interpretations of psychoanalysis in general, not merely with the work of historians.ĥ. 126: “However much Freud’s thought strove to be universal in its range, it was obviously bound by its creator’s own mental endowment and early experience.” Recently Carl Schorske has undertaken a historical and biographical interpretation of Freud’s concepts ( American Historical Review, 1973). Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958), p. Even when historians have had no interest in the polemical issues that thus almost inevitably surround the historicization of Freud, their own bias as historians leads them to take such an approach. ![]() Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (New York, 1970), etc. Sampson, The Psychology of Power (New York, 1966), pp. More recently such arguments have been taken up by feminists see, for example, Ronald V. The neo-Freudian strategy from the beginning was to show that “Freud was in many respects limited by the thinking of his time, as even a genius must be” (Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development, p. It is not only those trained as historians, of course, who take what purports to be a historical approach to Freud. Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain - an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.Ĥ. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. ![]() Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades.In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |