Abstract
This paper presents a new approach to theorizing and empirically investigating a phenomenon variously described by sociologists as internalized oppression or symbolic violence. Located at the intersection of internal worlds and external reality, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal and social, this object of inquiry—here termed self-negation—is crucial to many forms of societal domination. The paper explores its inner workings, analytically disaggregating it into an array of psychosocial processes drawn from the psychoanalytic theory of the defenses. Much of the work’s originality consists in showing how these processes operate across multiple systems of domination and drive many and varied outward manifestations of the phenomenon.
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Notes
Left aside here is the intellectual history of mutual engagements, or lack thereof, among these sources of ideas. Fascinating as their interrelations may be, more relevant is what each contributes on its own to theory and research on self-negation.
I do not spotlight this high-profile work because its constructs are too broad-brushed to capture the variegated processes through which self-negation operates.
The same holds for Weinstein and Platt (1973), who were influenced by Parsons.
The paper on which I draw was submitted in 1972 as Smelser’s graduating thesis at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute; it would remain unpublished for another decade and a half.
See, e.g., Vaillant (1993, ch. 2), who pairs splitting with projective identification—the “primitive” defenses associated since Klein (1975) with the earliest months of childhood development—and contrasts them with the more “developed” defenses of relative maturity, in something like a formalized hierarchy of the defenses.
When drawing on Smelser’s ideas, I set aside, as less relevant to my purposes, a second way in which he classifies the defenses: namely, along a continuum from arousal to gratification.
One recalls here a bestseller entitled Crazy Like Us (Watters 2011), which lambasts the exportation of Western categories of mental illness to the rest of the globe.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Matthew Desmond, William R. Earnest, and Ashley Mears for their very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. I presented its core arguments in colloquia at Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa, University of Helsinki, Aalborg University, NYU-Abu Dhabi, Rice University, and Washington University; many thanks to all who offered stimulating questions and provocations in those various settings. Finally, Eugene Lunn inspired me to go down this path nearly fifty years ago. With gratitude, I dedicate this paper to his memory.
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Emirbayer, M. Self-negation. Theor Soc 53, 323–356 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09541-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09541-4