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Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

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