Sustaining an Unlikely Marriage: Biographical, Theoretical, and Intellectual Notes

Abstract

Readers of this volume will easily discern the difficulties of fruitful articulation between psychoanalysis and sociology on all dimensions— theoretical synthesis, collaborative research, practical applications, and no doubt friendships and visiting patterns among their respective practitioners. As a person whose primary identification has been that of a sociologist, but also as one who became a psychoanalyst and remained intellectually active in that field, I appreciate these difficulties as much as the next. Yet I have remained committed to both fields, and have made a number of efforts to use both in order to generate knowledge. In this essay, I attempt to discuss this marriage and along three dimensions:

• Biographical-personal, or how predispositions and events brought me to pursue both fields.

• Theoretical-cultural, or how the core assumptions and methods of the psychoanalytic and sociological approaches mainly discourage but leave some room for positive articulation.

• Practical-intellectual, or an account of the specifics of the avenues I actually pursued in discerning the social edges of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic edges of sociology.