I’ve been struck over the last two years, as I explored psychoanalytical theory more seriously than I had previously, how many concerns it shares with sociological thought but how differently it construes them. This is most stark with regards to agency and automaticity. In sociological thought there’s a tendency to equate the valorisation of the former with neoliberalism and the latter with the real substance of social life. In the conceptual dead end which was the epochal British sociology of the 00s, it was sometimes as simple as saying reflexivity = good and habit = bad* but more often an ambiguous sense that tradition constrained us through inheritance and freedom involved establishing our own responses. But partly in reaction to this there’s a parallel tendency to see invocations of reflexivity as neoliberal ideology. It’s interesting to consider the same issue in psychoanalytical thought where automaticity is more likely to be equated with trauma, rigidity and an inability to grow. It was this passage in The Divided Self, which I’m currently rereading, which prompted the thought but there’s a broader issue that I’m keen to explore:
the individual may prefer to pay the price of incurring the haunting sense of futility which is the necessary accompaniment of not being onself, rather than hazard the frank experience of frightened helplessness and bewilderment which would be the inevitable start to being oneself. the false-self system tends to become more and more dead. iN some people, it is as thought they have turned their lives over to a robot which has made itself (apparently) indispensable.
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, Pg 184
It’s interesting to consider how the clinical relationship, as opposed to the empirical or conceptual one of the sociologist, might influence the moral weighting placed upon agency and automaticity. Not just the notions themselves but the broader picture in which they are embedded, in which their varying balance and how it is distributed throughout the population takes on a moral significance as part of a broader narrative of social change, even if implicit.
*Archer definitely never came close to suggesting this. Giddens seemed to think it at points, even if he was resistant to saying it. There are instances in the secondary literature where popularisers of Giddens and Beck did in fact explicitly say this. The valence was reversed in Bauman which makes it odd how he was accommodated to late modernity theorising.
Mark Carrigan 