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The Unconscious State of Social Psychology

Jan Parker

The project of critical social psychology necessarily entails a reflection upon our place in the body of the discipline and its associated practices, in the network of ideas and institutions that have as their centre the professional associations that define what 'psychology' is. This dense network is the psy­

complex ( Ingleby, 1 985; Rose, 1 985). How can we take forward a reflection on the activities and mentalities of uncritical psychologists, and compre­

hend the trajectory of our colleagues through the bureaucratic layers of this grid? This chapter is about economies of desire in the ego of psychology considered as a state apparatus, and the ways in which psychoanalytic debates over the nature of desire and the rise of conformist ego-psychology may be brought to bear on our discipline and self-discipline as 'critical social psychologists'.

Problems and Questions

The many tiny opposition movements which emerged through our various scientific 'crises' (Armistead, 1 974; Harre & Secord, 1 972; Israel & Tajfel, 1 972; Wilkinson, 1 986) have failed to capture key institutional sites in the discipline, and radical work is still marginalized. More extravagant appeals in recent years to supposed postmodern transformations in culture (Gergen, 1 99 1 ; Kvale, 1 992) are symptoms less of the power of alternative ideas than of their isolation. Some critics may think that there has been a qualitative change in psychology and that they now have the opportunity to pilot the ship through new times, but this delusion is part of the problem. Some radicals down the years have always had that view of psychology, and that has not prevented the psy-complex from growing apace and churning its way through the popular imagination, continuing the project of the policing of subjectivity that was its original impulse.

Four problems which were identified in the crisis literature twenty years ago are still apparent.

Individualism in psychology was a key target of early critique (Billig, 1 976; I srael & Tajfel, 1 972), and the task of constructing explanations

1 58 Critical Social P.lychology

which focus on social processes has long preoccupied radicals. The issue is still on the agenda in accounts of the social and cultural location of mental phenomena, but there is often a conceptual slippage, in which an individual explanation is called for to supplement the social story, and psychology enters the picture again with an even stronger mandate. Individualism still needs to be tackled as a problem in psychology, and as much as an ideological formation that masks collective phenomena (of class, gender, sexuality and race, for example) as simply a mistake.

Positivism was subjected to thorough critique, as was the mistaken image of investigative procedures in the natural sciences that bewitch social psychologists and the failure to appreciate the distinctive tasks that the phenomenon of consciousness set the researcher (Gauld & Shotter, 1 977;

H arre & Secord, 1 972). The quantification of social phenomena is, for many, now, unreasonable, and qualitative research methods have grown in popularity. This critical impulse still needs a further push, however, to highlight how positivist research is dangerous in the very way it conceals moral-political values.

Politics came onto the scene as it became clear that social psychology was not an objective or neutral value-free enterprise, but carried with it political assumptions, and could not but encourage a demeaning view of the person and the collective (Armistead, 1 974; Parker, 1 989). Social psychology's conception of the relation between the individual and the social was and is free enterprise incarnate. Even so, it is still tempting to defend the distinctive expertise and knowledge that psychology offers, and it is important to resist this temptation and insist instead that there are no such things as 'facts' independent of political perspectives. Psychology inhabits ideology, and ideology feeds on power.

Gender has moved more slowly to centre stage as an exemplar of political resistance in psychology. The position of women in psychology, as researchers and as objects of inquiry, is a distinct aspect of the political imbrication of gender and culture in the discipline ( Burman, 1 990;

Wilkinson, \ 986). But the questions raised by feminists outside and then inside the discipline, in social psychology and then in psychology as a whole, as to the masculine character of this fake science arc themselves part of a deeper problem. Feminism's critique of the male control and gendered description of psychological processes has necessarily extended to an account of the sexual dynamics of research. And now, theoretical and methodological reflection needs to focus on how particular configurations of sexual desire constitute what psychology does, and who psychologists think they are.

In sum, we still urgently need: a thoroughly social account of subjectivity that does not fall foul of individual-social dualism; qualitative research methods that look back into the process of study; a 'psychology' that is explicitly permeated with political argument; and research that embeds that argument in an account of the production of sexual contradiction.

The Unconscious State of Social Psychology 1 59 Reflexive Analytic Critique

Self-reflexive critique must, then, be constituted with reference to processes of oppression and opposition, of repression and resistance. Such critique has to be grounded so that it does not simply go round in circles but deepens our understanding of how the psy-complex operates to suppress certain forms of self-understanding and to produce particular subject posi­

tions; theories and positions which disempower those on whom psycho­

logical knowledge is practised and empower those who are invited to step into the machinery and keep the academic and professional institutions rolling along. The critique also has to ground psychology in a culture that is deeply 'psychological', in which people absorb and display theories of self and other that confirm the truth of psychological investigation. But the irony is that the culture that succours the psy-complex does not run so much on behaviourist, cognitivist or humanist lines as on psychodynamic principles. We live in psychoanalytic culture, and it is as much a pre­

condition for psychology that it expresses and legitimizes psychoanalytic thought as it expels and refuses home to psychoanalytic theorists.

Psychoanalysis, Psychology and Culture

The paradoxical double operation which psychology compulsively repeats is to draw upon psychoanalytic notions, and to deny their truth. It must also do this whenever it touches on everyday reasoning, and the appeals to common sense in psychology are characterized by a routine and ruthless cleansing of psychodynamic notions from accounts reckoned to be ordinary enough to be taken on good coin. The history of psychology is a repression of psychoanalysis, and a repression of its own past ties with psychoanalytic ideas (including an efficient amnesia about the psychoanalytic allegiances of figures ranging from A . R . Luria to Jean Piaget to E.G. Boring). To say that psychoanalysis is the 'repressed other' (Burman, 1 994) of psychology must also, in this context. where we are examining the fate of critical ideas at times of crisis, include an awareness of the political repression that has facilitated and accompanied the suffusion of psychoanalytic theory through the webs of Western culture (Berger, 1 965; Bocock, 1 976; Foucault, 1 98 1 ; Moscovici, 1 976).

This is important if psychoanalysis is not to be seen here as the alterna­

tive or the only solution to the problems that beset social psychology. It is not the alternative. We should not do psychoanalysis instead of psychology.

I want to be clear that I do not think either that psychoanalysis in general is a true explanation, and can thus be simply counterposed to the falsities of psychology, or that the particular psychoanalytic approaches I am concerned with here are correct (Parker, in press). Psychoanalytic theories are fictions, but powerful fictions that structure subjectivity and contain within them the very contradictions of those material political and economic structures that give them life, the very contradictions in which we

1 60 Critical Social Psychology

experience the oppressive aspects of this culture and through which we might imagine better lives.

To say that psychoanalysis is the repressed other of psychology is also, in this case, because culture is psychoanalytic, to highlight that peculiar way in which psychology represses culture. Culture is also the repressed other of psychology, its Other, and that culture is threaded together on psycho­

analytic narratives, held in place by 'discursive complexes'. But culture is not straightforwardly nor transparently storied. The accounts of individual and collective action that are passed from mouth to mouth, and the theories of experience and identity that circulate across the social order, conceal as much as they tell, and they must mask as much as they explain for ideology and power to link together, and for class exploitation, among other kinds of oppression, to work. And if this is a psychoanalytic culture, then the reproduction of ideology is also the repression and transformation of stories that were once told or that could be told. This is the culture that contains within it repression as a condition of its oppression, and a version of psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework which operates as much as does psychology in the service of power.

To understand what is happening when psychology reproduces itself in the machinery of the psy-complex must also be to understand what happened in psychoanalysis as the other, the threat and the guarantor of our discipline. As psychoanalysis passed into Western culture it fragmented, and, not surprisingly perhaps, the fragments function as homologues to psychology. But more than that, and this is why we need to take it seriously, not only did the fragments embed themselves more thoroughly in culture than did orthodox psychological theories, but also the relationship between the fragments carried with it a history of contradiction, a history of reflection and resistance that can be of use to 'critical social psycho­

logists'. And more than simply being homologues, the fragments organize 'psychology' as common sense in the archive of the contemporary social imaginary and 'social psychology' as a discipline in the centres of the psy­

complex.

Repression in Psychoanalysis

Three phases in the repression are important; for our purposes here, the third most so. The repression of psychoanalysis was first accomplished in Central Europe in the 1 930s through self-censorship as the International Psychoanalytic Association, in a misguided attempt to placate the fascists, excluded radicals from its ranks (Kovel, 1 988). The expulsion of Reich and the sanctions against Langer are significant moments here, and the lesson that other psychological organizations could learn, but refuse to learn, is that political caution will not persuade conservative forces to treat you politely. Already, in this first phase, the radical elements were being slewed off from the psychoanalytic mainstream. (It is worth noting, incidentally, that orthodox professional psychology associations in Germany coli

abo-The Unconscious State of Social Psychology 1 6 1 rated enthusiastically with the fascists, and with thoroughly social concep­

tions of the person in relation to their community to boot . ) Then, second, the repression proper started as the psychoanalytic movement was crushed, books were burned, and analysts who were fortunate enough not be taken to the camps fled, many of them to America. Not many fled eastwards, for psychoanalysis there, too, was under threat, and Stalinism also claimed the lives of radical analysts. But the migration of psychoanalysis to the US did not provide a safe haven for radicals, and the immediate fear of expulsion back to Europe and certain death combined with McCarthyism after the war led to the censorship and suppression of social critique. The secret communiques of Fenichel and the cryptic aesthetic productions of Adorno exemplify this active silence (Jacoby, 1 977, 1 983).

The third phase commences with the incorporation of analysts and analytic writers into professional institutions and the refusal of American medics to relax restrictions on the practice of psychoanalysis to doctors, the insistence on the nature of psychoanalysis as a natural science and as a process of 'cure' that would satisfy insurance companies, and the produc­

tion of a form of psychoanalysis best adapted to the American way of life, an 'ego-psychology' concerned with the adaptation of the individual to society. Ego-psychology, and American object-relations theory which succeeded it (Greenberg & M itchell, 1 983), have provided a fund of observations and models that our discipline of 'scientific psychology' could connect with, and the convergence between mainstream psychology and American psychoanalysis can be seen in the American textbooks which include a run through 'Freudj ungandadler' to H arry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney et aI., together with a good deal of misrepresentation of each (Richards, 1 989), and more recently in attempts to connect psycho­

analysis with developmental psychology in the work, for example, of Daniel Stern (Cushman, 1 99 1 ) . Critiques from within French psycho­

analysis have stressed the adaptationist tendencies in ego-psychology (Roudinesco, 1 990), but more important for us is the way the arguments then as to how we might respond to ego-psychology have trickled into popular culture and now into 'our' psychology.

The Integrity of the Psychological Sciences

The debate between Herbert M arcuse and Erich Fromm is particularly telling (Rickert, 1 986). They tell stories that structure the unconscious investments of both conservative psychologists and radical anti-psycholo­

gists. Not only do we have a radical attack on conformity in psychoanalysis in M arcuse's ( 1 95 5 ) work, but also a refusal to conform by one of the objects of his attack, Erich Fromm ( 1 94 1 ). Fromm's refusal, from a humanist standpoint, carries with it dangers and possibilities of its own;

dangers and possibilities we may attend to and learn from as we consider our place in a sister discipline. I will take up themes in the debate as they

1 62 Critical Social Psychology

touch upon the problems we have encountered in social psychology, and use those themes to elaborate an analysis of the self-images and practices of psychology. The analytic framework I use is derived from discourse analysis and psychoanalysis (Hollway, 1 989; Parker, 1 992), and structures my reading of social psychology around 'discursive complexes'.

Discursive complexes are sets of statements which constitute particular varieties of objects and subjects and also, simultaneously, are patterns of subjective investment which structure the experience of those who under­

stand themselves in relation to the texts. They are psychoanalytic themes.

Self-characterizations by psychology and social psychology of their aims and objects carry with them allusions to approaches that they find unacceptable, and the projects of radicals are implicitly framed no less than those of conservatives, in a kind of mirror image, by the fear of what they may become should they fail. A reading of a text which attends to the silences and absences, to the alternatives to the statements, is already, in a sense, a psychoanalytic reading. But which psychoanalytic reading? I n this case, I am suggesting that we are committed to a double reading, and that this derives from the arguments between Marcuse and Fromm, and this double reading can help us subvert the state as ego in modern psychology.

As I describe this reading, I will be running back through the four enduring problems in social psychology I outlined above.

Sexuality

The foundation stone of psychoanalysis for Freud ( 1 953) was the Oedipal form, but the identification of this structure as a 'complex' only appeared in his writings in 1 9 1 0, and under the influence of J ung. Until that point, Freud's description was of relationships that were organized by forms of family prevalent in Europe at the time, and what is important in this description is the notion of infantile and unconscious sexuality. Sensual and erotic ties that bind the infant to the first love object govern the shape of all later relationships. For Freud, in addition, the infant had to learn gender identity through a painful and humiliating process of repression, repression of erotic feelings which were not directly genital, and repression of erotic feelings about members of the same sex.

These most radical aspects of psychoanalytic theory, and a theory of the self as a deeply sensual being, which Marcuse defended, were first casualties in the rise of ego-psychology, and Fromm, for good humanist and not reactionary reasons, did collude with two major revisions of psychoanalytic theory at this point. For ego-psychology and for Fromm, other drives were more important than the sexual drives. For Fromm, the ideal sexual state that an individual should attain was of genital sexuality, of heterosexuality.

M arcuse's notion of polymorphous perversity, on the other hand, retained and accentuated the radical dynamic of Freud's work, and was concerned with uncovering how the focus on genital sexuality was a repressive component of a particular type of reality principle locked into place by

The Unconscious State of Social Psychology 1 63 the performance principle. But the stakes are higher than that if we consider how different conceptions of sexuality underpin a discipline like psychology, considered as an ego which is structured around the perform­

ance principle.

Two psychoanalytic themes function as discursive arrangements in psychology's texts, those of 'stages of development' and 'polymorphous perversity'. The discursive complex 'stages of development' is a powerful one in psychology; it structures the way psychologists understand Freud, Piaget, Vygotsky, and so on, and the way those who suffer psychology read the progress of their child through normative developmental milestones. It also presents a myth of the development of a young science from affiliation with philosophy to mature self-governance. The discursive complex 'polymor­

phous perversity' narrates the past as state of untutored sensual being that should be left behind and as a warning to radicals and perverts of all kinds who may regress too far. It is important to note how a radical gesture by Fromm led him from one side of the equation ('polymorphous perversity') to the other ('stages of development'), j ust as humanists in psychology now sometimes appear to be resisting psychology at one moment only to end up celebrating it the next. For all the value of humanism, its conception of individual growth fits with psychology's subject, a subject M arcuse can still help undermine.

Marxism

It is also important to note that both M arcuse and Fromm identified themselves, in different ways, with M arxism, and so their debate is under­

pinned by an attempt to understand the political and economic structures and functions of power and ideology (Jay, 1 973). But an adherence to M arxism is no less an invulnerable talisman than is an adherence to feminism. And, though the tide is hardly turning in favour of M arxist academics at the moment (cf. Parker & Spears, 1 996), the self-discipline of radicals who think they have better secret agendas and learn to keep them to themselves to protect the small gains made so far is still a temptation and a tangle which enmeshes even the most critical social psychologists in the psy-complex. The critique of ego-psychology was developed by both M arcuse and Fromm. Although Marcuse lumped Fromm together with other ego-psychologists (in particular with H arry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney), Fromm himself was adamant that the attempt to adapt an indi­

vidual to social circumstances as part of the 'cure' was deeply conformist

vidual to social circumstances as part of the 'cure' was deeply conformist