Abstract
The author addresses the problems that arise if the social unconscious is defined as a generalization of parts of the individual dynamic unconscious. The discussion presents the idea that the contents of the social unconscious are not psychical but social in nature, and that the social unconscious stands not in opposition to a generalized individual consciousness but to social consciousness. The author demonstrates that historical materialism conceptualizes the appearance of the social unconscious in social consciousness in the same way as psychoanalysis conceptualizes the reappearance of the individual's unconscious in his consciousness. Additionally, a specific definition of the domain of analytic social psychology is given.
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Notes
3 Freud himself regarded his thesis of Eros and Thanatos as an “often far-fetched speculation” (Freud, 1920g, 1955, p 24), as “hypotheses” concerning which he did not know “how far I believe in them” (ibid., p 59). For a more detailed critique of this Freudian concept, see for example Fenichel (1945, pp 59–61) and Zepf (2006a, pp 35–39).
4 Substitutive formations of the repressed differ from the repressed itself in content, but remain identical with it structurally. As an example Freud cites an obsessional neurotic patient who “suffered from having to take a long time over putting on his stocking,” and – “after overcoming his resistance” – “found as an explanation that his foot symbolized a penis, that putting on the stocking stood for a masturbatory act … .” (Freud, 1915e, 1957, p 200)
5 Freud states that he “himself conceives of the neuroses as substitutive formations for the repressed libido and explains their differences in terms of the different mechanisms of repression and of the return of the repressed” (Nunberg and Federn, 1967, p 268).
6 The same goes for Jung's concept of a “collective unconscious,” which he defines as “the all-controlling deposit of ancestral experience from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation” (Jung, 1928, p 162). I shall not discuss this concept further here.
7 As Ferenczi (1908, 1980, p 290) puts it, neurosis is a “sickness of society.”
8 The passage that includes this concept reads as follows: “He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Smith, 1776, 1937, p 477; my italics).
9 [Translator's note: The German word is Verhältnisse, which is also translated in the Standard Edition as “conditions” or “circumstances.”]
10 This idea might also underlie a comment by Freud on child-raising which Anna Freud (quoted in Sandler, 1983, p 35) recalled in a conversation with Sandler: “I am reminded of something my father said … when he spoke of how we bring up our children. He said we supply them with a map of the Italian lakes and send them to the North Pole.” At all events, if the family is the psychological agency of society, the map of the Italian lakes allows the children, when grown up, to survive in the frozen waters of the North Pole by imagining them to be Italian lakes.
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Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab. MITI
2 [Translator's note: The masculine form is used for convenience for both sexes.]
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Zepf, S. The Relationship Between the Unconscious and Consciousness – A Comparison of Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism. Psychoanal Cult Soc 12, 105–123 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100118
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100118