Lecture 3 Handout

Constructing the Self Lecture 3 Psychoanalysis, Self and Society

What can psychoanalytic approaches add to our understanding of self and society?

Psychoanalytic Approaches

“ … what is valuable in Freud, and the psychoanalytic theorists who followed him, is the always implicit, sometimes explicit, message that we can never quite be who we want to be.” (Ian Craib)

“ Psychoanalytic insights cannot offer us any precise solutions but they can enable us to see problems more clearly because they take account of the irrational as well as the rational elements that are inherent in them.” (Ros Minsky)

Two fundamentals of psychoanalysis

• Seek a detailed, clinically informed understanding of the processes whereby people come to be people. Focus on the importance of early experience (bodily and emotional) and the phantasies associated with that experience in the development of underlying personalities.

“ In contrast to other areas of knowledge, psychoanalytic theory rests fundamentally on how the baby and then small child comes, unconsciously, to discover a way of being rather than existing and to make sense of itself, its parents, its siblings and the non-sense of the world in which it tries to place itself.” (Ros Minsky)

• View of the self as being about the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious. This is not the sovereign individual of the Enlightenment – defined by internal coherence and the capacity for reason. Instead there is emphasis on a) things beyond reflection and reason – anxieties, fantasies, drives and needs b) internal conflict.

Psychoanalysis and the Social Self

How can psychoanalysis improve our understanding of the relationship between self and society?

• Artificiality of mind/body distinction – we have bodies that effect what we can and cannot do.

• Contribute to a better analysis of ‘identity’ and self as social product by looking at the processes of self-formation and acknowledging that individual circumstances and personality mediate social influences.

• Recognition that human behaviour is not simply the result of conscious, rational reflection