The role of the psyche in social analysis: An examination of texts by Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Norbert Elias

This work examines social scientific texts that integrate two spheres of human reality: psyche and social. It examines these texts closely, seeking to discover not only what they say theoretically about the psycho-social interconnect, but also how they depict it analytically. It seeks thereby to uncover the underlying conceptual paradigms by which each of the works structure its representations of this interconnect. The texts are by four seminal thinkers rooted in a common German intellectual tradition: Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Norbert Elias.; Sigmund Freud's two major books on civilization contain radically different paradigms of the relationship of society and psyche. In The Future of an Illusion, society is a prior social facticity that represses, sublimates and distributes instinctual energies. In Civilization and its Discontents, society is in itself the embodiment of these energies.; Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic utilizes a model of social action in which irrational psychological states mediat between culture and social action. Weber's methodological writings argue that analysis should differentiate rational from irrational elements of action and interpret the latter by methods of verstehen psychology.; The psycho-social paradigm of Theodor Adorno's writings on fascist psychology posits a dialectical interaction between determinant social structures and psychic responses. Adorno insists on recognition of the primacy of social structure in this interaction, but in reality he focuses on psychic response.; Norbert Elias's work so interlocks psyche and social that a paradigm emerges in which the two are aspects of the same historical processes. For instance, Elias's concept of Fremdzwang ("the pressures which people exert on one another") refers to both social structure and the psyche's experience of social structure. And his concept of the civilizing process refers to parallel developments of social and psychic differentiation.; Following the examination of texts structured by these various psycho-social paradigms, a conclusion considers the ways they, and the theories and analyses they structure, relate not only to each other, but also offer possible assistance to those of who today wish to advance an understanding of the psychological qualities inherent in much of social reality.