Experiencing Identity

Experiencing Identity

Ian Craib

SAGE Publications
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi
© Ian Craib 1998

First published 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd

6 Bonhill Street
London EC2A 4PU

SAGE Publications Inc.

2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

32, M-Block Market
Greater Kailash - I
New Delhi 110 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN 0 8039 7691 7

ISBN 0 8039 7692 5 (pbk)

Library of Congress catalog card number 98-060588

Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys

Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd,
Trowbridge, Wiltshire
 CONTENTS

Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction: Sociology and Identity 1

Part 1: Identity, Experience and Politics 13

2 Lukacs: Experience, Identity and Philosophy 13

3 The Politics of Experience 33

4 Psychoanalysis, Experience and Politics: The Problem of

Ambivalence 49

Part 2: Identity, Experience and Sociology 62

5 Back to Utopia: Giddens and Modem Social Theory 62

6 Goffman: Frame Analysis 75

7 Masculinity and Male Dominance 85

8 The Sociology of the Emotions 105

9 Sociological Literature and Literary Sociology: Some Notes

on John Berger's G 116

Part 3: Identity, Experience and Psychoanalysis 128

10 Freud and Philosophy 128

11 The Psychodynamics of Theory 138

12 What's Happening to Mourning? 157

13 Conclusion: Experiencing Identity 168

Bibliography 178
fu� 1�
 PREFACE

The essays collected and revised here have been written over a period of
twenty-five years and recount a journey from a radical Marxism to
somewhere else. I cannot find a name for where I am now, which is
perhaps appropriate given the arguments developed here. I have been
occasionally embarrassed and occasionally surprised to find some of the
continuities through these chapters. The emphasis is on something called
experience, not only as something which is important in understanding
individual and social action, but as a value, something in theory to be
protected against sociologistic explanations, and in the outside world to
be protected against manipulative 'abstract systems' and the state. Sadly,
sociology can easily become such an abstract system and I have grown
increasingly aware of what might be called the 'sociological critique' of
society as a sort of underground current in sociology - the view, or the
paradox, found in Simmel, for example, that if sociology can supply
powerful explanations of social life, then that fact is a criticism of the
society with which these explanations are concerned.
If these essays start with Marxism and travel through sociology, they
end with psychoanalysis. This position offers no more comfort - it is
more likely than sociology to act as an abstract system attempting to
force lives into preconceived patterns, but like sociology psychoanalysis
can offer subversive ideas which can point to an opening up of possi­
bilities, albeit uncomfortable and painful possibilities.
The Introduction and Conclusion are new and they explore these
themes. They could perhaps be read as the first and last sections of the
same chapter. The middle section runs through the various chapters as
codas and contemporary commentaries and self-criticisms through which
I try organize the different subjects around the central themes of the
book.
The ideas developed here owe much to generations of colleagues and
students in the Sociology Department at Essex and elsewhere, but I alone
am responsible for the various eccentric forms that their ideas might take
here. I am particularly grateful to Jessica Evans of the Open University
for her comments on Chapter 2, and to Chris Rojek for the original
suggestion.
I am also grateful to Marion Haberhauer for putting the earlier
 PREFACE Vll

chapters on disc and for coping with the pain caused by my convoluted
style and to the Fuller Bequest Fund of the Sociology Department at
Essex for financing the enterprise. Finally, I am grateful to my family in
its various extensions and manifestations; without their creative
disruptions none of this would have been possible.

Ian Craib
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The original version of Chapter 2 appeared in Radical Philosophy 17,

Summer 1977. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in Radical Philosophy 9, Winter
1974, Radical Philosophy 13, Spring 1976, and Sociology 26, 1975. Chapter 4
is based on debates originally appearing in Radical Philosophy 55, Spring
1990, and in W. Dryden and C. Feltham (eds) (1992) Psychotherapy and its
Discontents, Open University Press. Chapter 5 appeared in Radical
Philosophy 43, Summer 1986, and Chapter 6 in Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 8, 1978.
The original version of Chapter 7 appeared in Sociological Review 35,
1987, and the basis of Chapter 8 appeared in Sociology 29, 1995. Chapter
9 first appeared in Sociological Review 22, 1974. The first version of
Chapter 10 appeared in Free Associations 4, 1985, and Chapter 11 first
appeared in Free Associations 10, 1987. Chapter 12 appeared in British
Journal of Psychotherapy 11, Spring 1995, and this in tum was based on
Chapter 2 of my The Importance of Disappointment (1994), Routledge.
I am grateful to all the above publications for permission to reuse the
material here.
 1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND

IDENTITY

The fundamental identifying feature of [the normotic personality] is a dis­

inclination to entertain the subjective element in life, whether it exists inside
himself or in the other. The introspective capacity has been rarely used. Such a
person appears genuinely naive if asked to comment on issues that require
either looking into oneself or the other in any depth. Instead, if the evolution
towards becoming a normotic personality is successful, he lives contentedly
among material objects and phenomena.
By the subjective element, I mean the internal play of affects and ideas that
generates and authorizes our private imaginations, creatively informs our
work and gives continuing resource to our interpersonal relations. (Bollas 1987:
137)

Sociology seems to have a lot to say about identity. At the moment

gender and ethnic identity seem to be at the forefront of the discipline's
concerns while thirty years ago it was class identity (perhaps then more
often referred to as class consciousness). There is much about the 'social
construction' of identity and there is a range of associated terms: 'the
self' (which I prefer since it seems to incorporate many of the others,
including identity) subjectivity, the subject, subjectivities, the agent,
agency and action all have something to do with identity, as does the
simplest term in this catalogue - the individual.
Whenever I use the term 'identify' in this book, I will be thinking of it
as one element or process within a self but I also want to add another
term to the list, one which I would argue underlies them all: experience.
Many of the chapters in this book point to the gap which is left in
sociological understanding and explanation if we ignore experience. It
seems to me, first, that any sociological account of our world must imply
something about the way people experience the world. Second, it is
useful to elaborate these implications as part of a process of examining
the adequacy of that account. Further I think all too often our under­
standing assumes that we live in a world of people who do not 'have'
experience, who, in Christopher Bollas' sense, are 'normotic'. A more
readily understandable way of putting this is to say that we assume that
cognition dominates people's lives, that we only have ideas and those
ideas come to us from the outside, from the social world; we take them
2 EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

in and act on them. There are sometimes references to 'interpretive

processes' but no real exploration of what they involve.
As well as pointing to the gaps which indicate a need for a concept of
experience, I want to try to indicate sociologically useful ways of
thinking about it and the ways in which taking experience into account
can disrupt our sociological understanding of the world. Here I should
declare the axe that I want to grind: it seems to me that some aspects of
psychoanalysis approach this area; but I also believe that some aspects
of psychoanalysis prevent us from understanding experience and that
perhaps there is something imponderable about experience which takes
us towards poetics and the limits of my expertise. To begin with, how­
ever, I want to draw, in very broad strokes, the sociological background
and plot my position in some of the debates it has generated.

Why now?

Whether we are looking at the more sociological approaches, post­

modem accounts of identity, modem psychotherapies, modem political
movements or whatever, an interesting sociological question is why this
concern with identity should be developing now. Anthony Giddens
(1991) places it in the context of what he calls 'late modernity', a process
which begins with the Enlightenment, taking away the traditional
sanctions on behaviour, and instituting a constant questioning of the
world through first the natural and then the social sciences. The central
feature of the self in modem society is its reflexivity, a constant ques­
tioning and reconstruction of the self in a lifetime project. We are
constantly constructing and revising our personal stories and so recon­
structing our selves. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Craib 1994),
Giddens believes this is a 'real' process and that the individual has a real
control over his or her self. I would prefer to see it as an ideology - a way
of thinking about the self which hides a more troubling reality. In fact I
would argue that the ideas of what I would call the 'powerful self' (Craib
1994) emerge just as the 'self', the individual, is becoming less powerful,
less able to change his or her world while being subjected to changes,
often radical changes, by forces well beyond his or her control or even
understanding.
There are various ways of approaching these changes. Giddens talks
about the 'juggernaut' of late modernity without following through its
implications, the psychological effects of being pushed in front of a
juggernaut and having to cling to it for dear life as it careers into the
future. In other words he pays no real attention to the experience of late
modernity beyond the increased prominence of the cognitive feature of
reflexivity. There are theories of globalization (Waters 1995) which might
not be describing a total process, but certainly get hold of something
important, and there are the processes described by David Harvey (1989)
 INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY 3

which are attributable less to late modernity than to late capitalism.

These all affect our experience of the world and not just our ideas about
it. Indeed, our ideas and our experience can be at variance with one
another.
It seems to me that the word 'capitalism' is important. Perhaps we can
best understand the focus on identity and the self through the way in
which the development of the market over the last thirty years has
intensified a process of individualization which it began with the indus­
trial revolution. Over the last three decades the pace of technological
change has increased, dramatically pushed forward by information and
communications technology. This in tum has encouraged changes in
the economic division of labour, a growing emphasis on short-term
returns in a situation where finance capital can be moved around the
world at short notice to its most profitable location. In the west, heavy
industry has declined and the labour market changed; the institutions
that comprise civil society have weakened. During the industrial revolu­
tion capitalism ate away at traditional communities and created new
working-class communities which, with the most recent changes, are
now in decline.
The market, at least in its ideology, to a lesser extent in practice,
reduces everybody to an abstract individual equality. As the possibilities
of long-term employment decline, we each have to face the market as
individuals selling ourselves (not only our labour), capable of surviving
changes and constantly readjusting to new demands. Kant was the first
to recognize the way in which the market intruded into personal rela­
tionships and it has been a recurrent theme in critical thought. Now it
seems to intrude into the very self. This is perhaps the crucial insight of
the sociology of emotions, and Arnie Hochschild's (1994) suggestion that
much popular modem feminism implies a commercialization of rela­
tionships is quite appropriate. The self, identity, becomes a product to be
revamped and relaunched at regular intervals.
These themes will occur with some regularity throughout this book
and one of my arguments will be that an understanding of experience as
a relatively autonomous area of the self enables us to take a critical
distance from this process and its accompanying ideology. For the
moment, however, I want to look at various sociological approaches to
the self and identity.

Sociology and identity: the conventional approach

First I want to explore the sociological notion of identity. In Richard

Jenkins' introduction to Social Identity (1996: 5) he begins by privileging
the social and, I would suggest, the normotic, by stating that he will use
the terms 'identity' and 'social identity' interchangeably to mean the
latter since 'all human identities are in some sense - and usually a
4 EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

stronger rather than a weaker sense social identities'. We all have a

-

number of social identities which organize our relationships to other

individuals and groups within our social world. He points out that the
Oxford English Dictionary definition of identity involves two ideas: on the
one hand absolute sameness and on the other a lasting distinctiveness. I
'am' a man and I 'am not' a woman. I classify the world into social groups
and I associate myself with one rather than another. It would perhaps be
true to say that whereas conventional sociology has concentrated on
sameness, more recent and particularly post-modem sociology has con­
centrated on difference.
Jenkins falls more into the former category than the latter and I want
to pursue my argument with him first. He goes on to say that our
identity is best seen as a process, criticizing, I think quite rightly, those
who see identity as a 'thing'. The process is one of constant negotiation
with those around us; identity is 'the product of agreement and dis­
agreement' and open to change. While I do not disagree with any of this,
my criticism is that he leaves out half the picture, that half which goes on
'inside' the bearer of identity or identities, and the process of internal
negotiation which this involves. It seems to me that 'identity' in Jenkins'
sense does not account for all that we mean when we talk about our own
individual identities. We certainly have social identities: I am a uni­
versity teacher, a father, a husband, a psychotherapist, a supporter of the
English cricket team and so on. Some of these (especially the last one)
could disappear without my experiencing any great loss. I would have
lost an identity, not my identity. If I suffered a major tragedy in my
family life, ceasing to be a husband and becoming a divorced man or
widower, my identity would have changed in an excruciatingly painful
way but I would still have an identity. Social identities can come and go
but my identity goes on as something which unites all the social iden­
tities I ever had, have or will have. My identity always overflows, adds
to, transforms the social identities that are attached to me.
I am not trying to deny the profoundly social nature of human beings,
nor the importance of our various social identities but part of the
dialectic of identification and difference involves me in a constant
separation from my various social identities. My identity is not the same
as my social identities. This is something recognized implicitly by Jenkins
later in the book when he is talking about Mead and Freud and the
possibility that we might have not a number of social identities but a
number of social 'selves':

This is a problem because most of the time most people don't seem to
experience themselves as an assembly of different bits and particularly not as a
plurality of entities. Perhaps the most important source of this consistency . . .
is . . . the embodiment of selfhood. Although over time and across situations
we recognize conflicts and different possibilities within ourselves, these don't
constitute a committee or cast of characters.
 INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY 5

Dividing the self up into bits thus risks losing sight of the fact that most
humans most of the time live their lives as more or less unitary selves. (Jenkins
1996: 45)

This seems to me to be arguing problems away rather than elaborating

or investigating them. We are left with a choice of being either a
'plurality' or 'assembly' of parts or a 'more or less unitary' self. The
question I would ask here is why we cannot be both at the same time. If
we take Mead's work seriously then we have to be - both at the same
time - an T and a 'me'. If I were only an T then I would be involved in
no social relationships whatsoever; if I were only a 'me' then I would be
an inanimate object defined by others and in neither case would the
problem arise. The difficulty is caused by our nature as reflective,
symbol-using beings - there are always internal divisions and always, at
least implicitly, a unity. Both are there whenever we say anything about
ourselves. Jenkins cites in his support some comments by Giddens who
cannot seem to follow through the implications of the reflexivity that he
sees as so important to modem self-identity. The division in the self, and
in identity, is there even in the Cartesian cogito so often held up by
sociologists as typifying the unitary subject: I think therefore I am. If I
think about myself, I am divided, experiencing and experienced at the
same time.
This combination or dialectic of unity and diversity is built into but by
no means always acknowledged by sociological theories of the self. It has
become increasingly central over the course of this century. If we think of
it in interactionist terms the more complex a society, the greater the
variety of roles that each individual has to play, the more complex
the 'me' phase of the self, and the greater the call on the T phase for
organization and reaction. Paradoxically it is perhaps Simmel, one of the
founding thinkers of sociology, who offers the most acute critical
awareness of this. He described the development of modernity in terms
of the growth of what he called 'objective culture' as opposed to 'sub­
jective culture' or the life process. He was suspicious of the growing
power of social forces and the way they can come to dominate our sense
of ourselves, and for a sociologist he has a heightened sense of the
psychological changes that this brings about.
In Simmel's (1971) essay on 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' he
describes how city life unceasingly bombards us with new stimuli that
would drive us mad if we tried to react to and process them all. We are
subjected as well to innumerable short-term and limited relationships
and in response we build a sort of internal protective shell which enables
us to deal with day-to-day life. It is no accident that psychoanalysis
developed in one of the great European metropolitan centres and became
the way to move below this protective shell and explore the nature of
human relationships. With a few exceptions sociologists have not
concerned themselves overmuch with what goes on within the shell.
6 EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

Following through with this metaphor, they have contented themselves

with describing the pattern on the shell - the social identities and role
expectations as if that were all there was.

Sociology and identity: postmodern conceptions

The approaches labelled 'postmodern' actually fall into two mutually

exclusive camps. In one postmodern world I constantly recreate myself
according to my desires and the situations into which I am placed, and
in the other I am the product of the discourses in which I am situated.
The theories seem to reproduce the dual nature of the self.

Endless self-creation
For Kenneth Gergen there is an opening up of possibilities; the social
world has been transformed and we ourselves have been transformed.
Gergen seems to me to represent the most optimistic - if not manic -
version of the result. He argues that there is a battle in train between
three different world views: the modernist view with its promise of
progress and knowledge; the romantic view with its concern for the
depths of the personality, and his own, postmodernist view:
The social saturation brought about by the technologies of the twentieth
century, and the accompanying immersion in multiple perspectives, have
brought about a new consciousness: postmodemist. In its retrospective stance,
it is sceptical, doubting the capacity of language to represent or inform us of
what is the case. For if language is dominated by ideological investments, its
usage governed by social convention, and its content guided by literary style,
language does not reflect or mirror reality. And if language is not truth­
bearing, then the very concept of objective reporting is rendered suspect. If this
is so, there are no objective grounds for saying that people possess passion,
intentionality, reason, personality traits or any of the other ingredients of the
romanticist or modem world views. All such concepts are socially and
historically contingent, the products of political and ideological forces, self­
protective communities and literary and aesthetic fashion. With the spread of
postmodern consciousness we see the demise of personal definition, reason,
authority commitment, trust, the sense of authenticity, sincerity, belief in
leadership, depth of feeling and faith in progress. In their stead, an open slate
emerges on which persons may inscribe, erase and rewrite their identities as
the ever-shifting, ever-expanding and incoherent network of relationships
invites or permits. (Gergen 1991: 228)

The difficulty with this sort of writing is to pick out the odd kernels of
truth from the hyperbole and refusals to think. If Gergen were to follow
through his scepticism he could not make any claims, let alone those he
is making - the point of arguing would vanish. And the fact that he feels
it worthwhile to argue his point indicates an implicit acceptance of
standards of rationality which transcend perspectives. Certainly, there
 INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY 7

have been changes in information technology, changes in our abilities to

understand and embrace other perspectives. I cannot see that this says
any more than conventional role theory when it talks about the
multiplication of roles or the pluralization of life - worlds that come
with modernity. And the insistence on a thoroughgoing scepticism is
simply an inversion of the thoroughgoing objectivism that Gergen sees
(wrongly) as part of the modernist perspective. The real problems of life
are more or less problems: what is closer to or further from the truth, a
better or worse representation of an external reality?
In the context of this argument, however, it is important to consider
under what conditions one might be able to prescribe, erase and rewrite
one's identity. It is a way of thinking perfectly appropriate to short
communication on the Internet. Once I am seen my ability to revise my
identity is limited: I cannot become a blonde teenage girl or a man who
is 120 years old; I cannot become a muscular giant or a dwarf. And
contact must be shortlived. With regularity of contact comes a recog­
nition of the patterns in characteristics, language, ideas, etc. It is a way of
being that is only possible within the imagination, can bear little contact
with an external reality, and cannot outlast anything but the most
cursory human contact.
More mundanely we are back to the necessary division within the self
and in our identity, the flux of sameness and difference. However many
times I rewrite and erase my identities, it is I who does it, not you or my
grandmother or anybody else. I am - at least - an identity with several
identities. There is still the 'I' and the 'me' even if the former can
constantly invent the latter in some sort of fantasy world. If we return to
the metaphor of a protective shell, it is as if Gergen is suggesting that we
can constantly change the pattern - we become self-creating chameleons.

The social construction of identity

There is a second 'postmodern' conception of the self that is perhaps

more depressive than manic and perhaps might more accurately be
called post-structuralism. Rather than being seen as an endless process of
self-creation, identity becomes something constructed through various
disciplines and discourses.
The interesting point here is that in the introduction to a collection of
papers adopting this approach, Stuart Hall (1996) deploys this radically
different conceptual framework. He identifies the very problem I have
been discussing in connection with more traditional approaches, recog­
nizing that when it is a matter of agency and politics the concept of
identity seems irreducible, it cannot be explained away. Yet he would
still prefer to see identities as constructed 'within discourse', that is,
cognitively and through difference rather than through a combination or
play of association and difference:
8 EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

Throughout their careers, identities can function as points of identification and

attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out . . . The unity,
the internal homogeneity, which the term identity treats as foundational, is not
natural but a constructed form of closure. (Hall 1996: 5)

The problem with this is that the opposite is also true. Identities can only
function to exclude and leave out because of their capacity to include
and enclose. We lose something important by concentrating on one or
the other side of this particular coin. I think the problem here is the
assumption that language - where meaning is created through difference
- provides us with a model for understanding social life where things
other than language are at play.
The tradition in which Hall is working, however, goes further than
this: it views language not as a useful metaphor or analogy but as the
creator of social life. In this context identities are created. A little later on
the same page Hall defines his own position:

I use identity to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between, on the
one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate', speak to
us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on
the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us
as subjects which can be 'spoken'. Identities are points of temporary attach­
ment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. . . .
They are the result of a successful articulation or 'chaining' of the subject into
the flow of the discourse. (Hall 1996: 5-6)

If we substitute 'role' and 'role expectations' for 'discourse' and 'prac­

tices' we are close to the determinist version of the traditional socio­
logical approach. The first part of the quotation describes the external
definition of the 'me', and the remainder of the sentence after 'on the
other hand' can be seen as a very ambiguous and ambivalent version of
the T - but described in a passive sense which Hall then begins,
tentatively, to deconstruct. He traces through the arguments from
Althusser (1971) and Lacan (1977), together with Hirst's (1979) criticism
of the former, and he criticizes Foucault's notion that constructed
subjects are 'docile' bodies.
The strength of Hirst's criticism of Althusser is that any attempt to
explain the construction of the subject by interpellation, by hailing,
presupposes that the subject can actually recognize that he or she is
being hailed - in other words it must presuppose that the one being
hailed already has the properties of the subject. We cannot escape the T.
Hall suggests that at the end of Foucault's development he was moving
towards producing a phenomenology and he develops this through a
discussion of Judith Butler (1993) who attempts to combine the tradition
more closely with psychoanalysis by relating 'the discursive' with the
'psychic'. But this edging towards the psychic, the mechanisms by means
of which we identify or do not identify, is an edging back to notions of
subjectivity, to what in more traditional sociology would be called
 INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY 9

interpretive processes and which always - and must always - pre­

suppose the T.
There is, however, a peculiar instrumentality and an almost mystical
quality in the way these arguments are pursued. There is talk about
'technologies of the self' and power seems to appear as a disembodied
force which can have 'effects'. There is a sense of the social as a machine
which grinds up and re-forms everything with which it comes into
contact. There are a number of problems with this way of thinking about
the world, not least in the denial of the subjectivity that is responsible for
the argument (see Craib 1997b). We have here a peculiarly complex way
of thinking of the normotic personality - it has an inner life, but that inner
life is a product of the outer life and does not generate anything new.
I shall be arguing later in this book that there is one sense in which
sociologists - or anybody, come to that - cannot help but write about
experience and that we write about it not only directly in the explicit
content of an argument, but indirectly in our choice of rhythms and
words. The feel of Hall's arguments, with constant references to 'rigorous
argument', 'full and unambiguous recognition', the necessity of theor­
ization, etc. have a normotic feel to them. They make one feel what they
explicitly argue: there is no internal space and logic controls all. For me
the style carries an aura of persecution even though the explicit argu­
ment moves towards the opening up of the discourse.
So far then, I have tried to show that sociological approaches to
identity or the self tend to assume that the world is peopled by normotic
personalities, by people who have no subjective or inner experience. I
will argue later in this book (Chapter 8) that even where sociology
attempts to grasp elements of subjective experience, as in the sociology
of the emotions, the understanding remains limited and stereotyped,
working primarily as if individuals were only cognitive beings. One
might argue that this does not matter - sociology is the science of society
so why should it concern itself with the inner worlds of individuals? This
would be fair enough if sociologists are trying to explain the decline of
feudalism, or changes in the contemporary class structure, the large-scale
shifts in social structures. An understanding of experience in these cases
would add a dimension of intelligibility and of colour but would not be
essential. However, when sociologists lay claim to talking about identity,
the self and emotions we need to know what we are talking about and
experience, the subjective, the inner world, is a vital part of this
discussion.

Experience and identity

So far I have used the 'I' as a shorthand for experience. What do I mean
by experience and how are we to understand it? The second part of the
question is perhaps more easily answered by the first but I will try. By
10 EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

experience I mean a wide range of affect which has both physical and
ideational components, both of which may be conscious or unconscious
or some combination of both. Christopher Bollas (1987) talks about a
person's idiom, their particular smell and feel, often very difficult to put
into words, and which - again consciously or unconsciously - is an
expression of their experience of the world and a vital part of each
person's experience of the other. Bollas also talks, in a lovely phrase, of
the 'unthought known', the precognitive and extra-cognitive knowledge
without which we would not be ourselves and would not be able to live
in the social world. If such knowledge enters into consciousness, it often
comes as a surprise.
Our way into this must be as much through phenomenology as
through psychoanalysis and indeed perhaps Bollas can best be placed on
the phenomenological wing of psychoanalysis. But we need also to finish
the journey that Hall attributes to Foucault and return to phenomen­
ology in its Hegelian, Husserlian and existential varieties.
There is, however, a further dimension to experience which takes us
towards psychoanalysis proper. When Jenkins talks about our experience
of a unitary subject he seems to suggest that our embodiment - the fact
that I inhabit only one body - is sufficient to explain this. But he offers
no real explanation of what it means to have a body, and most socio­
logical work on the body, like that on identity, deals with the body from
the outside. It is the end product of sociological processes.
Yet my body is more important than I am; the pulsating organs which I
inhabit are a constant part of my feeling and thinking; I have various
physical needs which change throughout my life as my body changes.
And the real scandal of being embodied, one which arguably is a
governing feature of all our lives, is that our embodiment comes to an
end. We die, and the sociology of death should be the sociology of our
lives.
This book explores three areas. Part 1 looks at identity, experience and
politics. I have always thought of Georg Lukacs as a more complex and
profound thinker than many commentators recognize. There is a dimen­
sion to his thought which links Hegel's phenomenology with the exis­
tential phenomenology of later thinkers, especially Sartre and Merleau­
Ponty, less central to the western Marxist tradition. I try to use Lukacs'
History and Class Consciousness (1971a) to show the way in which an idea
of a pre-reflective experience of the world is essential to his account of
the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, the socialist revolution and
the development of western philosophy. Chapter 3 shows how later and
more elaborate existential ideas leave Lukacs' work looking distinctly
utopian and show new dimensions of human experience and relation­
ships. Chapter 4 takes up these themes in the context of psychoanalysis
and what it has to tell us about the necessary ambivalence of utopias and
of experience itself. It should become clear in the course of these
arguments that 'experience' is a much wider concept than 'identity' and
 INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGY AND IDENTITY 11

that if the latter concept is central, whether i n politics o r in theory, it

often involves a closing down of possibility and understanding.
Part 2 looks at identity, experience and sociology. In Chapters 5 and 6
I take Anthony Giddens' attempt at a general social theory and Erving
GoHman's micro-social theory and try to show in each case how the
approach glosses or ignores the experience of the actor, or more accur­
ately the individual. In the case of Giddens my argument is that he
employs an over-simple notion of the individual to provide a convenient
foundation for structuration theory. In the case of GoHman my argument
is that, despite appearances, his work strips away the meaning of the
individual's experience.
Chapter 7 was my first attempt to use psychoanalysis to understand a
sociological problem, that of gender. In line with the implications of the
previous two chapters I found myself trying to separate the individual
personality structure from social processes, or perhaps more accurately
argue that we cannot see identity and experience as only a social
product. My experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has led me
to hold this view more firmly than ever and I end this chapter with a
retrospective self-criticism. This leads directly into Chapter 8 which is a
critique of the sociology of emotions, particularly the tendency to see
emotions as only a social construct and the resulting tendency to see real
people as if they were only stereotypes.
Finally in Part 2, Chapter 9 returns to some of the ideas of existential
phenomenology, comparing sociological and literary forms of language
use and suggesting that, whether we like it or not, we convey our own or
others' experience of the world in the language we use. This sets the
scene for one of the arguments in Part 3.
Part 3 looks at identity, experience and psychoanalysis. Chapter 10 is a
discussion of a number of philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis
and has two central arguments: the first involves a comparison between
the philosophical treatments of psychoanalysis which close down the
development of Freud's thought and those which open it up; the second
links the creative interpretations of Freud with an acceptance of what he
has to say about the contradictory and irrational aspects of human
nature. Chapter 11 is concerned with the experiences unconsciously
embedded in theoretical work and the way in which it can inhibit or
encourage the development of understanding, while Chapter 12 is a
critique of some contemporary developments in psychoanalysis. I argue
that there is a danger in our society that psychotherapists can come to see
themselves as constructing identities, forming and controlling subjectiv­
ities (for the best and most humane reasons, of course) in a way that
implies as dismissive an attitude to our experience as that implied by the
sociological approaches to identity discussed in this introduction.
Finally, in a new essay which acts as a conclusion, I try to bring
together some of the themes of the book as a whole into a discussion of
what it is like to 'experience identity'.
 PART 1

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND

POLITICS

LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND

PHILOSOPHY

Georg Lukacs was a remarkable character; he was above all a philosopher

in the German idealist tradition and to read his work is to read European
philosophy from Kant through Hegel to Marx. The development of his
philosophy produced what Lucien Goldmann (1977) called the first great
work of twentieth-century existentialism, Soul and Form (Lukacs 1971b)
and it has been said, with some justification, that he turned to revolu­
tionary socialism because it seemed to solve crucial philosophical prob­
lems. He was involved in the short-lived Hungarian revolution after
WorId War I as a minister in the Communist government and there are
possibly apocryphal stories of parliament discussing the nature of
philosophy rather than organization of the civil war being fought outside,
and of Lukacs walking up and down the trenches lecturing the troops on
dialectical materialism. After the failure of the revolution he took refuge
in Russia. His politics fell out of favour and there are debates about how
far he compromised with Stalinism - he certainly stopped writing about
politics and spent a good part of the rest of his life producing literary
theory and criticism. He also spent some time in Stalin's prisons.
Here I will be concerned with History and Class Consciousness (1971a)
first published in 1923. It is Lukacs' major philosophical and political
work, bringing together notions of experience, philosophy and politics.
In the context of my argument here, his importance is that he offers an
ideal, a vision in which everything comes together. The rest of Part 1 will
be concerned with the modification, and sometimes degeneration, of the
ideal.
14 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

At the centre of History and Class Consciousness is the problem of

relativism and the sociology of knowledge - an issue which has cropped
up in modem feminist philosophy (see Harding 1986, 1991) of which
more later. The basic question is that if all knowledge is dependent upon
its social context, then how can we lay claim to one form of knowledge
being superior to another? Is there not just simply a range of points of
view all of equal validity?
If the answer to this question is the relativist answer that we cannot
choose between different points of view we end in absurdity. If the
relativist answer is true, then it is false, since it would then be an absolute
truth and not at all dependent upon its social context. It often seems to be
the case that people think that the only alternative to this sort of relativism
is some form of rigorous scientific absolutism and if that were the choice I
guess relativism would be preferable. However, there are other
alternatives and Lukacs offers a particularly interesting one.

Lukacs and relativism

History and Class Consciousness is not an easy work and it is not made any
simpler by the intrinsic difficulties of Lukacs' dialectical form of argument;
at times his arguments are confused and a great number of assumptions
remain implicit. Superficially, he appears to reproduce the relativist con­
tradiction, insisting that all knowledge is rooted in its social context, but
then arguing that it is possible to choose between different points of view,
implying the existence of trans-contextual criteria. Stedman-Jones (1971)
puts forward what is perhaps the most common interpretation when he
sums up Lukacs' 'startling but elegant' reply to relativism as: 'All truth is
relative to the standpoint of individual classes; the proletariat is by its
essence a universal class; its subjectivity is universal; but a universal
subjectivity can only be objective' (Stedman-Jones 1971: 47).
I want to argue that this formulation perhaps possesses more elegance
than accuracy and that Lukacs' position is in fact considerably more
complex, often implicit in his practice rather than explicit in his argu­
ment. He suggests that there are a number of interrelated features which
enable Marxism to avoid relativism and which ensure its superiority
over other forms of knowledge, one of which is a by no means simple
relation between Marxist theory and the proletariat. I will deal in tum
with these features: first, Marxism's grasp of the totality; second, its
ability to transcend the dualisms of bourgeois thought; finally, its rela­
tionship to the proletariat implied in the notion of praxis.

The totalizing movement of Marxism

Lukacs describes the notion of 'totality' as the most fundamental distin­
guishing feature of Marxism. Whether or not he is correct is less important
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 15

for present purposes than what he means by 'totality', and what is

involved in Marxism's grasp of the totality. There is (or was) no shortage
of bourgeois theories of 'society as a whole', so, self-evidently, there is
more to it than that. It becomes apparent later in the book that 'totality' in
the framework of Lukacs' thought is related to a more familiar Marxist
claim concerning its method of producing knowledge. This production
involves a totalizing movement which, in relation to praxis, he calls an
'aspiration towards totality' (1971a: 198) the first step of which is the
penetration by thought of immediate 'external' appearance - the penetra­
tion of reification and the revelation of the determinations behind what
bourgeois thought takes to be the given 'facts'. To take an oversimplified
example, bourgeois economics takes as given the 'facts' of price and
attempts to explain their fluctuations in terms of supply and demand
(equally 'given' as 'facts'). Marxism, on the other hand, is able to grasp
the way in which these 'facts' came to be in the first place - to grasp the
origins of commodity fetishism, the way in which human relationships
manifest themselves as relationships between things ( price, precisely,
expressing a relationship between things).
This movement beyond the immediate leads to the revelation of
hidden, 'internal' relationships - relationships unavailable to immediate
perception. To continue the example (and the oversimplification): as it
reveals the nature of the wages system and the origin of prices in
labour, Marxism at the same time reveals the foundations of social
classes and, beyond that, the way in which the mode of production
reproduces itself. It reveals those relationships that are usually sub­
sumed by the terms 'base' and 'superstructure'. In this way, each
immediately evident 'fact' is understood not in terms of its independent
existence, or in terms of an external causal relationship; rather its
existence is understood as the product of a number of relationships - a
structure of relationships. In Lukacs' terms, its immediacy is mediated,
and these relationships are in tum mediated by others. The 'totalizing
movement' of Marxist thought is the steady exploration of these
increasingly wider, more complex and more fundamental relations, and
the discovery of these structural forms is the production of knowledge.
There is clearly a variety of realist epistemology underlying Lukacs'
understanding of the Marxist analysis of social formations, one which
sees access to the underlying structures of the social world as a task of
theoretical construction.
Thus what appears to bourgeois thought as 'real', for example, price, is
shown to be abstract, isolated from the totality of relationships that
determine its existence. What appears to be abstract, for example, social
classes (since we cannot point to an existing object which is a class) is
shown to be real, a concrete determination of external appearances. This
seems to follow closely Marx's own methodological statement in the
introduction to The Grundrisse, frequently quoted in part by Lukacs, but
worth quoting in full:
16 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real
recondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the
foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on
closer examination, this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave
out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in tum are
an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest, e.g.
wage labour, capital etc. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration
of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of
thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result not as a point of
departure even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the
point of departure for observation and conception. (Marx 1973: 100-101)

In other words, we start and finish with 'reality', the 'concrete' (or
perhaps better, we start with 'reality' and finish with the 'concrete'),
reconstructing it, in the process of theorizing, through the relationships
into which we place the immediately appearing phenomena. For Lukacs
the reconstruction of 'facts' in theory is fundamental and the differences
between theories lie in the extent and method of the reconstruction of the
'facts'. The totalizing movement of Marxism, the ability to understand
and penetrate reification and grasp the way in which the facts we are
reconstructing are produced as facts in the totality of their determina­
tions, reveals that these facts are the product of human activity and that
social classes are the subject of that activity. This places the 'facts' we
study in the ongoing movement of history:

The function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the
fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society
appear as supra-historical essences. The knowledge of the real, objective nature
of a phenomenon, the knowledge of its historical character and the knowledge
of its actual function in the totality of society form, therefore, a Single,
undivided act of cognition. (Lukacs 1971a: 14)

It is the mediation of history that enables us to grasp the concrete

interpenetrations of the dualisms which have typified bourgeois thought.
Thought is a reconstruction of reality and since that reconstruction
leads us to history, we realize that thought is not the only activity
involved in the reconstruction of reality, it is only one moment of what
Marx called 'sensuous human activity'. It is this activity - and not
thought alone - which gives us access to the objective world and here
experience enters into the equation.
The totalizing movement of Marxism thus leads us directly to the
transcendence of the dualisms of bourgeois thought and to the concept of
praxis.

The transcendence of dualisms

The most significant dualism that Marxism transcends, according to

Lukacs, is that of subject and object, although, as we shall see, a number
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 17

o f other dualisms i s left behind - i n particular those o f truth/falsity,

relative/absolute, thought/reality. It is the subject/object dualism and
the attempt to overcome it which provided the impetus behind the
development of bourgeois philosophy. Although the solution remained
unavailable, the problem was pursued to the point where it became
possible for Marxism to realize the transcendence.
Lukacs is primarily concerned with German idealist philosophy and,
in particular, with the development of the contradictions of Kantian
rationalism, but in the course of his argument he reveals the close
relationship between the two ways of handling the dualism, the way
in which an internal dynamic can lead to the transformation of one
into the other. For Kant, the starting point is not that our knowledge
must conform to objects but that objects must conform to our knowl­
edge. He returns to the familiar principle that we can only know what
we create. The object 'in-itself' remains unknowable and the world that
we know is the 'product' of the rational mind. But there is a 'necessary
correlation' between the principles of rationality and irrationality
according to Lukacs, and when rationalism claims to be the universal
principle, the correlation becomes crucial and erodes the whole system.
In Kant's case, the irrationality, the cause of the erosion, is the unknow­
able 'thing-in-itself'. There is a radical separation between content (the
object) and form (the knowing subject), the overcoming of which would
require the development of a concept of praxis. Failing that, all that
can be produced from Kant's starting point is a structure of highly
systematized formal laws which, because they are laws, exclude or
absorb the creative subject. Knowledge thus becomes a matter of the
passive contemplation of something outside the knower rather than an
active production. This analysis is the basis of Lukacs' criticism of the
way in which the natural sciences conceive of their activity. We start
with rationalism and end with a form of empiricism (see in particular
Part 11 of the essay 'Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat').
Lukacs does not try to step outside (suppress, conceal) the dualism,
but attempts to transcend it through a grasp of the concrete unity of
subject and object in the movement of history, reached in the totalizing
movement of Marxist thought (1971a: 14, 142-9). Through history we
can grasp the way in which the subject produces itself as object, the way
in which humanity creates itself. Marxism further reveals that it is
because of the internal expansionist dynamic of capitalism that a proper
grasp of the totality becomes possible, and that for the first time the
possibility exists that history may be made consciously. The proletariat,
because of its position in the production process, is the first class in
history capable of becoming conscious of itself as the subject and object
of history at the same time. Conversely, because of its position in the
production process, the bourgeoisie is unable to achieve a theoretical
transcendence of the subject/object dualism (1971a: 134-6).
18 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

The precise nature of this unity of subject and object requires further
exploration, for it is here that we come up against the central difficulty of
dialectical thought that Lukacs warns of:

It is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their
abstract one-sidedness are later transcended. The process of transcendence
makes it inevitable that we should operate with these one-sided, abstract and
false concepts. These concepts acquire their true meaning less by definition
than by their function as aspects that are then transcended in the totality.
Moreover, it is even more difficult to establish fixed meanings for concepts in
Marx's improved version of the dialectic than in the Hegelian original. For if
concepts are only the intellectual forms of historical realities, then these forms
- one-sided, abstract and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine
aspects of it. (Lukacs 1971a: xiv)

In this context, there is the possibility of two non-dialectical misreadings

of a dialectical text. The first restores in toto the dualisms transcended in
the dialectic. Gareth Stedman-Jones takes this tendency to its extreme:
where Lukacs is attempting to transform, in a new synthesis, previously
antinomic tendencies of bourgeois thought into a dialectical under­
standing of social life, Stedman-Jones (1971) sees only an anti-scientific
romantic coming into confused contact with Marxist science (and in the
process he reduces Marxist science to the positivism that Lukacs is
attacking). Where Lukacs tries to develop a political practice and a
theory of organization from his philosophical position, as he does in the
later essays in History and Class Consciousness and also - arguably - in
Lenin (1972), Stedman-Jones can see only an unbridgeable gap.
The second misreading involves the opposite tendency: to read the
claim to have transcended the dualism as an assertion of the simple,
immediate unity of opposites. In the case of the subject/object dualism,
Lukacs can be read as asserting an a priori unity rather than a unity
grasped in the concrete, in history. Matters are not helped by the fact
that this is the way in which the older Lukacs came to read himself
(1971a: xxxIii). Stedman-Jones again takes this misreading to its extreme,
using, without understanding, Lukacs' argument that a change in the
self-consciousness of the proletariat involves a change in the world that
is known through that self-consciousness and transforming it into the
crassest idealism. According to Stedman-Jones, Lukacs' argument is that:

Once the proletariat fulfills its vocation as the identical subject-object of

history by acquiring an adequate consciousness of capitalist society, it
abolishes capitalism in a final interiorization of it. The exact analogy of this
procedure with the movement of Hegel's Spirit needs no emphasis. All that it
omits is the brute, material struggle for power. (1971: 53)

Lukacs holds no such bizarre position:

For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness
enable it to organize the whole of society in accordance with those interests.
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 19

The crucial question of every class struggle is this: which class possesses this
capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment? This does not
preclude the use of force. It does not mean that the class interests destined to
prevail and thus to uphold the interests of society as a whole can be
guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such a transfer of power can
often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the
primitive accumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class
consciousness prove to be decisive in just those situations where force is
unavoidable and where classes are locked in a life-and-death struggle. (Lukacs
1971a: 52-3)

But the problem still remains of exactly what the transcendence of the
dualism means. There can be no doubt that Lukacs talks of the identical
subject/ object, but it is apparent that it is meant in its peculiar Hegelian
sense. Lucien Goldmann (1971) talks about the partial identity of subject
and object, and although he makes no attempt to conceptualize the
relationship, he offers a clue. Despite using the term 'identical' and his
later self-criticism, Lukacs does not offer an a priori unity but insists that
it be discovered in history; in other words, it is a mediated unity, the
primary mediation being history itself. The proletariat becomes conscious
of itself as both subject and object through the mediation of the devel­
oping social and economic structures of capitalist society, through the
mediation of its own developing relationships with other classes. Its
discovery of itself as an object produced in the past, and as the object of
present production processes, is the precondition of its action as subject
to produce itself as a new, future object through a transformation of
those production processes and their accompanying social structures.
The relationship of subject and object is in this sense one of identity and
separation at the same time - a formulation which Lukacs approaches on
several occasions (for example, 1971a: 142).
The fact that the subject/ object identity is mediated - by economic and
social structures and other classes - provides the 'space' for the 'brute
material struggle for power'. It further makes necessary a comprehensive
grasp of the mediating structures, there is no question of an immediate
reading of 'essences' from history:

The categories of dialectics must be applied to man as the measure of all things
in a manner that also includes simultaneously a complete description of
the economic structure of bourgeois society and a correct knowledge of the
present. For otherwise, any description will inevitably succumb to the dilemma
of empiricism and utopianism, of voluntarism and fatalism. (Lukacs 1971a:
190-1)

Thus the initial theoretical penetration of reification reveals that history is

the product of a human praxis and at the same time it reveals the power
of, and the need for, a precise analysis of those structures produced by
praxis and underlying immediate appearances.
20 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS

Praxis

It will be remembered that what makes this development possible, not,

note, what causes it or makes it inevitable, is the experience of the
proletariat, not the fact that it has a universal interest. Such an interest
may be developed but Lukacs also spends some time looking at the class
divisions that may inhibit it. What is important however, is the experi­
ence that makes the development possible. My interpretation of Lukacs
is that this experience is of being both part of a collective subject and a
collective object at the same time. As a factory worker I experience
myself as joining with others in creating the world, but at the same time
as I carry out that work, I am controlled and organized by my employer
as one of the three factors of production: land, labour and capital. Of
course everybody experiences themselves as both subject and object but
not at the same time in this peculiar way. The employer first of all
experiences him or herself as an individual subject in relation to
organizing the enterprise, but then as an object controlled or pushed in
this direction or that by the market forces which are perceived as natural
forces. This is a very different experience to being pushed this way or
that by another human being. The two experiences do not come together
in the same way. The experienced coincidence of the subject/object
provides the possibility of theoretical development and political, organ­
izational development. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic (1977) the slave
comes out on top - he is the one who has contact with the real world
and the master becomes helpless and dependent. For Lukacs, this
dialectic, when transferred to the factory floor, provides the possibility
for the creation of a free society.
I argued earlier that the ability to penetrate reification led theory to
become conscious of itself as one moment of 'sensuous human practice'.
It is this practice as a whole, uniting various levels of 'thought' and
'action', that Lukacs seems to embrace in his concept of praxis. Praxis is
what unites 'abstract thought' on the one hand and the 'concrete', the
world of structures, appearances and experience, on the other, into a
developing totality that transcends each. It is here that we find the
relationship between Marxism and the proletariat, the nature of which
Lukacs tends to gloss, even in the final essay in History and Class
Consciousness, 'Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization'.
However, it is made explicit in a striking way by Merleau-Ponty (1974a).
Lukacs moves to and fro between the most abstract levels of philo­
sophy and an analysis of the class position and experience of the
proletariat. The implication is not that the proletariat can immediately
and spontaneously achieve a fully developed theoretical awareness of its
position, otherwise there would be no point in Lukacs turning, in the
later essays, to the problem of the nature of the revolutionary party. The
relationship, as always, is mediated. The proletariat is a class which, in its
immediate experience of acting in the world, achieves a practical
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 21

consciousness of itself as subject and object at the same time. Its very
existence opens up the possibility of a theoretical transcendence (carried
out by theorists) of the subject/ object dualism and - since the existence of
the proletariat presupposes the existence of capitalism as a potential
world system - the possibility of a theoretical grasp of the totality of
social relationships as a coherent whole. The existence of the proletariat
reveals the way forward for thought. In tum, thought reveals the way
forward for the proletariat. It raises to a theoretical consciousness its
potentiality as the revolutionary subject of history, and articulates the
means by which that potentiality may be realized and the problems
involved in that realization. In this sense, Marxism as a theoretical system
is fully conscious of its social roots and its existence as one moment of a
wider praxis. It gives a concrete articulation to this consciousness pre­
cisely in the revolutionary party, where theorist and proletariat come
together, the former to theorize the experience of the latter, the latter to
base its practice on the knowledge produced by the former. In this way
Lukacs brings together the two sides of an argument which split the
Communist movement after World War I: on the one side there was Rosa
Luxemburg's argument that the proletariat could reach a revolutionary
consciousness by itself, on the other there was Lenin's argument that it
could not move beyond a 'trade union' consciousness and to go further
it needed the organization and direction of a revolutionary party.
If thought is one moment of a developing totality, its ability to grasp
the concrete conditioned by the concrete, and its relationship to the
concrete articulated in a praxis that changes the concrete, then there is a
constant movement of thought from an adequate to an inadequate and
from an inadequate to an adequate grasp of the concrete. In other words,
thought moves from 'true' to 'false' and from 'false' to 'true', from
'absolute' to 'relative' and from 'relative' to 'absolute'. Knowledge is
'true' insofar as it claims to offer only an incomplete grasp of its object,
'false' insofar as it claims to offer a total knowledge; 'absolute' insofar as
it has reached the limits placed upon knowledge by historical develop­
ment, 'relative' insofar as that development will continue and the limits
placed upon knowledge change; 'true' insofar as it was once 'absolute',
'false' insofar as it is now 'relative'; 'absolute' insofar as it is 'true',
'relative' insofar as it is only partially 'true'.
If Marxism is the possibility of the full self-consciousness of the
proletariat, then it must be able to take account of its own relativity, its
own developing falseness, and again it is through the revolutionary
party that this is achieved. Through its relationship to the class's experi­
ence of the developing social totality, it is able to theorize that experience
and development. It is here that we can understand the meaning of one
of Lukacs' most obscure statements:

Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research has disproved
once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses. Even if this were to be
22 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS

proved, every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such
modem findings without reservation, and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses in
toto - without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment . . .
Orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. (Lukacs 1971a: 1)

This is immediately dismissed as nonsense by Stedman-Jones: 'In fact,

such a credo would simply be an intellectual suicide for Marxism: what
scientific method in history has been able to survive the systematic
disproof of every one of its findings? What possible charter could there
be for it?' (Stedman-Jones 1971: 47).
Allowing for Lukacs' deliberate exaggeration, the charter is this: as the
totality of social relationships develops, so our knowledge of it will move
from adequacy to inadequacy; through its relationship to the practices
conditioned by, comprising and acting upon that totality (through
praxis) Marxism is able to revise itself in a consistent rather than an
arbitrary or piecemeal way. Thus the superiority of Marxism does not lie
in its individual statements about the world, but in its ability to revise
those statements as soon as they become inappropriate without creating
destructive internal contradictions, without fragmenting its insights,
uniting each through its totalizing movement which is not achieved once
and for all but is rather a ceaseless movement of totalization and
retotalization. One could say that a science that could not recognize its
own inadequacies and revise itself would be lost.
Thus there is a complex of reciprocal developing relationships between
'thought' and 'reality', the motor of which, identified at its most general
level, is 'praxis'. We can see now how Lukacs avoids relativism. For the
latter, there are two poles: 'thought' and 'reality', and problems can only
concern the correspondence or lack of correspondence between them, the
problem of 'truth' and 'falsity'. From Lukacs' position, truth and falsity
are intertwined and the questions that enable a grasp of that intertwining
concern the conceptual structure of knowledge, the extent to which it
remains caught in or goes beyond immediate appearance, its awareness
of its own multidimensional relationships with what it grasps as the
'concrete', its articulation with other moments of praxis.

An epiphany

Reading and revising this argument some twenty years after I wrote it,
part of me has been asking constantly how could I ever have believed it
- yet if it was believable not only to me and a number of others more
intelligent than myself within the last fifty years, then how much more
believable would it have been seventy or eighty years ago when the
proletariat had moved to the centre of the world stage and promised to
dominate the future. One major revolution had already been achieved
and revolutionary situations were appearing and disappearing in the
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 23

turmoil that followed the end of World War I. It has always seemed to
me that at this point in his career Lukacs produced the best available
statement of the utopian vision inherent in Marxism and it is a vision
which seems to be resurrected during periods of rebellion or upheaval -
it is no accident that Lukacs came to light again during the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
The religious overtones of 'epiphany' are conscious. What Lukacs
envisages is a world where the human powers projected into and
alienated in conceptions of a deity have been recaptured by humanity,
and where the totality is here and now, no longer the province of a
divine being. The free and rational world which had been envisaged by
the Enlightenment and by the French Revolution would be here.
Philosophy would be realized concretely and practically in the world as
Marx had envisaged in his earlier writings (Marx 1974). It seems to me
that this is not an unpleasant vision, a world where people are equal and
free and aware of the dependence upon and need for each other, a world
where we could go fishing, look after cattle and philosophize as we
desired. It is, to put it mildly a pity that life has proved more compli­
cated. However, I am not sure that there is an alternative ideal. The
vision of postmodernism, which I think is the contemporary form of
the liberal vision, is one of fragmentation and hidden despair, and that
only leaves a hankering after a rigid, established order.
Returning to a more realistic level, if Lukacs' vision has fragmented,
some of the fragments are well worth preserving. Here I want to look
particularly at his critique of non-Marxist knowledge and how that
might figure in our understanding of identity, and second I want to
return to and elucidate the importance of the notion of experience.

The critique of knowledge

Lukacs presents a view of Marxism as a process of constant self-revision

as it comes into contact with an ever-changing reality; this process
of constant revision is also a process of absorption of other forms of
knowledge and theory, not just that produced by Marxism itself. It is not
a matter of measuring Marxism against other theories and knowledge
claims and showing that it is better (or not). There are no independent or
absolute criteria, but this does not mean that there are no criteria, as is so
often assumed by contemporary theorists.
The criteria that Lukacs suggests are internal to Marxism, and not
simple targets, like the finishing tape in a race; in fact as the race develops
so the finishing tape moves and nobody ever reaches it. The totalization
process must be constantly renewed. But if these criteria are potentialities
within one form of thought, then how can they provide the basis for
establishing the superiority of that form over others? Since they must be
defined by the form that contains them, what relevance can they have for
24 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

other forms? Lukacs offers, but does not elaborate (except implicitly in his
own critical positions) an answer. Marxism does not reject bourgeois
knowledge but accepts it and goes beyond it, including it as a moment
within Marxism. Its starting point is the intellectual and artistic products
of bourgeois society: 'The "falseness", the "one-sidedness" of the bour­
geois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic
acquisition of knowledge about society' (1971a: 164).
Perhaps the best starting point is to dispute the idea that to situate a
work in its social context, to reveal its social roots, is not by and in itself
a criticism of that work, a proof of its lack of 'objectivity', any more than
the psychological state of the thinker can invalidate his or her claims. The
fact that Isaac Newton might have been obsessive or neurotic does not
invalidate the laws of gravity, any more than the fact that John Maynard
Keynes was, in Marxist terms, a bourgeois thinker invalidates his
economic theory. In fact, from a Marxist point of view, the problem with
Keynes might be that he was only too right.
It is important to situate ideas in their social context in the immediate
experience or practical consciousness of a particular class or group. An
idea only becomes truly intelligible when we can grasp, through the
project of the writer and the conditions in which it is pursued, why it
should occupy this position within this discourse, why it is produced at
this time by this individual, why it should have these peculiarities,
features not directly necessitated by the underlying problematic. All this
is an exercise in making ideas intelligible, not in criticizing ideas. What is
unintelligible, what cannot be understood, cannot be coherently
criticized. The next step is the conceptual criticism, which is a matter
of identifying the partial and one-sided nature of what is being criticized,
its 'unconscious' relativity and its internal contradictions, in tum rooted
in its reliance on unreconciled dualisms.
There are a number of different ways in which knowledge may
present a partial and one-sided view of its object, each rooted in its
failure to go beyond the immediate. Lukacs does not deal in a detailed or
systematic way with the identification and transcendence of 'partial'
knowledge, but an examination of his arguments in relation to the
fragmentation and false separation of disciplines in the social sciences,
combined with my earlier exposition, make it possible to follow up more
rigorously some of its implications. The unification of the fragmented
disciplines is not simply a matter of adding them together, rather they
must be 'transformed inwardly' by an 'inwardly synthesizing philo­
sophical method' (1971a: 109). It might be inferred from such an
argument that Marxism is a philosophical method and nothing else, and
that knowledge produced by science is worthless until it has undergone
a philosophical transformation. Lukacs' critique of scientific knowledge
tends to support this interpretation: the subordination of philosophy to
science is seen as a product of reification. To accept uncritically the
results of science, at least of social science, is to accept the reified world.
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 25

Science sees the world analytically, separating out elements and looking
for external, causal relationships. In the social sciences this leaves society
looking fixed and unalterable, a 'second nature', whereas Marxism seeks
to unite elements in the internal relationships of a totality which is
constantly changing in relation to human praxis.

Marxism, however, simultaneously raises and reduces all specializations to the

level of aspects in a dialectical process: this is not to deny that the process
of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the
special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science.
But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards
understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it
presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated
fragment retains its 'autonomy' and becomes an end in itself. In the last
analysis, Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences
of law, economics or history etc.: there is nothing but a Single, unified -
dialectical and historical - science of the evolution of society as a totality.
(Lukacs 1971a: 28)

The implication is that the philosophical method is the 'highest' moment

of totalization and that its object is precisely the knowledge produced by
Marxist science. There are also implicit and explicit distinctions between
Marxist and non-Marxist science, and this in tum implies that a pre­
liminary transformation of the knowledge produced by the bourgeois
disciplines is necessary before the philosophical transformation may be
operated. These different levels of 'science' - always in this context social
science - the philosophy / science relationship, and the different levels of
transformation are frequently blurred by Lukacs. For our present pur­
poses, sociology can be taken as 'bourgeois science' and I will try to offer
an example of Lukacs' method first by borrowing from Arato's (1972)
discussion of Lukacs' development of Weber's notion of formal ration­
ality. I will then tum to a Lukacsian critique of a sociological account of
self and identity.
For Weber, formal rationality is the 'reason' of science and industry,
resting on quantifiability and calculability and excluding all 'values'. A
rational economy requires the organization of all areas of life, law,
politics, etc., according to the principles of formal rationality. This was the
governing principle of modernity. Arato points out that Lukacs 'fuses the
Marxist category of abstract labour with Weber's category of formal
rationality' (1972: 35), enabling him to go beyond Marx in arguing that:

Free labour in itself is not enough to allow the complete self-realization of

capitalist production, or even the total rationalization of a single factory. The
culmination of capitalist rationality is only possible when the 'fate of the
worker becomes the fate of society as a whole', when the 'internal organization
of the factory' becomes the microcosm of 'the whole structure of capitalist
society. (Arato 1972: 35)
26 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

If Weber's category enables an extension, or at least a clarification, of

Marx, then what has happened to the category itself? At one level it
remains the same: it 'refers' to an analytic logic necessary to capitalist
production and reproduced in every area of social life; at the same time
it is modified, it becomes a concept 'required' in the totalizing frame­
work of Marxism, and the conceptual structure of which it becomes a
part limits its meaning and fills it out. Limits, in the sense that it ceases
to be the (eventually unintelligible) dominant feature of industrial society
as such, but becomes a feature of capitalist society, a 'dependent' rather
than a central, organizing concept - dependent upon the analysis of the
development of capitalist relations of production, which it follows in
Lukacs' exposition. It is 'filled out' in the sense that it takes its place in a
structure of concepts appropriate to capitalist society which specify in
more detail its Significance. Previously in Weber's work it was specified
in relation to the principles of organization of all societies, as for instance
in Weber's analytic classification of types of authority. Thus its
'unconscious relativism' is revealed - it loses its 'absolute' implications
and becomes the grasp of an historically limited phenomenon.
This should convey the general idea and we can now tum to a more
simple example. For Lukacs bourgeois social science is analytic as
opposed to dialectical; it breaks elements down and sees them as static
rather than bringing them together and putting them into motion.
Perhaps the best example in relation to the sociological conception of
identity is the Twenty Question Test set up by Manford Kuhn of the
Iowa school of symbolic interactionism (Kuhn and Partland 1972). People
are asked to write down twenty answers to the question: 'Who am I?'
The results can be easily quantified and compared and of course by
themselves they tell us nothing about identity, except that if people are
asked to describe themselves to a stranger they start with the most
anonymous characteristics such as gender or religious denomination.
However, this is not 'wrong' in any sense , it is only partial and we can
easily push it into something more useful. We can ask, for example,
whether people would describe themselves in the same way to potential
friends or lovers. The answer is, of course, that at least the order of
characteristics might be varied and the concept of identity is then put in
motion - it is not a list of characteristics but a changing combination of
characteristics that can vary from situation to situation. We can ask
questions about the relationships between the individual and the
different situations in which one finds oneself. Identity is not a fixed
entity, part of a second nature.
This is very general but it enables two important points to be made.
The first is that it is clear that the 'originally given' object, the results of
the test, remains at the same time as it is transformed, reconstructed. The
'facts' come to be seen as part of a process and take on a new meaning.
They are no longer the reference point against which a theory must be
judged. All this is fairly straightforward and not particularly Marxist at
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 27

all; in fact it is the starting point of the Chicago School of symbolic

interactionism and here the notion of criticism moves up a level. Identity
is seen as a process, a matter of external negotiation between oneself and
the people around, and an internal negotiation or conversation between
the T and the 'me' (Mead 1938).
The next stage, from a Marxist point of view, would be the situating of
these processes in an even wider social framework. Again it would not
be a matter of demonstrating that Mead or the interactionist tradition
were wrong, but of situating these particular ideas, these particular
processes, in the context of wider processes. Symbolic interactionists
have gone some of the way themselves: Simon and Gagnon (1986), for
example, give an account of the historically changing forms in which we
work out our sexual behaviour through a process of social scripting, then
interpersonal scripting and then intra-personal scripting, a process of
increasing complexities in sexual identity. This in tum can be understood
as the result of an increasingly complex role structure, all of which can
be described by symbolic interactionism.
What cannot be understood within the interactionist framework, how­
ever, are the underlying structural relationships which produce more
complex roles, and the ways these roles are arranged in power hier­
archies and connected to property or wealth. Nor, it seems, can inter­
actionism grasp the underlying historical processes in which an
individual life and identity is formed. This needs something more,
which can be supplied by Marxism or indeed by other macro-social
theories that can be brought into the ongoing totalization. It is not just a
matter of Marxism absorbing everything; Marxism itself is incomplete
and will require other theories and approaches to fill gaps. Goff (1980),
for example, argues that Mead can supply Marxism with a social
psychology which it can generate out of its own conceptual framework.
This is not the place to go into great detail about the battles between
different forms of social theory during this century, but from the way I
have framed this argument it is clear which side I 'support'. Yet the
argument itself is undermining this facile notion of support and oppo­
sition. The original version of this paper was motivated by a reaction
against what I felt to be Althusser's (1969) 'scientistic' Marxism. It now
seems to me that it is best understood as an argument in favour of
metanarratives and against postmodernism, against which I would also
argue for the importance of the idea of social science and scientific
practice.
The notion of an ongoing totalization involves the necessity of debate
between different positions, but the maintenance in some form or
another of all positions, constantly modifying each other and in rela­
tionship to each other. These days I would prefer not to argue in favour
of Marxism over other theoretical positions, but in favour of Reason, of
which Marxism is one historically fruitful variant, and in contrast to
unreason. The former is a totalizing thought which maintains what is left
28 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

of the Marxist ideal, the latter is a one-sided or detotalizing process

which cannot see its own partiality. I think that the important point in
this argument, and one which takes us back to identity, is the unavoid­
ability of being involved in a totalizing process. Any statement of
theoretical knowledge, interpretation of empirical findings, or of one's
own experience has implications which go beyond that simple inter­
pretation. We always imply theoretical grand narratives, perhaps even
especially when denying their existence. Such a denial is a grossly
universal and grand statement.
To understand what an 'identity' is, or a 'self' or 'person', involves
seeing the individual in the context not just of the surrounding 'sig­
nificant others' at different times of his or her life, but also in terms of
position in the wider social structure and of the wider historical
processes which provide us with the stage on which we act out our lives.
We are each of us given a starting point and we do something with it.
Some aspect of our identity is given to us with our starting point and we
have no choice about it. I did not choose to be white, male, or to be born
into a South London working-class family, yet my identity, my self, has
been framed by these facts, as it has been framed by my being conceived
during World War II, and growing up during the Cold War to witness
the Vietnam War and so on. These things do not determine in any strict
sense the sort of person I am and what I do, but they limit and condition
both of those things.
I might not be carried along in the totalizing movement of history
towards the socialist revolution but the thought which tries to under­
stand my life, or anybody's life must find my place in the totality. Just as
the understanding of a society requires a metanarrative, so the under­
standing of an individual self, identity or life requires that it be inserted
in that metanarrative. I need not be aware of that metanarrative, the
social and historical processes which have such an effect on my life. I will
be talking later about the internal unconscious, but we are all
surrounded by an external unconscious which profoundly influences
us. We might not be able to abolish this unconscious by seizing control
of history, as Lukacs hoped, but we can become aware of it.
Now I want to move in the other direction, away from the totality and
towards individual experience and its significance. My starting point will
be other attempts to deal with relativism suggesting that one or another
social group is in a privileged position to grasp reality.

Experience, truth and knowledge

It seems to me that Lukacs' very complex argument brings together two

central elements: experience, and knowledge/ theory. Arguments which
are often similar in form to his arguably tend to miss or underestimate
the importance of one or the other. I want to argue here that if we pursue
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 29

experience we can arrive at another important idea, that of truth as

something different from knowledge.
I will begin with Karl Mannheim (1972), who in the 1930s produced an
argument which came very close to Lukacs, with the role of the
proletariat being taken over by intellectuals. He argues that the sociology
of knowledge replaces relativism with 'relationism'. It appears when
different points of view have invalidated each other by revealing each
other's social roots and consequent ideological characteristics. It offers
the only way out of the impasse by replacing the notion of absolute or
eternal truth by one of a permanently developing truth:
Relationism, as we use it, states that every assertion can only be relationally
formulated. It becomes relativism only when it is linked with the older, static
ideal of eternal, unperspectivistic truths independent of the subjective experi­
ence of the observer, and when it is judged by the alien idea of absolute truth.
(Mannheim 1972: 270)

This sounds very Lukacsian, but Mannheim still approaches the problem
of distinguishing between better and worse knowledge, more or less
adequate knowledge. He suggests that more adequate knowledge is
achieved by synthesizing different points of view into an ever-widening
totality of knowledge and two ways in which this might be done. In the
first place:
What has been correctly but differentially perceived by the two perspectives
must be understood in the light of differences in the structure of these varied
modes of perception. An effort must be made to find a formula for translating
the results of one into those of the other and to discover a common denomi­
nator for these varying perspectivistic insights. Once such a common
denominator has been found, it is possible to separate the necessary differ­
ences from the arbitrarily conceived and mistaken elements which here too
should be considered as errors. (Mannheim 1972: 270)

Alternatively, we might achieve a synthesis through recognizing the

situational determinants in opposing or differing points of view and, as a
consequence, neutralizing them.
Each alternative implies some 'neutral' area (in the second case,
apparently immediately visible) between or within different points of
view - an implicit 'real world' against which 'situational' determinants
can be identified, or a neutral language which enables the same result.
This implication remains despite his attempt to situate 'superior knowl­
edge' in the perspective of intellectuals as a group: they are simply able
to see more of the real world than others, or have easier access to the
neutral language.
In this way, 'truth' and 'error' creep back and, having gone this far, it
is no surprise that Mannheim reaches the point of advocating 'a direct
observation of the facts' (1972: 256) in order to choose between different
points of view. This is in direct contradiction to the earlier assertion of
the perspectivistic nature of all truth which, moreover, Mannheim has
30 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

taken to its logical conclusion in asserting that in an important way

'facts' are constituted by conceptual structures (1972: 91). This would
imply that the terms can have no absolute meaning apart from the
perspectives in which they occur, and they will of course have different
meanings in different perspectives. We end up back in a relativist
position.
It is indeed very difficult to avoid relativism if we think of the world
as something 'out there' which we look at from different angles - people
sitting in a room will see different parts of the room and it would be
nonsense to say that one point of view is better then another. We could
not get a complete picture by adding all the points of view together since
a complete picture would involve being able to see through objects and
other people to the hidden objects and parts of the room.
Now what differentiates Lukacs from Mannheim is precisely the notion
of seeing through or inside objects - the notion of there being underlying
structures which are not available to any visual perspective but can be
constructed in theory as explanations of what can be seen. This is a way
of putting it which owes more to modem realism than it does to Lukacs
(d. Bhaskar 1978, 1979) but it seems to me to capture Lukacs' claims for
Marxism. The feature that enables Lukacs to make this claim, producing
an alternative to relativism, is the notion of experience the experience of
-

the world and of the self as subject and object which opens up the
possibility of knowing the totality and of being able to understand
underlying structures. This experience can work 'internally' in the sense
that it pushes the class into thinking about its place in society, it can be
grasped and its implications explored by the theorist and the philo­
sopher. It is developed through interaction between the two.
In the original version of this paper I argued for the development of a
Marxist phenomenology of experience. In fact such a phenomenology
already existed and I will be discussing the basics of it in Chapter 3
where I shall suggest that it helps us to understand the failure of Lukacs'
hopes. Here, however, I want to make another distinction based on a
criticism of Harding's 'feminist standpoint epistemology'. My under­
standing of her argument is that the privileged place of women in
establishing knowledge is that they are the group that is most excluded,
the group at the bottom of the pile. A good critical discussion of the
philosophical aspects of this argument can be found in Halberg (1989),
but here I want to develop a different critique. The important point is
that Lukacs does not base his argument on the fact that the proletariat is
at the bottom of the pile. This is the mistaken position attributed to him
by Stedman-Jones whom I quoted above. Lukacs' argument is based on
the peculiar experience of the proletariat, the conjunction of being subject
and object in the same activity. Arguably, it is only working-class
women who are caught up in this experience as part of a wider class.
I do not think that Harding makes her case on cornmon experience of
this sort but what she does seem to do is to open up the possibility for
 LUKACS: EXPERIENCE, IDENTITY AND PHILOSOPHY 31

other groups to demand priority within the women's movement -

working-class women, black women and so on. I will argue later that
there are profound sociological reasons why this sort of identity politics
will fragment. What the fragmentation does in this particular case is to
open the door to a postmodemism which seems to undermine the
possibility of a feminist politics at all. However, if we think of experience
here in a different way I think it is possible to rescue something from
Harding's position.
While the sort of experience implied by Lukacs might be absent for
women or other 'identity' groups, based on gender, ethnic origin or
sexuality, this is not to deny that some form of experience might be shared
by many members of such groups. It is quite clear, for example, and to
continue with feminism, that women are almost consistently under­
represented in the higher levels of industry, the professions, academia,
that they are subjected to forms of violence which are not necessarily
punished or even recognized. These things can be experienced by women
and some of this experience can be turned into knowledge, statistical
knowledge, for example. But there is a level of experience - of 'feeling' the
glass ceiling above one's head, of sensing the threat of violence in a man -
that is perhaps only available or primarily available to women; or perhaps
it is a matter of such experiences playing a more fundamental part in
women's lives than in those of most men. These experiences would be
somewhere around the border of the reflective and pre-reflective.
I would like to refer to this sort of experience which is both individual
and social as a person's truth his or her way of feeling the world and
-

others, which might enable a mutual recognition and a basis for

collective action or might not. It is intensely felt and for periods will fill
up a life. It is an experience we can identify with or 'become' and which,
I shall argue later, stops us thinking, whereas the experience Lukacs is
talking about is an experience that is contradictory and pushes us into
thought.
Now my truth is not knowledge and the gap between the two is often
painful - especially since it pushes me into thinking again; as an
example, a woman's truth that women are under threat on the street is
different from the statistical knowledge that young men are most in
danger. Of course the two can confirm each other: the experience of the
glass ceiling, is usually confirmed by knowledge. When the two contra­
dict each other, it often feels that the experience is being invalidated,
especially if it is a very intense experience. It is not 'invalid' - it is
authentic, integral to the experiencing individual, but it is not knowledge
of the world, it is an individual truth. Theory, knowledge, must make a
space for that truth and attempt to understand it and its importance, but
it would be wrong to take it as knowledge. My religious experiences and
the beliefs I develop might be a vital part of my truth, but it does not
follow that the beliefs are true. Theory has to place my truth in a wider
totality and that will change its meaning.
32 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

It should be evident that even if Lukacs does work with a fairly

limited conception of experience, experience is a complex reality. There
can be contradictory experiences which push us into thought, there can
be intense experiences that are vital to our sense of self and which
prevent our thinking. In the next chapter I will tum to different
phenomenologies of experience which make the picture ever more
complicated.
 3

THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE

The more recent concern with the politics of identity, which I have
suggested elsewhere (Craib 1994) is narcissistic in various ways, is argu­
ably a narrowing down of a wider concern with the politics of experi­
ence. This wider concern can be traced back through the philosophy of
Hegel, Marx's comments about alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts,
Hegelian Marxism and Husserl's phenomenology, and French existenti­
alism, the latter being most immediately relevant to R.D. Laing's classic
The Politics of Experience (1967). Here I want to look at the two major
twentieth-century figures of French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and at a central figure in the Hegelian Marxist
tradition, T.W. Adorno.
There are various ways of conceptualizing experience and one reason
for starting with French existentialism is that experience in this tradition
is by definition wider than and prior to cognition. The Cartesian cogito is
inverted - not 'I think, therefore l am', but 'I am, therefore I think'. Of
course, I can 'be' in different ways and these different ways can affect
not only what I think but how I think, and how I know myself, how I
understand my identity. From this starting point Sartre and Merleau­
Ponty take us in different directions.

Sartre's existentialism

I find it difficult to understand why Sartre has not attracted more

attention from English-speaking sociologists: he is a difficult thinker and
requires careful reading but this is true for any number of French thinkers
who have been embraced by British sociologists, from Althusser through
to Baudrillard. It is true that Sartre's earlier work, the 'purer' existen­
tialism of Being and Nothingness (1957) is perhaps at the opposite end of
the spectrum to sociology, but the later massive Critique of Dialectical
Reason (1977) has at its centre an analysis of different forms of relation­
ships comprising different types of social group. His more accessible The
Problem of Method (1963a) addresses an issue central to interactionist
sociology and the increasingly popular concern with life histories and
narratives (see, for example, Macadams 1993) - the relationship between
34 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

the course of an individual life and the surrounding social networks and
social structures. His Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) takes up the issue of
otherness and the other some forty years before contemporary post­
modernists and Lacanians.
Even if we do not concern ourselves with the detail of Sartre's earlier
philosophy, his assertion of a pre-reflective level of consciousness at
which we take decisions and adopt positions is important. By inverting
the Cartesian cogito, Sartre shows that Descartes does not espouse the
simple unitary subject that contemporary thinkers so often attribute to
him. The notion of reflection, of thinking, presupposes a split in con­
sciousness between that which thinks and that which is thought about.
The pre-reflective consciousness that is already committed in the world,
whether we like it or not, splits when we think about our commitment.
When I think about myself I am both subject and object - the person
who does the thinking and the person who is thought about. In this
sense identity can never be achieved, I can never become myself.
There is another sense in which identity cannot be achieved: my
consciousness is a separation from the world around me as well as from
myself as an object and I am not part of any material chain of causation.
It is here that we can find the meaning of what Sartre calls freedom and
the necessity and unavoidability of freedom: I am always already in the
world and I have to take an attitude to the world around me and to
myself, but that attitude is not determined by anything. If I am clapped
in irons and suspended upside down in a dungeon I still have to choose
how I will suffer.
In his earlier work Sartre is primarily concerned with the ethical
implications of this division in consciousness between the reflective and
the pre-reflective: do I take responsibility for my place in the world and
what I do with it or do I claim to myself and to others that I have no
choice in what I am or do? Sartre (1957) calls the latter 'bad faith' and
one aspect of bad faith is the attempt to identify with a social role or
status. If, for instance, I decide that my identity as a man is what is
important and I spend my time trying to discover this identity through
participating in various men's groups in the hope that I will find a
security and solidity in such an identity, then I am engaging in an act of
bad faith, for such a security and solidity is not possible. I can never be
a man, I can only try to be whatever it is that I think a man is. This is
perhaps the simplest reason why identity politics are never as satisfying
as they promise to be.
Sartre here is presenting an ethical version of Lacan's (1977) psycho­
analytic concept of the 'mirror stage'; the similarity should not be
surprising since both were pupils of Alexander Kojeve and his
interpretation of Hegel (Kojeve 1969) constantly emerges in their work.
In Lacan's version, the infant, which at first experiences itself as a bundle
of conflicting urges, comes to see itself reflected in a mirror (the eyes of
its mother perhaps). What it sees in this reflection is a being apparently
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 35

in control of itself with clear boundaries and a physical and therefore

emotional unity. The infant attempts to become this being, an imaginary
identification; to some degree we spend the rest of our lives chasing such
an identity which is impossible to achieve.
For Sartre what makes this identity impossible is a fissure in con­
sciousness. The pre-reflective consciousness is a nothingness; it has no
content but is simply a relationship to what is outside. For Lacan what
underlies our consciousness of the world and prevents us becoming
subjects identical to ourselves is a complex unconscious. It is, I think,
arguable that at different levels of experience both are right; our
consciousness breaks any causal chain that links our subjectivity to the
outside world. Yet at the same time our subjectivity is caught up in
the outside world in all sorts of ways, through our body and through the
language and belief systems into which we are socialized, and the social
structures in which we are situated. The moment of 'nothingness', of our
separation from the world and the anguish and fear which that pro­
duces, is only part of it. Later in this chapter we shall see that Merleau­
Ponty adds another dimension and in the following chapter we shall
examine how psychoanalysis extends our understanding of experience
even further.
Sartre developed his original existentialism through a long philoso­
phical and political confrontation with Marxism. The Critique of Dialectical
Reason (1977) is a massive attempt to found Marxist philosophy, not as a
philosophy of nature a la Engels (1940), but as a philosophy of the
relationship between conscious human beings and nature, in which a
third area of ontological reality is created between the nothingness of
conscious and the material world. This area - the 'practico-inert' -
combines certain properties of consciousness and the material world and
acts back upon consciousness, confining and directing practice. It is in
this context of what is an elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation that
we find Sartre's analysis of different types of social relationships.
This part of Sartre's philosophy is primarily one of praxis, of action
rather than structures, and he aims at a philosophical foundation of
Marxist concepts such as class, not at their refinement or employment
which must take place on a different level of analysis. In this sense, he
can be grouped with writers such as Lukacs, but he offers a more
elaborate conception of social class and of social experience. In his
exploration of the limits and potentialities of human praxis, the 'dialectic
of freedom and necessity' that he finds in Marx, Sartre develops what
can best be called a phenomenology of social groups, an analysis of the
possible structures of relationships that may form between individuals
and groups on the basis of their membership of a social class.
Two of these are particularly important. The first is the 'series': a
structure of interpersonal relationships conditioned by economic scarcity
and dominated by social and economic structures that have become
relatively independent of human activity. Each individual is assigned her
36 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

place within and by these structures which separate her from others in
the series: she grasps herself as 'other' than those others, isolated and
dependent upon others' actions; to the extent that her action is limited
and guided in this way from the outside, she is also 'other' than herself -
a profound double alienation that leaves her impotent and, as we shall
see, open to manipulation. The second formation, the 'group-in-fusion',
is the radical opposite: under an external threat that defines the series as
a group, serialized individuals come to grasp themselves as the 'same' as
each other through the actions, initially separate and individual, they
take to protect themselves. Andre Gorz describes Sartre's notion with
admirable clarity: 'The active unit of human praxis which then emerges
. . . is the paradigm of all egalitarian concepts of what a liberated,
fraternal community should be . . . . In the fused group alienation is - at
least temporarily - abolished' (Gorz 1975: 258-9).
Gorz is right to emphasize that, for Sartre, the triumph is shortlived;
the necessity for the group to organize and maintain itself sets it on the
path to institutionalization and re-serialization; nonetheless, it remains
the means by which people collectively and freely make history.
The sociology of consumption can gain a critical dimension from
notion of a series. The creation of markets and needs in late capitalist
societies involves a process of serialization where each is defined by
external criteria - possessions - in relation to the others. I choose my
'self' from a range of styles and commodities offered to me, my choice
being a response to the choice of others rather than something which
comes from my life-project. Sartre sees this as involving a form of
manipulative control that he calls 'extero-conditioning' in which a ruling
group 'works' upon the series to push seriality to the limits and endow it
with a false unity. Each individual, in her isolated importance, is kept
separate from others and at the same time encouraged to become more
like them through the adoption of various 'external' anonymous quali­
ties: ways of dressing, tastes, cliched political beliefs, etc. The alienation
is cemented; in my serial isolation and impotence I am persuaded that I
can find power, friendship and perhaps especially an identity by making
myself more like other people I do not know, that - in the last analysis -
nobody knows. This provides a way into an analysis and critique of a
host of cultural and political phenomena which play vital roles in
maintaining the present system. The notion is useful not just on the level
of fashion and popular culture, the most obvious examples, but it is also
applicable to the mass media and parliamentary democracy. Extero­
conditioning gives rise to a whole 'rhetoric of anonymity' through which
news is filtered and political questions posed: 'public opinion', 'the silent
majority', 'the wishes of the people', 'the ordinary working man', become
anonymous arbitrators, points of identification for those addressed as
'free independent individuals' by the media and politicians. These are, at
least in Britain and the USA reinforced by the market ideology that sees
the citizen as a consumer and it all serves to mask the possibility of
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 37

taking real collective decisions in cooperation with specific other people

in concrete situations.
The 'group in fusion' is in more conventional Marxist terms the 'class­
for-itself', the class which has achieved class-consciousness. But Sartre's
way of conceiving this offers a more subtle tool than conventional
Marxism. A 'group in fusion' can form on bases other than class, and
within classes at different times and places. We can see the social world
as a kaleidoscope of series, fused groups and institutions in a constant
process of formation and dissolution, in Sartre's view given an overall
unity by their relationship to the practico-inert: different classes possess
different relationships to the material world.
Compared with Lukacs, Sartre offers the hope of totality, rather than
its promise. In epistemological terms the totality is still central to
understanding and in political terms it is still the ideal, but a complex
ideal and the development of class-consciousness is not a cognitive
process, involving the theorization of experience, but an experiential
process, the experience of a threat, and the experience of others experi­
encing that threat, brought together into a group by the actions of the
ruling group. The fused group does not come together to achieve an
identity - it is given an identity from the outside and internalizes it
through the experiential rather than theoretical realization of a common
threat.
Sartre's philosophy carries on the tradition of humanist Marxism in a
generally recognizable way, Merleau-Ponty carries it on at a different,
less recognizable level.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is rather less radical than Sartre's. He

does not emphasize consciousness as a transcendental nothingness in
relation to the world, nor does he see it as that which constitutes the
world. He is concerned primarily with the life-world as the realm in
which consciousness comes into contact with an already constituted,
already existing material world. The introduction of the real material
world into the life-world distinguishes him from the more orthodox
phenomenological sociologists such as Alfred Schutz (1967) and opens
an important possibility, that of taking account of 'material' social
structures, those with a weight and permanence that goes beyond the
meaning given to them by social actors. When we come to consider
Merleau-Ponty's relation to structuralism and Marxism, we shall see to
what extent this promise is fulfilled.
If he eliminates the constituting transcendental consciousness this does
not mean that he gives priority to the material world, nor does he simply
juxtapose that world to consciousness (which is certainly a tendency in
Sartre). The life-world is for Merleau-Ponty the interpenetration of
38 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS

subject and object, an area of mystery where meaning is generated in a

real but meaningless world. It is an area revealed by the phenomenology
of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is in the immediate 'primordial'
perception of the world that everything else has its basis: perception
involves the whole body as both subject and object, and it is in the
immediate organization of the world in terms of figures and ground (as
opposed to Schutz's typification) that we find the first generation of
meaning, the first projection of human intentions into the world.
Consciousness must always grasp its object from a specific perspective,
perception is rooted in the same body as one object among others. We
can never perceive an object from all perspectives at the same time, the
world continually transcends our grasp as we continually transcend the
world through organizing it from our specific perspective. In my
perception of the world, I become part of it at the same time as I
appropriate it at a distance as part of myself. My pre-reflective experi­
ence of the world is this ongoing 'dance' with the world around me. It is
this fundamental interpenetration of subject and object, the fact that
consciousness is always situated within the world and never completely
transcendent to it, that enables phenomenology to become dialectical and
opens the way for an accommodation with Marx, particularly through
his earlier work.
A central concern is with linguistics (Merleau-Ponty 1974b) which
illustrates his vision as a whole and acts as a model for the other human
sciences. He explores in particular the generation of meaning from
within the life-world through language, which is both the ground of
intersubjectivity and a structure. At times he manifests an almost
religious sense of wonder and mystery at this pre-reflective relation to
the world, but at the same time there is a coherent argument. He devel­
ops his own position through a critique of the idea of a 'pure' language,
and of the attempt to study language as if it were a system of clear
denotations in order to escape 'the confused and annoying situation of a
being who is what he is talking about' (1974b: 3). A 'pure' language
would be one with an absolutely clear meaning, with no room for doubt
or misinterpretation; such a language would also make it unnecessary to
speak, since nothing could be said that was not already known. The
perfect clarity of meaning is the impossibility of new meaning, and
therefore the impossibility of life: 'What we have to say is only the excess
of what we live over what has already been said' (1974b: 112).
To regard language as a system of clear denotations is to render its
development a matter of historical accident; we know that language
changes, but there would be no reason for the change. To make change
intelligible we have to come back to the experience of speaking, the
expression of new meaning. If we look at our experience of speaking, or
reading, we find the opposite to what we would expect if language were
a structure of clear meanings. The words themselves are a hindrance - to
attend to the words as they are enunciated or as they appear on the page
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 39

is to lose the meaning of what is being said or read. The meaning always
seems to lie beyond the words rather than in them.
Merleau-Ponty offers a highly original interpretation of Saussure. Most
structuralists read Saussure as showing that a scientific linguistics must
eliminate the speaking subject and concentrate on the synchronic
structure of language; for Merleau-Ponty, Saussure brings us back to the
speaking subject and the inseparability of synchrony and diachrony. He
argues that Saussure was the first to realize the peculiar nature of
language as a structure that is gone beyond in each spoken sentence yet
remains constant, the first to discover a structure of language that does
not involve the assumption of clear denotation. This structure is, in fact,
a structure of differences, the meaning of a sound or word is not a
positive quality that adheres to it, but lies in its difference from other
words and sounds. Its meaning depends on its relationship to other
words and sounds in the chain. Meaning lies in-between words. This
system of differentiation is the means of generating meaning within the
'life-world' of a society and to learn a language is to learn the rules of
differentiation around which the structure is built. In this sense language
pre-exists what can be said with it; but at this level the structure of a
language only makes meaning possible - it is actualized in use, and here
we are referred back to the speaking subject. The act of speaking must
take an 'existential and ontological' priority over the structure that makes
speech possible, that logically precedes it. It is speaking that generates
the structure of language and it is to speech that we must refer to
understand any development in that structure.
Interaction with others, communication, is not, as many sociologists
seem to assume, a matter of listening to words. Intersubjectivity is for
Merleau-Ponty an immediate reality of pre-reflective experience. I grasp
the existence of the other consciousnesses as soon as I see some objects in
my world reacting to other objects to which I also react. But I do not
grasp the other consciousness as existing over and against me: 'face-to­
face' interaction is a misnomer. Face to face I see only a twitching fleshy
object which is not the other consciousness and which does not contain
the other consciousness - I know that inside that object there are only
other objects. The other's consciousness exists as it were not 'in' him but
behind and around me. Insofar as language is an object in my world as
in his, we are joined together through it: when I listen to the other speak
or read what he has written, I enter into his consciousness, discover his
meanings through my meanings. After reading, listening, it is possible to
say - Merleau-Ponty quotes PauIhan - 'in this light at least I have been
you' (1974b: 12).
Given these views it is not surprising to find that as the deficiencies of
post-structuralist and postrnodernist conceptions of subjectivity become
apparent, theorists tum back to Merleau-Ponty to explore new possi­
bilities. Stavro-Pearce (1994), for example, uses his ideas to suggest an
alternative view of postrnodern feminism. Donald McIntosh (1994) offers
40 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

a critique of the more conventional sociological conceptions of subjec­

tivity presented by Mead and Habermas and he argues that we should
recognize the existence of a pre-linguistic self and therefore non-socially
constructed self. He suggests also that we need to distinguish between
the person, whom I take to be the real individual with various levels of
experience, and the self which is perhaps imaginary in the Lacanian
sense, an attempt to avoid the complexity and multidimensionality of
experience. The cognitive bias of sociology always seems to bring it to
focusing on the self.
When we tum to social structures in the wider sense we can use the
linguistic model to offer interesting insights: societies are created pre­
cisely by human beings going beyond social structures, in the same way
that meaning is created by going beyond the structures of language. To
contemporary sociologists these ideas might sound similar to those of
Anthony Giddens (1984) who talks of structures as rules and resources
employed in social action, and on occasion refers to Merleau-Ponty, but
again Giddens reveals the cognitive bias of much sociological analysis of
action. Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the experiential overflow of
rules, with the struggle with rules rather than the following of rules. One
vital difference between Giddens and Merleau-Ponty is that the latter
recognizes the limited use of language as a metaphor for social struc­
tures, which possess a different, material ontological status.
It is this struggle with rules which should provide the basis of social
analysis and politics, and I want to follow through the way in which
Merleau-Ponty develops these ideas in a critique of Marxism with which
he had always had an ambivalent relationship. After World War II he
and Sartre formed a short-lived political party aiming at French
neutrality in the cold war. In the following period Merleau-Ponty pro­
duced a book which was an apologia for Stalin's show trials and he was
very close to the Communist Party, much closer than Sartre at the time.
After the start of the Korean War he moved away from the Party as
Sartre moved closer towards it. Adventures of the Dialectic (1974a) marks
his break with Sartre which was never quite healed. Its interest here lies
in his critique of the development of Marxism from Lukacs and his
attempt to develop a different sort of left-wing politics.
In what must be one of the best short discussions of the early Lukacs
available, Merleau-Ponty argues that he achieved two things. First, he
was able to relativize relativism, to grasp that relativism is a historical
product that may be superseded. Second, although he placed the
possibility of overcoming relativism in the proletariat, he avoided
conceptualizing the latter as an object bearing the quality of absolute
truth and at the same time avoided allowing it to be the 'idea' of a
philosopher external to it. Rather, through his notion of praxis, he was
able to argue that the proletariat was the creator of truth in the sense that
knowledge was developed in and by the action of the class. For Lukacs,
the field of the dialectic was that of man's activity in and on the world,
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 41

precisely that interworld between subject and object, the life-world, that
was discussed earlier.
The unity of thought and action is a recurrent theme in Merleau-Ponty
and emerges in his discussion of the late Lukacs and Trotsky in
Adventures of the Dialectic (1974a). Here we find the core of his critique of
Marxism, the eventual failure of which, already contained in Marx's later
works and in Lenin, lies in its projection of the dialectic into the material
world, into the proletariat as an object and the Party as a bearer of
absolute truth. When the future is already outlined in the objects around
us, freedom disappears. When those objects prove not to be moving in
the direction in which they ought to move, then the only recourse is to
terrorism - the attempt to force the world in a particular direction, in
other words, Stalinism. Thought and action become divorced, the former
is reduced to reflection, the latter becomes arbitrary.
In the epilogue to Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty argues for
a non-communist left that will renounce revolution and work within the
parliamentary system. Revolution involves forcing the world in a direc­
tion in which it does not want to go and must inevitably result in Stalinist
terrorism. In the case of underdeveloped countries, where the choice is
between Stalinism and starvation, then we must choose the former every
time, but in the advanced industrial countries of the west the proletariat
has nothing to gain from revolution. This is not a very original position,
but an alternative development might be found from Merleau-Ponty's
statement of the dialectic:

Dialectic is not the idea of reciprocal action, nor that of the solidarity of
opposites and their sublation. Dialectic is not a development that starts itself
again, nor the cross-growth of a quality that establishes as a new order a
change which until then has been quantitative - these are consequences or
aspects of the dialectic. But taken in themselves or as properties of being, these
relationships are marvels, curiosities or paradoxes. They enlighten only when
one grasps them in our experience, at the junction of a subject, of being and of
other subjects: between those opposites, in that reciprocal action, in that
relationship between an inside and an outside, between the elements of that
constellation, in that becoming, which not only becomes but becomes for itself,
there is room, without contradiction and without magic, for relationships with
double meanings, for reversals, for opposite and inseparable truths, for
sublations, for a plurality of levels or orders, for a perpetual genesis. There is
dialectic only in that type of being in which a junction of subjects occurs, being
which is not only a spectacle that each subject presents to itself for its own
benefit but which is rather their common residence, the place of their exchange
and of their reciprocal interpretation. (1974a: 203-4)

Thomas Langan (1966) draws a parallel between Merleau-Ponty's

conception of a social structure ripe for revolutionary change and his
conception of the psychological complex in intersubjective life: both
block or distort human relationship to the pre-reflective life-world,
rendering people incapable of responding to the most fundamental
42 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

demands of that world. In this context the notion of identity can also be
seen as a freezing of the dialectic of the life-world, whether it is seen as a
matter of personal identity or of class identity. At the same time it is not
apparent that non-Marxist socialism, social democracy or any other form
of contemporary politics actually expresses people's experience of the
life-world. Indeed it is arguable that our ability to make contact with our
life-world has become steadily undermined with the growth of late
capitalism. This takes us on to the work of Adorno.

Adorno's tragic Marxism

Here I will be primarily concerned with Adorno's Minima Morali (1974).

The note on the inside cover describes it, rightly, as 'unlike any other
book by [Adorno], or any other work in the Western Marxist tradition'. It
is a collection of aphorisms written over the period 1944-7 and pub­
lished in 1951 in honour of Max Horkheimer. It is not a book that can be
read easily from beginning to end, but at the same time it is more than a
'commonplace book' that can be dipped into at random. It is united by
an 'inner form' but more importantly for present purposes by an
overriding moral critique of modem capitalist society.
It is not the sort of book that easily lays itself open to summary.
Adorno's style, even in translation, is tight and deliberate; subordinate
clauses are built into the centre of each sentence, not strung out at the
end as a series of reservations and qualifications, and each aphorism
takes us smoothly through a series of contradictions and transformations
in which each sentence plays its role. Each sentence, each aphorism is a
specific manifestation of the dialectical method that informs the work as
a whole: a unity of opposites.
It is divided into three parts according to the periods in which the
aphorisms were written, and a staggering variety of topics is covered,
moving in each section from the most intimate personal experiences to
the most general theoretical problems. The subtitle, 'Reflections from
Damaged Life', indicates the roots of the work in Adorno's own experi­
ence, but even where this experience is most closely touched upon we
learn little about Adorno himself. Each experience, each topic is lifted
immediately from the particular to the general: he examines his
childhood and finds the forewarnings of fascism; a sleepless night is the
grounding for a discussion of time; a whole social system is revealed
behind a landscape, a hotel, two lines in a newspaper obituary. The
topics range from sexuality and love, generosity, kindness and tolerance
to the role of the family, the position of women and of intellectuals,
bourgeois manners, personal relationships, and the roots and nature of
fascism; there are critiques of mass culture, film, literature and music and
theoretical critiques of psychoanalysis and philosophy. A simple listing
of the topics becomes pointless. What each aphorism expresses is a
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 43

general critique of late bourgeois society, outlined in the introduction

which moves, unlike the rest of the book, from the general to the
individual and provides the justification for the book itself.
The category 'subjectivity' appears as the principal topic for several
of the aphorisms and is the hidden topic of them all. 'Individuality',
'the subject', 'subjectivity' is the product of the bourgeois economy:
each individual is defined as such by his or her market relationships to
other individuals; each is the product of a totality and as such to begin
from individuality, to 'start with the individual' as does bourgeois
thought, is to mask the real nature of the totality. This subordination of
the individual to the totality has its origins in Hegel: 'The conception of a
totality harmonious through all its antagonisms compels him to assign to
individuation, however much he may designate it a driving moment in
the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole' (Adorno
1974: 1 7).
Yet at the same time it is only through the individual that the totality
realizes itself, and it is in the individual that the totality may be revealed.
Having created the individual and realized itself through the indi­
vidual's subjectivity, bourgeois society in its later development sets
about destroying the individual. The free play of the market has
produced all-powerful monopolies; the division of labour that gave birth
to the individual has now eradicated individual differences, has created a
series of interchangeable elements, a homogeneous mass:

In the period of his decay, the individual's experience of himself and what he
encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely
obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as
the dominant category. In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the
eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the
social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual
sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience.
(Adorno 1974: 18)

In other words, it is as the individual is destroyed that he or she becomes

the source of truth or knowledge - not the serialized individual pursuing
fashion and lifestyle or Giddens' reflexive individual constantly
reconstructing him or herself according to some therapeutic programme,
but the suffering individual hidden by such manic activity, unable to
make contact with experience or life-world.
There is a striking similarity between Adorno's vision in Minima
Moralia and the tragic world view described by Lucien Goldmann (1964).
Goldmann sees tragic thought as the most advanced forerunner of
dialectical thought: like the latter, tragic thought takes the totality as its
major category and, against bourgeois rationalism, stresses the contra­
dictory nature of truth. But tragic thought lacks a historical conscious­
ness, it cannot see the development and solution of contradictions that,
for Marx and Hegel, came from history. The world is seen not as
44 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

developing dialectically but as static totality of paradoxes, an 'unstruc­

tured totality' in the true sense of the word. There is no starting point
and no end point for tragic thought, no infrastructure which provides the
base of the totality, only a series of contradictions that may be related in
any number of ways. Hence the fragmentary form of Pascal's Pensees
which is reflected in Adorno's aphorisms. The latter have a more
tangible order since Adorno comes after the discovery of history, but
history no longer seems to entail the development of the contradictions
of the totality to a higher level, rather it threatens to suppress them
altogether, hiding itself from thought in the process, forbidding any
rational grasp of its mechanisms. It is only through the fragmented
experience of a subjectivity conscious of its own fragmentation and
destruction that we can grasp the totality at all.
The critical theorist, like the tragic thinker, is 'in the world but not of it':
both pursue the realization of absolute values - the values of Christianity
in the latter case, the value of an end to alienation, of reconciliation with
self in the former - and neither will accept compromise. At the same
time, both recognize the impossibility of achieving those values in the
world and see that the slightest relaxation of their demands only
strengthens the world they reject, and they also recognize that it is
impossible to escape from the world. They are both caught in the same
double bind: to retire from the world, to give up the struggle within it, is
implicitly to approve it, yet to remain in the world whose values they
reject is equally a compromise, a sign of approval.
For the tragic thinker, salvation - God - is both always present and
always absent, he is constantly watching but never reveals himself, there
can be no proof, no rational certainty of his existence. For Pascal,
Goldmann argues, all that was possible was a wager on God's existence,
and it is the concept of the wager that is at the centre of his thought, the
one possible organizing principle. For the critical theorist it is the
proletariat that is always absent and always present: always present
because it once offered the possibility of salvation, always absent because
that possibility has now passed; the proletariat has been absorbed by the
system, disappeared into a mass society. As Adorno was to write at a
later date: 'Philosophy which once seemed outmoded is now alive
because the moment of its realization has been missed' (Adorno 1973: 3).
In Minima Moralia the ghost of the proletariat remains in the subjectivity
of the critical theorist: it is this that plays the role of the wager as an
organizing principle.
There was a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the
proletariat at least hinted that it might be just over the horizon again; at
any rate many of us persuaded ourselves that this was a possibility. But
whatever revolutionary force that there was in Europe at that time was
soundly defeated and any realistic talk of socialism and revolution must
seem at least as remote now as it did to Adorno in the late 1940s. It is
also true that the moral urgency felt by Adorno is still relevant. Horror
 THE POLmCS OF EXPERIENCE 45

has not abated since the Holocaust, although western Europeans and
North Americans have managed to keep it at arm's length. If we allow
the horrors back into our hearts then we are back in Adorno's position.
Two consecutive aphorisms, 'How nice of you, Doctor' and 'Antithesis'
(1974: 25-6) at the beginning of the first section discuss the possibility of
morality in capitalist society, and the position of the intellectual. In the
face of the horrors of fascism, the technological terror of the modem
world, the 'little pleasures', the spontaneous expressions of joy in the face
of beauty take on a sinister meaning, they become a callous escape from
the world: 'Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen
without the shadow of terror.' Even everyday sociability is a pretence, a
compromise with evil, a hiding of the fact that the possibility of com­
munication between human beings is being systematically destroyed.
For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of
showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human
warmth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit accept­
ance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the
smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of
their pains. But this very isolation is an involvement:
The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only
advantage to the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal
freedom that lies in knowledge as such. His own distance from business at
large is a luxury which only that business confers. This is why the very
movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to
develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois. (Adorno 1974:
26)

The very fact that the intellectual thinks reveals his privileged status, his
dependence upon the bourgeois system of production:
There is no way out of entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny
oneself the ideological misuse of one's existence, and for the rest to conduct
oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is
required, no longer by good upbringing but by shame of still having air to
breathe in hell. (Adorno 1974: 27-8)

On the most immediate level, this is a radical critique of the possibility of

moral action in contemporary society, the revelation of its impossibility.
However, simply to accept Adorno's conclusion that moral action is
impossible is to transform a valid insight into a gruesome symptom: the
impossibility of moral action can only be known through the constant
attempt to act morally - it is only in this way that the 'infinitesimal
freedom that lies in knowledge as such' can be achieved.
At another level there is a critique of radical action and organization
itself. In the same way that moral action is transformed into an example
of immorality, so can revolutionary action be transformed into a
reproduction of bourgeois oppression. Implicit in Adorno's method is an
attempt to grasp the way in which, for example, revolutionary violence
46 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

may become the reproduction of bourgeois terror or - in some ways

even worse - a reproduction of the random meaningless violence that
characterizes bourgeois society in its more fully developed state, the way
in which revolutionary discipline may reproduce the tyranny of capitalist
organization, the way in which sexual liberation may become a
dehumanization of the sexual act. Even Adorno's own method of
argument is vulnerable: the dialectic is by no means the privilege of the
revolutionary, its central category of the totality may become a tool of
conservative, even reactionary thought. First, it can encourage, through
its revelation of alienation, of the destruction of subjectivity, a naive
bourgeois self-assertion; it becomes a tool in the interest of the society it
criticizes. Second, it can fall back into simple debating procedure, where
its origins are to be found; it becomes simply 'the serene demonstration
of the fact that there are two sides to everything' (1974: 47).
The danger of becoming or of being, what one is most opposed to
would not be a strange one to many contemporary psychoanalysts.
Adorno can see that in theoretical terms it is necessary to know the
reified, alienated system and this knowledge requires a form of alienated
thought. Adorno's brand of dialectical thought perhaps reaches its peak
when it reveals its own inadequacy. The displacement of philosophy by
science has led to the separation of the two elements which for Hegel
comprised philosophy: reflection and speculation. Science takes over the
realm of reflection and is degraded to the reproduction in thought of the
world simply as it is; the basis for criticism disappears. On the other
hand philosophy becomes the empty shell of former theories, mere
private speculation:

The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined, is cut off from

practical life: revulsion from it has driven him to concern himself with so­
called things of the mind. But material practice is not only the pre-condition of
his practice, it is basic to the world which he criticizes in his work. If he knows
nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air. He is confronted with the choice
of informing himself or turning his back on what he hates. If he chooses the
former he does violence to himself, thinks against his impulses and in addition
runs the risk of sinking to the level of what he is dealing with, for economics is
no joke, and merely to understand it one has to 'think economically'. If,
however, he has no truck with it, he hypostatises as an absolute his intellect,
which was only formed through contact with economic reality and abstract
exchange relations, and which can become intellect solely by reflecting on its
own conditions. The intellectual is thereby reduced into the vain and unrelated
substitution of the reflection for the thing. (Adorno 1974: 132)

Conclusion

This seems a good point to try and look back over this chapter, to see
where we have got to in relation both to experience and identity. We
 THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE 47

found in Lukacs' Marxism the notion of totality as an epistemological

criterion: an object can only be known in relation to the totality. We find
the same idea in Sartre, less so in Merleau-Ponty and with extreme
reluctance in Adorno, where the totality has declined into the dualism
which Lukacs hoped would be overcome through the socialist
revolution. On the one hand we have an empty, speculative philosophy,
which I would suggest reaches its peak in the way that what Giddens
calls the 'linguistic tum' in twentieth-century thought seems to absorb
everything into language or discourse. Theory then becomes a matter of
trying to talk about the world in a way that transcends dualisms not, as
Lukacs desired, by political action, but finding the right concepts, so
when Giddens replaces 'dualism' with 'duality' it seems as if something
has been achieved. On the other side there are increasing quantities of
empirical knowledge in the human and the natural sciences which exist
in a sort of vacuum; we seem to lack the conceptual tools to organize,
understand and criticize knowledge.
In Chapter 2 I suggested that an important aspect of Lukacs' work was
his reliance, often implicit, on a conception of experience as a mediator
between social structures and action, and between theory and practice.
Moving on through Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, one thing that emerges is
that experience is more complex than Lukacs' theory allows and recog­
nition of the complexity of human experience contributes to a decline in
the power of the concept of totality. I have already suggested that
totality as an epistemological criterion remains important, in the sense
that one of the things that we have to do as we come to understand the
social world is to relate propositions to each other; the gaining of
knowledge is a constant totalizing process. However, totality as an
achievable world, an end of history, is another matter. Adorno was able
to recognize that a 'world system' or total system was more to the
expansionary tastes of capitalism, that there is a link between 'total' and
'totalitarian', something which Popper had claimed from a very different
tradition. The real totality in Lukacs' sense is neither a possible reality,
nor necessarily a desirable aim. In a free world the totality will be in a
process of constant change of, in Sartre's terms, detotalization and
retotalization.
These three philosophers leave us with increasingly complex forms of
Marx's original dialectic based on the simple statement that people make
history, but not in circumstances of their own making. On the one side
we have our experience of the world, ourselves and other people, an
experience which constantly seeks to articulate itself in thought and
action and is more complex than we have yet discovered, and on the
other side we have a social system, a set of social structures which
increasingly distort and deny our subjectivity, our experience of the life­
world. The postmodemist emphasis on the technologies of the self, the
construction of subjectivity, sees only a limited view of one side, whereas
interactionist and action sociologies see only a limited view of the other.
48 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

The limited view of the life-world comes through what I have called
sociology's cognitive bias. In this context, the search for identity is an
attempt to stem the flow of experience, what is left of the creative
interchange with others and the world around us.
The politics of experience in the sense in which I have tried to develop
it here takes us away from notions of identity and towards our internal
divisions, alienation and suffering. Moving on from phenomenology,
psychoanalysis provides us with an understanding of further levels of
experience and especially of the difficulties of articulating our immediate
experience. This further understanding eventually points the way
towards a different sort of ideal.
 4

PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND

POLITICS: THE PROBLEM OF
AMBIVALENCE

The tum to psychoanalysis

The growth of interest in psychoanalysis both as a theory and as a

therapy seemed to come naturally out of the problems met by Marxist
theory in the 1970s and early 1980s. There might be some truth in the
cynical view that it is a move from one form of dogmatic totalizing
explanation to another, but there are also deeper roots to the move. It
was already the case that western European Marxism concerned itself at
least as much with ideology as with structural analysis, and after the
victory of National Socialism in Germany this concern became even more
pronounced - how could a country with mass socialist and communist
parties fall to a creed which in effect stood for everything socialism
opposed? There had been a revolutionary trend in psychoanalysis prior
to World War II, now probably remembered best through the work of
Wilhelm Reich (1957), who identified sexual repression and social
oppression in a fairly straightforward way. The postwar interest devel­
oped on two levels. One was a metatheoretical level best illustrated by
Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1969), a difficult attempt to combine the
two theories which kept a sense of totality and projected a utopian
sexual and social world. The attempt at a theoretical combination
continues, in a very different way, in the more recent work of Habermas
(1987).
A second strand also emerged from critical theory and the Frankfurt
School, beginning with Adorno et al. The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
which moved towards sociological analysis, particularly the role of
family and family structure on the one hand and popular culture on the
other. Changes in both were seen as involved in the growth of the
totalitarianism already discussed in Chapter 3 and this strand has devel­
oped through the more recent work of Christopher Lasch (1977, 1980,
1984, 1995). The third strand developed from Althusser's theory of
ideology and merged into discourse theory and post-structuralism and
postmodernism generally. Althusser (1971) developed his theory through
50 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

a borrowing from the French analyst Jacques Lacan (1968, 1977) who
transformed psychoanalytic theory in the 1960s and 1970s.
In this chapter I am concerned with the first strand, the problems of
the metatheoretical synthesis and where a critique of that position can
lead us.

The nature of repression and the necessity of ambivalence

I do not want to pursue the detail of Marcuse's attempted synthesis of

Freud and Marx. Put as simply as possible it involves the argument that
Freud's view of society as necessarily involving repression can be
modified if we look at it historically. Different types of society require
different types of repression. Modem capitalist society does not need as
much repression as the earlier stages of capitalism; consumption is
replacing production as the centre of economic activity and consumption
involves the search for pleasure. Less repression is necessary and thus
there is a build-up of what Marcuse calls surplus repression. The
economic system then releases this surplus repression in a process of
'repressive desublimation', a matter of associating sexual excitement
with consumer goods. The ideal that he proposes is in Freudian terms a
return to pre-oedipal sexuality, a form of polymorphous perversity,
where the whole body becomes a site of sexual pleasure. We no longer
focus exclusively on the genital areas and the link between sexuality and
reproduction is finally broken. Such would be dependent upon the
abolition of economic scarcity, something of which Marcuse thought
developed capitalism might be capable.
It is this last point which undermines the attempt to bring the two
theories together on a metatheoretical level. Nancy Chodorow (1985)
makes the point well: 'The argument against adult genitality and pro­
creative sexuality . . . amounts implicitly to an argument against
relations with women, a rejection of women' (1985: 298).
Marcuse's ideal is a narcissistic rejection of the reality principle, which
I would argue is represented by the father as much as the mother in
whom Chodorow locates it. The reality Marcuse denies is in fact a very
mundane reality: the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, especially
sexual relationships whether with members of the same sex or of the
opposite sex, the difficulties presented by screaming infants and dirty
nappies, and the difficulties of rebellious adolescents and ageing and or /
senile parents. He avoids the difficulties of being human in a human
body and the difficulties of living with other people.
This is where we come up against the unavoidable opposition of Marx
and Freud. For Marx the fundamental feature of human beings was their
ability to labour and transform their environment and so transform
themselves; it is this which enables the vision of human freedom, the
possibility of taking collective control of society - the totalizing
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 51

movement not as a necessary part of thinking but as part of the real

world. Lukacs maintains the ideal, the realization of philosophy, but is
not unaware of the difficulties of achieving it. I argued in relation to
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre that an understanding of our experience in the
world questioned, if not denied, the possibility of achieving such an ideal
and Adorno shows both its necessity and its dangers. What we learn
from Freud in this respect is the impossibility of achieving such an ideal
in reality. What Freud has to teach is another version of Sartre's (1944)
dictum that hell is other people, because living with other people means
not only, as Sartre argues, that other people will inevitably not see us as
we want them to see us, but because we have to adjust to a world in
which we not only have to share the goodies, but the goodies are by no
means readily available.
For Freud (1985) civilization goes hand in hand with suffering. We
maintain within us the infantile desire for immediate satisfaction and
every step forward in social and cultural development requires some
sacrifice of immediate satisfaction, a degree of suffering. Work which Marx
regarded as primary in human beings is in fact a secondary achievement
acquired through sacrifice. Freud paints a much grimmer view of the
world than Marx, and this is reinforced in developments in psychoanalytic
theory. Klein's (1975b) analysis of human envy and destructiveness adds a
very different component to our understanding of humanity. It does not
appear in people as a result of their social circumstances, although they
might make it worse, but it is there by virtue of being human. It becomes
important to recognize the existence of human destructiveness and to
contain it, rather than imagine to ourselves that it can be eliminated. The
very attempt to eliminate it makes it worse as it emerges in unexpected
and unrecognized ways. What also becomes clear in psychoanalysis is the
way in which each feeling is closely associated with its opposite; there is a
profound and necessary emotional ambivalence in our lives.

The status of ideals

Compared to the phenomenological conceptions of experience discussed

earlier, Freud takes us directly to the emotional dimensions of our lives.
Sartre's work on the emotions tended to concentrate on interpersonal
dimensions of 'being-for-others' in Being and Nothingness (1957) and on
their intentional nature in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1963b).
But he has little to say about the ongoing everyday emotional life which
has a physical existence for most people, and which seems always to
work in opposites - there is no love without hatred, no pleasure without
misery, no gain without loss. There are Marxists who have taken this on
board. The work of Joel Kovel (1988a, b, c, d; Kovel and Craib 1990) is
noticeable for its sanity. He does not believe a synthesis between the two
theories is possible: 'Nor, despite the many intriguing formal homologies
52 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

between the two thinkers, could there be any kind of symmetry or

balance between them. The difference between Marx and Freud is more
than one between "outwardness" vs. "inwardness". It is also, and more
basically, one of basic values' (Kovel and Craib 1990: 26).
I find my attitude towards Marxism varying with political contexts. In
the exchange from which I have just quoted I was suggesting that, in
theoretical terms, the best reason to be a Marxist is that Marxism breaks
down in especially interesting ways. In the present context I more often
than not find myself defending basic Marxist insights against the easy
and often ignorant dismissals that are now all too readily pronounced.
Another way of putting this in terms of my argument is that it is
necessary to hold on to both value choices at the same time - the
impossible Marxist ideal and the realistic psychoanalytic commitment to
understanding and containing the messy and contradictory nature of
everyday experience.
Using psychoanalytic ideas, the Marxist ideal can be seen in two ways.
It can be seen in terms of a punitive super-ego, which in the individual
can constantly emphasize the inadequacy of his or her actions and deny
pleasure, but which constantly demands allegiance and energy, however
impossible it might be to achieve. It can also be seen as an ego-ideal
which is a more gentle animal, the best version of myself that I would
like to aim at. There can be less intolerance attached to the ego-ideal, an
ability to understand the conception of 'good enough' and not demand
perfection. It recognizes that the self is not omnipotent but is constantly
engaged in a game of give and take with the surrounding world. It
seems to me that one of the difficulties of psychoanalytic clinical work is
that the ego-ideal and the punitive super-ego can be very close together
and can often be expressed in the same terms. Yet one is a desire for
perfection and wholeness which cannot be achieved, leaving failure as a
constant source of misery, while the other can offer a sense of at least
partially achieved goodness, a reassurance.
We can hold wholeness, the totality as an ideal, but if we believe it is
really achievable we are in trouble. An individual who seeks to be
perfect, seeks some form of omnipotence over his or her own unruly
desires, tries to avoid, or remove moral chaos and uncertainty, does so at
a cost to themselves and those around them. Similarly a society which
aims to be perfect must get rid of its disruptive elements, its dissidents.
The more perfect the society aims to be, the more it must repress. Yet we
need a way of thinking about what might be possible. We need some
direction in which to move and the vision offered by Marx and by
socialism still seems to me the best available.
There will be times when the world changes quickly and it seems that
the ideal might be achieved. These experiences are, I believe, important,
but so is the aftermath, the decline of hope and the disillusion which
follows the revolutionary upsurge. To blindly cling on to hope in the face
of reality and to give up hope in the face of reality leads to equivalent
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 53

disasters. The experience of disillusion is important in politics, just as it is

important in infancy, but so is the presence of the illusion, the oceanic
feeling of oneness.
I want to try to develop the psychoanalytic critique of the Marxist
ideal that Joel Kovel (Kovel and Craib 1990) begins to outline. He con­
centrates on the argument that it is a regression to an infantile oceanic
experience, and to infantile omnipotence. I would add that involved as
well is a denial of a very real and strong rivalry that we experience in
relationships, initially, to parents and siblings. This is a very conservative
psychoanalytic critique and I think psychoanalysis can do better, offering
a critique which can, in one sense, be seen as more radical, but less
utopian, less revolutionary.
In each case, the oceanic experience, infantile omnipotence, the denial
of rivalry, we do not have to dismiss the experience or the defence
because it is infantile. To do this is to deny a fundamental insight of
psychoanalysis: that the infant remains within us, the unconscious is
timeless, and must be catered for - it does not disappear with our access
to maturity. Beyond this, I think the infant plays an essential role, in a
modified form, in our adult life.
Let us take the oceanic feeling to begin with. It is true that as adults we
can surrender ourselves to it, or rather to the search for it. We can seek a
permanent high: the only alcoholic I have known intimately was a slave
to such a feeling. We can seek such a high through our political practice
and ideas and, if we are lucky, we might find it occasionally. The more
desperately we seek it, the less likely we are to find it. Yet such an oceanic
feeling can be there without overwhelming us, we do not have to become
addicted to it. Just as we can drink occasionally without becoming an
alcoholic, so we can allow ourselves such an experience. A conservative
analyst such as Erikson points towards religious institutions as the social
organization to maintain and satisfy such a need, but we could also point
to politics, the activity of working together to change the world, as a
possible way of allowing such a feeling expression and a concrete
realization. The important point is that it can inform our relationship
with others without hiding the other, less pleasant or downright destruc­
tive aspects of our nature. Similarly infantile omnipotence has its place in
adult life. It emerges clearly from Winnicott's work that out of this
experience of omnipotence comes the infant's ability to learn, to do things
and to withstand frustration. The Marxist ideal provides our politics with
a sense of the possibility of change, of betterment. But again to believe the
ideal can be realized is equivalent to the pathological continuation of
omnipotence into adult life. It would be like believing that tomorrow I
could retrain as a brain surgeon. Clearly I cannot, but I could learn
something about the physiological structure of the brain.
Everything I have been saying moves towards this idea: that we
can find a psychoanalytic critique of Marxism that recognizes its value
and modifies it. It says not that the Marxist project is infantile and
54 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

pathological, only that it can be; it can also be a form of what, for want
of a better word, I will call maturity, a desire and a vision of something
better. It only becomes dangerous, pathological, if it involves the denial
of everything that makes the vision impossible to achieve, if it becomes a
sort of absolutist project.
The history of Marxist politics is full of debates about the correct line; I
think that this is associated with the belief that the ideal (even if it is
denied) is possible. The radical nature of my argument comes from the
implication that all sorts of other politics become relevant, useful and
possible once we get rid of this absolutism. It leaves us saying something
like Marxism gives us the direction in which to move. We will never get
there, and there are all sorts of ways in which we can move in this
direction which cannot be envisaged by Marxism. Modem feminism and
the ecology movement are perhaps examples; but so are the traditional
liberal and social democratic ideas of industrial capitalism. At times
the ideal will have to be emphasized, and given its place. At other times,
the impossibility of the ideal becomes important, and during these other
times, emphasizing the impossibility can open up different, less totalizing
paths to change. Joel Kovel mentions Sartre's point that Marxism is as far
as we can go. The implication of my argument is that as the inadequacy of
Marxism becomes apparent, we might have to return to a range of pre­
Marxist ideas as a way of going forward, or at least not losing too much.

The radical denial of ambivalence

At the beginning of this chapter I talked about people moving from

Marxism to psychoanalysis possibly seeking to replace one totalizing
theory with another. The traffic has also been in the other direction, from
a concern with psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling to a
concern with politicized sociological explanations. The above ideas were
developed in a discussion with Joel Kovel, who had found psycho­
analysis, his first profession, too conservative. However, he had devel­
oped a sensitive way of thinking about the two approaches together. It
is easy, when a long-term intellectual and emotional commitment is
abandoned, to seek a new set of beliefs and ideas which one imagines
solves all the problems of the old beliefs and ideas.
If the abandoned beliefs and institutions have been idealized, then it is
common to reject them with as much energy and vehemence as one once
adhered to them. Both Marxism and psychoanalysis have had their share
of apostates and the ideas which I am now going to try to develop were
first in an exchange with David Pilgrim (Craib 1992), Pilgrim (1992).
Pilgrim takes up some of the ideas of Jeffrey Masson, once apparently
considered the man who would save American psychoanalysis and who
later became one of its most famous critics (Malcolm 1984; Masson 1985,
1989).
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 55

Reading through this debate some of the arguments strike me as rather

sillier than they did at the time. They are arguments around compara­
tively mundane issues to those discussed on a theoretical level in the
previous section. But the point I wanted to make then, and would make
even more strongly now, would have to do with the acknowledgement
of ambivalence - the way in which opposite qualities are inextricably
entwined in all human behaviour. The fact that love and hate are closely
connected has been a staple of literature but we can say the same about
other human qualities - good and evil at one extreme down to casual
generosity and petty selfishness on the other. There is, for example,
always some sort of internal conflict when I pass a beggar on the street.
This is perhaps a good example of what I have been arguing. My way of
dealing with this conflict is in most situations to give something to
alternate supplicants. This seems to balance two possible extreme
reactions. On the one hand I could feel guilty about my good fortune
and want to invite the beggar back home to live with me and eat my
food, and on the other I could feel threatened and angry and want to
have the beggar arrested and thrown into jail.
Now each of the extreme reactions would deny an acknowledgement
of an internal conflict; it would avoid a internally painful situation. I
have already suggested that one of the most important features of
psychoanalysis is that it recognizes ambivalence and of course it must
then recognize the pain that we experience when we feel the internal
conflict that follows on from the ambivalence. I have suggested else­
where (Craib 1994) that a failure to recognize such ambivalence is a
defect in many modern forms of psychotherapy, and that it has become a
central failing of contemporary political discourse, turning political
argument into self-righteous accusations (Craib forthcoming). It also
haunts the debate I had with Pilgrim.
The central metaphor as far as I was concerned was the old saying
about the baby and the bathwater and I suggested that Pilgrim was
throwing out the former with the latter. Pilgrim in turn suggested that
the metaphor 'is a common rhetorical device to imply that an opponent
in a debate lacks sensitivity and clarity in their arguments'. I am afraid
that that is precisely what I was implying. Now I would change the
metaphor slightly. Then I argued that the bathwater in which we all had
to live was unavoidably dirty. Now I think I would say that we our­
selves are the dirty bathwater. We are also of course the clean bathwater
and it is our responsibility to keep some sort of balance. This should be
borne in mind in the following discussion where I take up a number of
Pilgrim's points.

Diagnostic reductionism

Pilgrim accuses psychoanalysis of two different forms of reductionism

which are worth distinguishing: a 'conceptual reductionism', to do with
56 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

diagnostic categories, and an 'explanatory reductionism', to do with our

understanding of the way the world is. He goes on to argue that this
second reductionism at least inhibits psychoanalysts' political under­
standing, or leads to a politics of which he disapproves. I shall begin with
'diagnostic reductionism' which Pilgrim sees as reinforcing the medical
model and juxtaposes to an idea of a properly human relationship, in
which one partner is not seeking advantage over another, and the
uniqueness and complexity of an individual is recognized. Diagnosis, he
suggests, demeans the patient and reinforces the power of the therapist.
Now a diagnostic category is a general category, covering a number of
individual cases; we cannot actually think without such categories, nor
can we have anything approaching working knowledge of any aspect of
the world. In our process of understanding other people, such general
categories act as signposts, a shorthand which can give us an idea of
where we are. If I see a patient as 'clinically depressed' I immediately
have a map which might or might not help me understand what is
happening - that remains to be seen - but which enables me to attempt
to understand what is happening. Without such categories, the person
cannot be seen at all. We might prefer another set of categories to the
ones that Pilgrim criticizes, but we cannot do without them. The work of
Winnicott above all seems to me to show that we can think in diagnostic
categories and leave plenty of space for individual complexity: it is not a
matter of doing one or the other but of maintaining the tension between
the two (see Little 1985; Winnicott 1987).
I am not sure that, by itself, the use of such categories reinforces the
medical model, it is more a matter of how they are used. I do not think of
such terms as referring to an illness - they refer to different ways of
psychological working in the world which, by the patient's definition,
brings unhappiness. They are sometimes rough and ready tools that can
help or get in the way. Like Pilgrim, I find myself thinking in diagnostic
categories but not necessarily sharing them with my patients. Sometimes
they help me to say something which is helpful to the patient; sometimes
they help me to say things that are unhelpful; they help me to stay with
the patient, which I think is the minimum condition of any therapeutic
work. Pilgrim later claims that these categories are 'pejorative, demeaning
and stigmatizing' (1992: 250). I think again that they are sometimes
experienced as such and used as such, but I have also found patients
wanting to be labelled by one of the categories because it brings a
temporary relief. One can 'have' depression or schizophrenia like one
'has' measles and no further difficult exploration is necessary. Such
categories can also be frightening. There seems, for example, to be an
increasing association in the public mind between psychological diffi­
culties and criminal violence. This might be the best reason for keeping
one's categories to oneself.
Of course, I also find myself using diagnostic categories to reinforce a
sense of my own competence; I do not think it is the best way to hold on
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 57

to my sense of competence, but sometimes it seems necessary. Some­

times I use them to give myself a sense of superiority and rightness, but
this tends to be in relation to colleagues and friends. My point is not that
Pilgrim is wrong; he is right but shows only half the picture. Diagnostic
categories are good things and bad things at the same time. If we can
hold on to the idea that 'we are all ill', then we acknowledge that
diagnostic categories also apply to the therapist, and we are less likely to
use diagnoses in a damaging way. It is a pity that Pilgrim, in his
argument, tries to deny us this aphorism.

Explanatory reductionism

Pilgrim criticizes what I would call 'psychologism', the attempt to

understand everything in psychological terms, quoting a distinctly dated
comment by Guntrip about prostitution and homosexuality and
suggesting that these might not be psychological symptoms but that
they might be socially caused. He goes on to argue that such psycho­
logism is always conservative with the implication that psychoanalysis is
concerned only with enabling people to acquiesce in existing social
conditions.
I would certainly agree that to see the world entirely in psycho­
dynamic terms is misleading; in fact I think it is absurd, and when
psychoanalysts step beyond their appropriate object, they sometimes
appear absurd. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the individual psyche
and relationships between individuals. There are, quite clearly, other
sources of misery in the world at the same time, but this does not mean
that there are no psychological sources. Poverty might encourage
prostitution and crime, but not every poor woman becomes a prostitute
or a thief. We are looking at a combination of social and psychological
forces. We are dealing with different causal processes related in complex
ways and psychoanalysis is concerned with only one process (see Craib
1989).
I am sure that psychoanalysts sometimes see success as involving
social adjustment to, even acquiescence in, the surrounding society, but
this is not necessarily the case nor is it always the case. However, in my
experience patients often have a rather better grasp of the real com­
plexity than does Pilgrim. They can recognize that they are victims of
social processes and situations, but they seek therapy because they are
aware of something in themselves that contributes to or prohibits them
from dealing with these problems. In these cases, the signs of therapeutic
effectiveness are the opposite of what I should, according to Pilgrim,
expect. It is not forbearance in the face of oppression, but the growing
ability to change a relationship, change a pattern of victimhood, deal
creatively with employers; the ability to move, at last, from the parents'
home, or to change tactics in seeking employment - these are the
external signs of therapeutic change.
58 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLmCS

These are, of course, individual changes, with all the limitations of

individual change. I also think social change is desirable and within the
limits of my personal energy I would seek that as a socialist or trade
unionist, not as a psychotherapist. Behind Pilgrim's argument is the
assumption that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis should be politically
radical, and should be radical in a particular way. The fact that various
political positions can be associated with psychoanalysis seems to me the
mark of an open system of thought. I think it can be radical, but in a way
that I suspect would not be acceptable to Pilgrim. I find two aspects of
psychoanalysis valuable in this respect. First, its emphasis on internal
space and there being some degree of autonomy in interpersonal
relationships; this counterbalances the impetus of sociologically reduc­
tionist explanations and the politics that stem from it. If we see every­
thing as a result of social processes, then we open the door to the sort of
totalitarianism implicit in the slogan 'the personal is political' (Craib
1988). Our freedom, which is never absolute, lies not only in our ability
to cooperate with other people in changing our world, but also in our
ability to distance ourselves from others, make choices which separate
ourselves from the collective, from the state: whether the state be
capitalist, socialist, communist or whatever. Insofar as psychoanalytic
therapy achieves the aim of leaving ego where id has been, then it
contributes to this freedom. The ego might go off and make political
judgements of which I disapprove, but that is as it should be.
Second, I think it is right to say that psychoanalysis can add to the
knowledge of other disciplines and sciences, but not replace it. My own
view is that often this addition is not terribly significant. However, in
relation to politics, it does, I believe, have something important to say
about the motivation of some forms of political action. Politics is a
dangerous game: it often, if not always, involves systematic dishonesty;
often, but not always, corruption; sometimes it involves tyranny, murder
and torture. It is important to recognize that however honourable a set of
political ambitions, honour does not make us immune to any of these
things. Pilgrim quotes Chasseguet-Smirgel and Gruneberger (1986) to the
effect that revolutionaries are suffering from an omnipotent infantile
fixation. I would suggest that they are saying something about the
dangers of some sorts of political motivation, and the blindness that it
produces, something of which we ought to be aware, even, perhaps
especially, if we are political revolutionaries. It can of course be read as a
demand for political passivity if one chooses; it could be read, if one
chooses, as a plea for self-understanding and a considered politics.

ProJessionalization

Pilgrim makes much of the issue of Professionalization, and my reactions

are ambivalent in the extreme; but on the whole I am happy with my
ambivalence and I shall simply describe it.
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 59

He is particularly scathing about comments that Hannah Segal made

about protecting the 'pure wine' of psychoanalysis from the supposed
'water' of psychotherapy'. He suggests that psychoanalytic claims to be a
science are a way of establishing a professional power which is unjusti­
fied. I respond gratefully to Hannah Segal's desire to preserve the pure
wine of psychoanalysis. I think the enterprise of knowing is an important
and liberating enterprise, even if that knowledge is always provisional
and incomplete, and even if it can be misused. I think there is much to be
said for the psychoanalytic method as a method of research, inde­
pendently of its therapeutic value. However, I am happy to be called a
psychotherapist and I think of my work as helping rather than research,
although of course it is both at the same time. I have some specialist
knowledge that my patients do not (always) have; I do not consider this
makes me better at life, although some people seem to think it should.
Like the diagnostic categories, sometimes it is helpful to me and to my
patients, sometimes it gets in my way, but not in my patients' way,
sometimes vice versa. My work is aimed at enabling the patient to find a
way of living free of me; I find that the early struggles in psychotherapy
have more to do with the patient's attribution of power and knowledge
to me rather than any power or knowledge I might actually possess.
The notion of helping is also problematic. Desiring to help a patient
can get in the way of change (see Milner 1969) or it can involve the
projection of one's own damage into a patient, keeping it there - keeping
the patient damaged, in order to avoid one's own pain; and of course,
helping someone can make one feel good, without doing much for the
person being helped (see Segal 1964). Helping can also be the best of
activities; it can involve all the activities of holding, understanding and
interpretation that can enable the patient to understand him or herself. I
do not understand how anyone remotely familiar with the Kleinian (or
non-Kleinian) literature on counter-transference can argue that analysts
have a 'cultivated indifference to both pain and personal change'. It is, of
course, precisely through the experience of pain and many other things
in the counter-transference, and the intelligent interpretation of that
experience, that change can emerge (Casement 1985).
I am well aware of the rhetorical uses to which the term 'science' is
put, that it can become a tool of self-seeking sectional interest, that the
nature of a science is hotly disputed with a number of different positions
each of which lays claim to some credibility. But it seems to me that we
can argue about and establish epistemological criteria which can distin­
guish better from worse knowledge, and the fact that this is possible
perhaps indicates that we should aim to tolerate differences rather than
reject the enterprise altogether. I have a similar ambivalence about the
process of professionalization itself. Increasingly professions are seen as
groups pursuing their own self-interest, and as the market and market's
ideology spreads perhaps it is inevitable that professions will become
primarily concerned with self-interest and the extension of their own
60 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS

power. But there is also an older and different view of professions, as

groups of free independent individuals, trained in a particular skill and
serving the community coming together to regulate their activities and
enforce a code of ethics. A profession can take steps to ensure that its
members are properly trained, regulated and supervised. A profession in
this sense is not an institution of the free market but an organization in
which people can combine to organize their lives. It is part of what used
to be called 'civil society', providing a barrier between the individual and
the state, and a vital part of democratic society. There are clearly degrees
of truth in both ways of looking at a profession and perhaps one view
might be true at one time and the other at another. But a profession is
not one thing.

Patienthood

A central issue in the argument with Pilgrim had to do with the nature
of patienthood and by implication the nature of power itself. It often
seems that among some radical theorists, power is a sort of dirty word.
On the whole I would agree with Anthony Giddens' (1984) comment
that power is an inherent feature of human action, and unless one is
unconscious one has it. The questions one can then ask become more
interesting. In this context they would be questions about the beneficial
and harmful uses of power and how 'beneficial' and 'harmful' are
defined and who defines them. These are not easy questions; there are
often periods in the progress of psychotherapy where people feel worse,
when they begin to look at what they have been avoiding in their lives,
but this apparently harmful effect is often a step towards an eventual
beneficial effect. But whether either of these effects is the result of the
power of the psychotherapist is debatable.
For Pilgrim, patienthood is related to power, which is of course quite
true but, in the light of what I have just said, not necessarily a bad thing.
There is however a more fundamental issue here which has to do with
the instrumental values of the market economy; it is interesting that the
most generally accepted alternative to patient is 'client' which empha­
sizes the cash connection. Part and parcel of all this is an emphasis on
being independent as opposed to dependent, in control, a free agent and
so on. None of these things is possible; we are all the time dependent on
those around us for our psychological and physical existence; we can
hide this need from ourselves but we cannot alter it. We start our lives
completely dependent on others immediately around us, and as we get
older most of us become more dependent on those around us. At certain
times in our lives, during periods of physical illness or periods of
unhappiness, or for some people who are profoundly unhappy most of
the time, that dependence will recur in a pronounced way. It does not
help to deny its existence.
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, EXPERIENCE AND POLITICS 61

This leads on to much wider issues which cannot be explored here.

Psychotherapy has become caught up in the individualist culture of what
Anthony Giddens refers to as late modernity and Giddens himself has
catalogued the therapies that promise self-control, self-expression, the
construction of a new self, independence and so on. Psychoanalytic
therapy seems less likely to get caught up in this and that is a point in its
favour, but its concern with ambivalence and other complications of
subjectivity tend to attract criticism from its therapeutic competitors and
from various forms of political radicalism. Yet it is arguable that it is
precisely this concern with ambivalence, with human failings as well as
with human aspirations, that promises a contact with experiential reality
which in tum can allow the development of a realist socialist politics.
We are not of course looking just at the complexity of experience but
also at the complexity of identity; the latter includes the many contra­
dictory experiences that we undergo, yet the very term 'identity'
excludes ambivalence and contradiction. The question of the possibility
of a conception of identity which allows for internal contradictions and
conflicts is something I shall leave until the end.
 PART 2

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND

SOCIOLOGY

BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND

MODERN SOCIAL THEORY

Anthony Giddens is the only British sociologist of recent generations to

attempt the ambitious project of integrating the classical traditions of
social theory with modem theory and philosophy. The attempt deserves
at least to be called impressive. Above all, he takes modem theory
seriously and sociology has become more interesting as a result. In many
ways his project must be regarded as equal in scope to that of Parsons,
his frequent target. In the context of this book, he is important because
structuration theory is best understood as a sophisticated form of action
theory in the tradition of Max Weber (although I suspect Giddens would
not like this characterization) and thus, by implication about the agent
and identity. My main purpose is to demonstrate that this type of
synthesizing glosses not only structural complexities and depths but also
presents a flat and limited conception of the social actor and his or her
experience of the world.
Giddens' assessment of his own intentions has remained consistent: a
revision of the main themes of nineteenth-century social thought in the
light of the crisis of contemporary sociology. He does not claim to offer a
new finalized synthesis, but rather to try to change the grounds of the
debate, bridge gaps between traditions and identify the points at which
differences may be transcended. Despite the reservations, we can identify
the synthesizing intention of his work, leading him from classical social
theory to problems of methodology, in the widest sense of the word, and
a consideration of contemporary capitalism and socialism. Dominant
concerns include the debate between naturalist and humanist approaches
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 63

to social science, and the related debate between structuralist explana­

tions and accounts in tenns of social action. In relation to the former, he
comes down firmly on the side of those who assert the specificity of the
methods and objects of social science. To deal with the latter problem, he
suggests a concept of 'structuration' and the 'duality of structures' which
maintains the necessity for analysing both structural and interactional
features of social life. He claims that this approach is neither a her­
meneutics nor a form of structuralism (Giddens 1984: xii). In the course
of this he develops an apparently sophisticated conception of the agent
and agency. My argument here will be that this conception is inadequate,
and that in fact any conception of agency constructed to fit in with a
synthesizing social theory is likely to be inadequate. I thought at first
that this was because social theory had not developed to the stage where
synthesis was possible, but more recently I have come to the conclusion
that such a synthesis is impossible because sociology is concerned with
different forms of being, different objects which cannot be understood in
the same way: people, social groups, organizations, and social structures
are all different types of object which call on different forms of under­
standing. Nevertheless we have to understand each of them in order to
understand the others. This perhaps is the central paradox of social
theory: it cannot be a totalizing theory but has to push towards total­
ization by going in different directions.
Thus when Giddens tries to bring theories together, he loses vital
dimensions of each of them and they cease to do the theoretical work of
telling us something about the social world that, previously, we did not
know. I believe that the end result of this is a significant incoherence in
his central concepts of 'structuration' and the 'duality of structures' and
an assumption of social order that is as utopian as Parsons'.
My criticism of Giddens, then, is that he oversimplifies the social world
and I will try to demonstrate this through a series of examples taken from
various places in his work. First, I will try to show how he reduces the
complexity of the social world and of the theories he employs to build
structuration theory. Second, I will argue that this involves him in an
over-simple idea of causality, and, despite his occasional statements to the
contrary, an unjustified assertion of the interpretive nature of sociology
and a limited conception of action and agency. This should be sufficient to
demonstrate the incoherence of his central concepts and his utopian view
of the nature of social order which, interestingly, rests on a utopian view
of the agent and the psychology of the agent.

The elimination of complexity

Giddens often talks about different levels of social organization as if the

social world possessed a depth, and there are underlying social structures
64 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

which bear a causal relationship to observable phenomena. However, in

the course of his bridge-building he loses sight of this depth. Everything
seems to be dealt with on the same analytic level with, on occasion, a
consequent confusion in the priority he gives to one factor over another.
My first example is an analysis of class structure, found in his theoretical
discussion The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (1973). In the course
of a lengthy and intelligent criticism of various approaches, he seems to
define a crucial problem as that of moving between the multiplicity of
relationships in advanced societies to the identification of structural
forms. This is also the way the problem has come to be defined by many
modem Marxists and Giddens seems to develop his own theory almost
as an equivalent. He offers a modified version of Weber's definition of
class as being based on property ownership, with the concept of property
extended to include the rights and capacities it confers upon the owner
(1973: Chap. 6). We could take this as referring to an underlying structural
level which helps us to order and make sense of the multiplicity of
relationships that we actually observe. Indeed, in what many might
consider a rather odd comment on Marx, Giddens indicates that his
intention is close to this: 'to focus upon the modes in which 'economic'
relationships become translated into non-economic social structure' (1973:
105).
This may be taken as a statement of the problem faced by every
Marxist writer on the subject for the past century; however, such an
interpretation cannot be sustained. It seems that we do not actually
arrive at classes proper until after the operation of a number of 'proxi­
mate' and 'mediate' structuring factors which appear to be dealt with at
the same analytic level as market capacities (1973: 107ff). The basic
definition seems to refer to the level of underlying structure to begin
with, but ends by referring to the multiplicity of relationships which
need to be structured. Its apparent causal role, at least as laying the
foundation of social class, is replaced by an implicit granting of causal
priority to the structuring factors. There is a sliding of priorities and a
flattening of levels.
Now, one does not have to accept the 'correctness' of an orthodox
Marxist base/superstructure analysis to recognize the usefulness
of distinguishing between different levels of social organization and of
attempting to identify causal relations between them. Giddens constantly
recognizes the significance of the questions that it raises, not least in the
above quotation. He begins with such a distinction but is unable to
sustain it and I think it is arguable that this failure presages the
incoherence of his concept of structuration. Here, he comes very close to
saying that classes exist (in terms of market capacities) before they exist
(as a result of structuring factors).
My second example concerns Giddens' discussion of Heidegger (1962)
in Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and the first volume of A
Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981). Here again we find
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 65

a reduction in the complexity of the world. Heidegger's concern is with

ontology, the nature of Being itself, and in particular the way in which
time is constitutive of Being. One does not have to understand the
subtleties of Heidegger to realize that Giddens' use of his theory in effect
trivializes these concerns. In fact he demonstrates it himself: 'Measurable
time-space is derived - that is imposed -on time-space relations in
Western culture - and should not therefore be confused with the nature
of time-space itself' (1981: 33).
In other words there is a social organization of time and space. One of
Heidegger's existentialist concerns is the way in which the social organ­
ization of time and space enables us to hide from the reality of Being and
Time, to slip into inauthenticity. Giddens' concern becomes simply the
social organization of time and space in the constitution of different
societies. It is as if Giddens builds a bridge between Heidegger's concerns
and social theory and then destroys it, leaving Heidegger standing on the
far side. In The Constitution of Society (1984) Giddens is much concerned
with the social organization of time and space, but Heidegger receives
only a handful of mentions.
My third example is some comments which conclude a discussion of
the work of Erik Erikson in The Constitution of Society, and I want to use
them to demonstrate again Giddens' oversimplification of both theory
and the real world. Erikson is a psychoanalyst who has particularly
concerned himself with the nature of identity and its relation to social
organization. Giddens is critical of his concept of ego-identity:

Even Erikson admits that it has at least four connotations. Sometimes it refers
to a 'conscious' sense of individual identity. It can also mean 'an unconscious
striving for a continuity of personal character'. A third meaning is 'a criterion
for the silent doing of ego synthesis'. A fourth sense is 'a maintenance of an
inner-solidarity with a group's ideals and identity'. None of these single uses,
it might be remarked, is particularly lucid, let alone the concept that embraces
them all! (Giddens 1984: 60)

All in all, then, the term 'does too much conceptual work'. Now, I have
no objection to striving for conceptual clarity, and it is certainly true
that the concept of ego-identity does a lot of work. Nonetheless it seems
to me that the concept is useful precisely because it embraces these
meanings, a series of internal psychological processes which are
interlinked and continuous with each other. The processes, moreover,
are not lucid processes but often, in the reality of an individual's life,
rather dark and mysterious. The meaning of the concept, in this case, is
not lucid because the reality it tries to grasp is not lucid. Indeed my
criticism of Erikson would be the opposite, that he oversimplifies the
notion of ego-identity, stripping it of the dimensions of internal conflict
present in Freud's idea of identity. However, as I will try to show later,
it is important for Giddens to have a simple idea of identity, and my
66 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

point at the moment is that conceptual clarity is not always desirable

if we are trying to grasp a difficult reality. It serves only to avoid the
problematic reality.

Causality

Giddens often refers to himself as a realist, without elaborating on what

he means by the term. Nevertheless the direction of his argument takes
him towards hermeneutics. It is within this context that his discussion of
causality must be understood. The most developed arguments are in
New Rules of Sociological Method (1976) but there are some revealing
comments in his discussion of Althusser in Studies in Social and Political
Theory (1977). Here he expresses his desire to maintain a notion of
'transitive causality' which seems to be a commonsense Humean con­
ception that one thing affects another. Second, he criticizes Althusser on
the grounds that he has no adequate conception of 'agency or causality',
the context implying that they are the same thing.
In New Rules of Sociological Method the implication becomes explicit
(1976: Chap. 4). He distinguishes between what he calls 'event-causality'
and 'agency-causality'. The former is seen as presupposing some invari­
ant connection between cause and effect, and as not really applicable to
social science. The latter involves some idea of a necessary connection
and of causal efficacy. There is however - a fact which Giddens
acknowledges - no elaboration of what is meant by 'necessary connec­
tion' and we are left with a very limited notion of cause. All we can do is
describe people's actions and their intended and unintended effects. This
would be writing history in the simplest storytelling manner and
removes any possibility of dealing with structural processes.
I will try to illustrate this with an example from Central Problems in
Social Theory. Here (Chap. 2) he redefines the Marxist idea of a contra­
diction between the forces and relations of production as a contradiction
between the principles of socialized and privatized production. He
argues that this is the primary contradiction of modem capitalism and
that it produces secondary contradictions, the most important of which is
between the hegemony of the nation-state and the internationalization of
capital. Now given what Giddens has to say about causality we have to
abandon structural explanations of the development of the secondary
from the primary contradictions. Parsonian functionalism could provide
such an explanation in terms of structural imbalance and boundary
maintenance. Marxism could do so in terms of the contradictory devel­
opment of the relations between the terms of the primary contradiction.
Both are suggestive and able to throw light on the process in question.
With Giddens, however, we would be left with a history of individual
choices and actions and their intended and unintended consequences.
Since it is unlikely that anybody actually intended the contradictions in
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 67

question, we would be left with an 'explanation' which says they are the
unintended consequences of human action. In other words, they just
happen to occur. This hardly seems a satisfactory form of social scientific
explanation.

The interpretive nature of sociology

The discussion of causality points to Giddens' tendency to reduce social

structure to social action. Since he views social science in terms of a
choice between positivism and hermeneutics, he also has to choose
between seeing social structures as independent of human action, which
they determine, or as simply constituted by human action. There is a
third alternative which escapes him, despite his frequent claims to be
presenting a 'third way'. Social structures may be seen as independent,
to some degree, of human consciousness, and as having a problematic
relation to human action, being neither simple product nor simple cause
of action. Giddens, however, constantly asserts the identity of structure
and action: 'Understanding is not merely a method of making sense of
what others do, nor does it require an empathic grasp of their con­
sciousness in some mysterious or obscure fashion. It is the very ontological
condition of human life in society as such' (1976: 19). And, more clearly:
'Social structures are both constituted by human agency and yet at the
same time are the very medium of this constitution' (1976: 121).
From this come the characteristic themes of his later work: the nature
of action and language and the insistence that actors have considerable,
if not always articulable, knowledge of their situation. In volume one of
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism there is an acknowl­
edgement that social processes can operate behind people's backs, but
such operations are seen entirely in terms of the unacknowledged
conditions of actions or their unintended consequences.
It is of course quite possible to acknowledge the truth of the first
quotation. However, the fact that understanding is the 'ontological
condition' of human life does not imply that it is the only ontological
condition. There is no prior reason why another such condition might
not be the existence of relatively independent social structures. This is
no more than saying that individuals are capable of creative thought
and at the same time our thought is limited by the physical structure of
our body and mind. How we conceptualize such structures and their
development is an open question, as is their relationship to our under­
standing and action. In some ways these are the questions of social
science. Giddens, however, seems to rely primarily on a (not unworthy)
humanist impulse to avoid these issues. The depth and complexity of
social structure and its relationship to our lives is lost. Even more
unfortunate, as I have already indicated in my comments on his use
68 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

of Heidegger and Erikson, he seems to lose the depth of human action

as well.

Agency and action

Dissolving social structure into social action removes the object of social
action: it can only now act upon itself, not upon social structures. In New
Rules of Sociological Method Giddens emphasizes the reflexively consti­
tutive nature of action. He argues that the traditional debate about action
in terms of reasons and causes wrongly divides action into what are
taken to be neatly identifiable components: reasons, motives, intentions,
purposes etc. He suggests, rightly I think, that only rarely if at all can we
identify such clear-cut categories. Action is, rather, a continuous flow,
involving a hierarchy of purposes and constant monitoring by an agent.
He suggests it is better to speak of rationalizations rather than reasons
(1976: Chap. 2). However, he goes no further than putting the traditional
categories in motion: reasons become reasoning.
On several occasions he presents a conception of the social actor as
comprised of different levels. He distinguishes an unconscious, a taken
for granted framework of meaning, commonsense, and ongoing reflexive
rationalization. At one point (1979: Chap. 5) he seems to give the
unconscious some priority. However, what is missing here in the way
of theoretical work is an account of any relationship between these levels
and there is little comment on their internal structures and workings. It is
precisely these areas which are significant. If, as Giddens argues, the
unconscious is the source of motivation, then we need to understand
how it works and how it comes to appear in consciousness. If it is true
that we rely on taken for granted and commonsense assumptions, then
we need to know how these effect our conscious beliefs and rational­
izations. Simply pointing to the existence of these areas is not sufficient,
and we find here a similar trivialization of theory to that I noted in
relation to Heidegger. Ethnomethodology, for example, is a questionable
approach which nonetheless raises questions which challenge the main
body of sociological thought in a new way. Whatever one might think of
its success, it has developed an intricate and detailed methodology for
laying bare the rules which govern action. In the work of Cicourel (1973),
for example, this is extended into a sophisticated theory of perception
and conception and agency. Giddens manages to reduce all this to a
series of generalized statements about the world: that action is rule
governed, language is important and that context is important (1977:
Chap. 1). The theoretical work of ethnomethodology is lost.
The way in which Giddens slips the object of action back into action
itself, together with the loss of depth in his view of agency, can be seen in
his contradictory criticism of Habermas in Studies in Social and Political
Theory (Giddens 1977). In an argument the beginning of which would
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 69

gladden the heart of any orthodox Marxist, he points out that Habermas's
distinction between labour and interaction loses the possibility of under­
standing domination as tied to material interests. Power becomes simply
a matter of ideologically deformed communication. However, he goes on
to argue:
Instead of equating labour with instrumental action and separating these
analytically from interaction . . . I think it is important to place in the forefront
the concepts of production and reproduction of interaction, as contingent
accomplishments of human actors. If, as I have outlined elsewhere, processes
of production and reproduction are treated as involving the reflexive
application of rules and resources in the service of the realization of interests
(wants) power emerges, together with symbolic meanings and normative
sanctions, as integral to interaction rather than analytically separate from it.
(Giddens 1977: 153)

Thus, he begins by pointing to the importance of material interests which

presuppose an external object for action, but in the quotation he absorbs
material interests (labour, instrumental action) back into social
interaction, and defines social interaction in terms of symbolic meanings,
normative sanctions and the reflexive application of rules and resources,
a simple list of the features of agency. From criticizing Habermas from
the Marxist end of the spectrum, he moves to becoming more of a
hermeneuticist than Habermas himself.

Structure and structuration

The reduction of qualitatively different phenomena to the same level,

and the consequent loss of depth, are responsible for what I referred to
earlier as the incoherence of Giddens' central concepts. The difference
between structure and action is both hinted at and blurred in his notion
of the 'duality of structures'. Structures are seen as enabling action, as its
medium, and as presupposed by and resulting from action. If there is
structuration then there must, somewhere, somehow be structure. His
most developed discussion of the issue, in Central Problems in Social
Theory (1979), reveals some intriguing statements. How are we to con­
ceive of the structures that are 'structurated':
I shall argue that 'structure' has a 'virtual' existence, as instantiations or
moments, but this is not the same as identifying structure with models
invented by sociological or anthropological observers. Although I shall not
defend the claim, I regard the concepts below as compatible with a realist
ontology. (Giddens 1979: 63)

If his concept is compatible with a realist ontology then we ought to be

able to see a structure or its effects, but we shall have to be quick, since it
has only an instantaneous or momentary existence. I am not sure what
happens if it has a virtual existence. It might be that Giddens is a realist
70 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

in the sense that for George Orwell some statements were true - they
were essentially true even if demonstrably false. Then again:
I shall not regard structure as referring to its most basic sense in the form of
sets but rather to rules (and resources) that, in social reproduction, 'bind' time.
Thus 'structure', as applied below, is first of all treated as a generic term; but
structures can be identified as sets or matrices of rules, resources and
properties. (1979: 63-4)

One wonders how a moment or an instantiation may bind time (not to

mention the question of whether time can be bound at all - it has a
tendency to move very quickly when chased). More important, if a
structure is not a set, then how are we to identify it, since that would
involve identifying interrelationships, that is, identifying a set? But then
again, we discover that a structure is a set, even if it is not basically a set.
Then: 'I shall argue that strictly speaking, there are no such things as
rules of transformation; all social rules are transformational in the sense
that structure is not manifested in empirical similarity of social items'
(1979: 64).
If we cannot find structure in the similarity of social items then how
are we to recognize differences, since the two imply and depend upon
each other? It would seem that we certainly cannot recognize the effects
of structures in social items, so perhaps this makes Giddens a virtual
realist. Despite himself, he would have to be a model-building realist; if
we cannot observe structures or their effects, then how else can we
identify them except through model-building? And a model, in some
sense, is a set.
So far we have seen that structures have an instantaneous, virtual, real
existence. They are not models but it would seem that we have to build
models of them, although it is not clear whether this is because of or
despite their instantaneous existence. They are also rules, defined by
their differences, which bind time (here, clearly despite their instan­
taneous existence); but since they cannot be defined by similarity, they
cannot be defined by difference. They cannot be defined. Finally:
As I shall employ it, 'structure' refers to 'structural property', or more exactly
to 'structuring property', structuring properties providing the 'binding of time'
and space in social systems. I argue that these properties can be understood as
rules and resources, recursively integrated in the reproduction of social
systems. Structures exist paradigmatically as an absent set of differences . . .
(and this implies) . . . recognizing the existence of (a) knowledge - as memory
traces of how things are to be done (said, written) on the part of social actors;
(b) social practices organized through the recursive mobilization of that
knowledge; (c) capabilities that the production of these practices presuppose.
(Giddens 1979: 64)

Now we learn that they are properties, resources and rules; that they are
somehow form and content at the same time. Since they are also struc­
turing properties, they are active and the question arises of how an
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 71

absent set of differences can possess the quality of agency. We end by

moving from an absent set of differences which does things, the realm of
theology, to a partial and mundane list of human qualities that could be
gleaned in rather more detail from a perusal of standard interactionist
and ethnomethodological works.
It seems after all that 'structure' and 'structuration' refer to the active
features of human beings. There is no doubt that Giddens tackles vast
and real problems of ontology, epistemology, theory building and many
other things. What is disturbing is the way these are run together and
discussed as if they were solved, the term 'structure' stretched to hide
the problems that were there at the beginning. Giddens' eventual
conclusion seems to be that we have to make a sort of gestalt switch,
what he calls a 'methodological epoche' in our analysis. We can examine
social systems as 'strategic conduct', that is, social action, or we can
embark upon 'institutional analysis'. In other words we end with the old
division between structure and action, seen as alternative ways of
looking at the same world - that world being essentially seamless and
with little internal complexity. Thus we come to Utopia.

Utopia

Dahrendorf's (1964) famous critique of Parsons directed itself to the

explicit assumptions and details of the latter's work, drawing parallels
with literary utopias. I would accuse Giddens of a more mundane
utopianism, something more like wishful thinking, but in the same
context as Parsons: that of social order.
Giddens' assumptions about the basis of social order are more difficult
to find than Parsons'. In New Rules of Sociological Method (1976: Chap. 3)
he offers a Durkheimian account with a phenomenological slant: social
order is based on a sort of conscience collective comprised of taken for
granted assumptions and rules. However, I think there is a more pro­
found and at the same time more naive account. I have argued that
Giddens reduces the depth of the social world in various ways and that
he absorbs social structure into social action, which in tum is seen in
terms of human qualities. There must, then, be something about the
social actor that ensures we live in an ordered world rather than in
chaos. The most explicit statement of what he assumes about the actor
that I have found is in Central Problems in Social Theory:

Ontological security can be taken to depend upon the implicit faith actors have
in the conventions (codes of signification and forms of normative regulation)
via which, in the duality of structure, the reproduction of social life is effected.
In most circumstances of social life, the sense of ontological security is
routinely grounded in mutual knowledge, employed such that interaction is
'unproblematic' or can be largely 'taken for granted'. (Giddens 1979: 219)
72 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

This claim is repeated in The Constitution of Society (1984). What is

happening here is a reversal of Parsons' ordering of priorities. Whereas
Parsons sees the stable personality as a product of the social system,
Giddens sees the social system, in terms of commonsense and the taken
for granted, as a product of the ontologically secure individual. It seems
that we have social order because people are creatures of habit,
sustaining their sense of security in the social order. I do not want to
dispute Giddens' argument here: we do find security in the routine and
perhaps construct the routine because it gives us security. He is right
insofar as he goes. My point rather is that this is only half the picture. If
that were all there is to it, the world would probably be a nicer, but
perhaps more boring, place and in this sense he is indulging in wishful
thinking.
If we look at theorists on whose ideas he builds this conception of
agency and ontological security, we find again that he turns a profound
idea into a shallow one. The notion of ontological security originally
comes from the work of R.D. Laing (1960) and Willmott (1986) points out
that ontological security is not a matter of feeling safe through routine,
but of being able to cope with changes in routine. The more one
immerses oneself in routine, the more likely one is to generate anxiety.
The work of psychoanalysts such as Winnicott (1964), to whom Giddens
also refers, on early childhood shows that what is important is not
routine in itself but the ability to cope with upsets and disturbances. In
this respect, routine without an emotional content can be profoundly
destructive.
That Giddens is only half right, engaging in wishful thinking, seems to
be self-evident once we step outside sociology books. Most of us live
lives that are in part routine; but they are also fraught with uncertainties,
anxieties and puzzles that originate in the depths that Giddens has lost
in his synthesizing. Our internal worlds also contain fear, self­
questioning, doubt and agonies which at times enhance the banality of
our commonsense world. We are regularly thrown by external processes
over which we have no control, processes that result in wars, unemploy­
ment, poverty. These disturbances, these absences of routine, have their
origin in our unconscious or at least the darker reaches of our
personalities, and in the social structure in which we are situated, but
which we do not control, individually or collectively. These areas, the
very parts of our lives which are not routine and secure, are the areas
which have generated the theories to which Giddens does violence:
Heidegger's existentialism, Marxism, even ethnomethodology. We can
see too why he wants a simple conception of ego-identity. These are also
the areas that require theoretical work: the development of concepts that
make intelligible what is puzzling, painful or threatening.
Giddens' tendency to gloss these areas and problems perhaps lies in
the nature of his project. To criticize him for a utopian conception of
social order is, despite my argument, just off target. To criticize him for
 BACK TO UTOPIA: GIDDENS AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY 73

resting such an assumption on a utopian conception of the personality is

closer to the mark, but the real utopianism is rather in his conception of
social theory: the idea that a synthesizing project is possible. Giddens'
work emerges at a time not of convergence but of increasing frag­
mentation in social theory, with all the obscurities and dead ends and
bitter debates that go with such a breaking up. My argument has been
that Giddens avoids such difficulties and debates rather than solves
them. What he leaves us with is a theory of simple complication. It
is complicated because he identifies a lot that must be taken account of:
the agent and the agent's unconscious, taken for granted interpretive
schemes, commonsense knowledge, reflective monitoring, the process of
structuration and the duality of structures, time-space constitution,
reproduction and related ideas such as presence availability and so on. It
is simple in that the result is a series of generalizing and descriptive
concepts which are simply aligned with each other. It is difficult not to
see the concepts of structuration and the duality of structures as a verbal
solution to the rocky problems that have broken the major theoretical
systems of sociology from structural functionalism to Marxism.

Conclusion

This chapter has become increasingly polemical and it is now perhaps

time to move back to what I said in the introduction is good about
Giddens. It would be satisfying to offer a way forward that would
provide as much promise as his project, but behind all the criticisms my
underlying theme has been that this is not possible. To find the real
value of Giddens' work involves not bridge building nor the destruction
of bridges but rather an unwinding of what he tries to knit together. It
means returning to the different traditions and nagging away at old
problems, from the Marxist base-superstructure debates to the reasons­
causes arguments and many others. His contribution to these arguments
is real and interesting, but neither he, nor to my knowledge anybody
else, has yet produced satisfactory solutions. I am suggesting that theory
and theoretical work are more mundane and slower than Giddens makes
them appear: it is a matter of constantly finding new problems and
disputing old solutions, and of trying to arrive at a reasonable assess­
ment of what a theory does and does not enable us to understand.
In this context, Giddens' other major contribution is to take seriously a
range of thinkers and issues which, strictly speaking, come from outside
sociology. It is generally true that when they have been considered by
sociologists it has been through an enthusiastic discipleship that Giddens
manages to avoid. He is reasonable and reserved in his discussions of
structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutic philosophers and others,
and if he has persuaded people to think about Heidegger and Levi­
Strauss or Gadamer then his work has been worthwhile. I say this
74 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

because I think that one of the implications of the fragmentation of social

theory is that sociology as a discipline has been unable to generate, either
from its conceptual framework or its empirical research, a real concep­
tion of its own possibilities and limits. Despite the obscurity and diffi­
culty of much modem philosophy, such work does begin to approach
issues and choices that are presupposed by sociological theory, and of
which sociological theory needs to be aware. Such philosophy provides a
map on which sociology must place itself, whether it wants to or not. It
is perhaps this area of work that is most important since it offers the
possibility of new ways of looking at the old problems to which we must
return.
One of these directions has to be towards a deeper understanding of
agency and the actor, of personality and the internal dynamic of the
psyche. A social theory which moulds its conception of the actor around
the demands of the more abstract levels of theory will always be inade­
quate and open to criticisms of irrelevance and/or ignoring significant
dimensions of the social world. Such synthesizing systems only work by
resting themselves on fictional models of human beings.
 6

GOFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS

On the face of it, Erving Goffman appears to avoid the criticisms that I
levelled at Giddens in the previous chapter. He is certainly no grand
theorist, forcing a conception of the individual into an unsuitable slot to
fit the rest of his theory. He often inspires delight and enthusiasm in
students and in those colleagues whose senses have not been too dulled
by age. He seems to be able to grasp important dimensions of how
people really behave in their day-to-day interactions. We are, I suspect,
all conscious of acting in public situations and with our nearest and
dearest and this is what he settles on.
The paradox is that Giddens (1984) tries to absorb Goffman's work
into his structuration theory. Although on the surface it is difficult to see
how such an apparently idiosyncratic thinker as Goffman could be fitted
into a grand theoretical synthesis, an examination of his work, especially
Frame Analysis (1974) will, I think, enable us to see how it could happen.
Goffman does, of course, have a theoretical background, almost self­
evidently located in the work of G.H. Mead (1938) and although he
might not fit neatly into any school, he is closest to symbolic interaction­
ism, which also has the reputation of getting to grips with everyday life
and experience. For Mead the self was an ongoing conversation between
two 'phases', the 'Me', the conception of myself that I receive from the
outside world, from others, and the T, my response to others, the source
of originality and creativity. It is clearly easier to talk about the 'Me' than
the T and it is a commonplace now to say that the T became a residual
category, brought in to explain what could not be explained in terms of
social determination. The T became the ghost in the machine. It is what
presents in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1971). So if
we ask Goffman who it is that does the acting in his dramaturgical
model, not what is acted, or the aim of the acting, we find, in Frame
Analysis, references to a 'moral core' or an 'animal self'. There is no
indication of what qualities these might possess or, in the former case, of
how it comes into being. I will concentrate on Frame Analysis (1974)
because I think it is particularly revealing.
What I would like to do is offer an interpretation of what Goffman is
'really' talking about, distinguishing it from what he claims to be talking
about. I will attempt this through an exploration of a number of
76 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

interconnected features of his work, beginning with the apparent self­

evidence of his subject matter that perhaps accounts for the enthusiasm
with which people greet it or the readiness with which they dismiss it.
There is certainly a sense in which Goffman's work is difficult to
grasp: not so much difficult to understand, but difficult to retain and to
present in an organized summary. The systematic production and sub­
division of categories seem to require an effort of memory rather than
comprehension. This makes it a difficult work to criticize. On the one
hand, there seems to be no 'core' concept or conceptual framework on
which to focus, in the way that, for example, the notion of the conscience
collective can be said to be at the centre of Durkheim's work. There is,
rather, a proliferation of concepts under the umbrella of a central
analogy, namely, the theatre. But the analogy is not the source of the
concepts: the notions of 'frame', 'key', etc. in Frame Analysis are applied
to, as much as derived from, the theatre. On the other hand, it is difficult
to go through the argument step by step, agreeing with it here, faulting it
there and coming to some overall judgement. There is little in the way of
a logical argument with each step leading necessarily to the next, and
there is no apparent criterion by which we can judge what is said on any
one issue. The most that seems possible is a series of discrete and
unconnected comments pointing to equally discrete and unconnected
problems thrown up in the course of the text.
The problem of getting some critical grip on his work and the
apparent absence of criteria by which to judge it provides an interesting
starting point. It is a problem, and an absence, that does not seem to
strike those who are immediately enthusiastic, and it hardly seems a
problem or an absence for Goffman. His work, of course, is open to
doubt and inadequate in various ways, however: 'Nonetheless, some of
the things in this world seem to urge the analysis I am now attempting,
and the compulsion is strong to try to outline the framework that will
perform this job, even if this means some other tasks get handled badly'
(1974: 13).
There is an appeal to obviousness, self-evidence and reasonableness in
his claims for his work: the world calls, everyone can hear it, it is
reasonable that someone try to answer. Of course there are doubts about
the obviousness of it all, but any reasonable person will recognize that
concern with these doubts eventually prohibits one from saying anything
at all, since people know what he is talking about:

Thus, I will throughout use quotation marks to suggest a special sense of the
word so marked and not concern myself systematically with the fact that this
device is routinely used in a variety of quite different ways, that these seem to
bear closely on the question of frame, and that I must assume that the context
of use will automatically lead my readers and me to have the same under­
standing, although neither I nor they might be able to explicate the matter
further. (Goffman 1974: 12-13)
 COFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS 77

Thus he takes refuge in self-evidence and reasonableness. Yet, standing

back from his claims, one finds immediately after the above quotation a
further argument:

This book is about the organization of experience - something that an indi­

vidual actor can take into his mind - and not the organization of society . . . I
am not addressing the structure of social life but the structure of experience
individuals have at any moment of their social lives. I personally hold society
to be first in every way and any individual's current involvements to be
second; this report deals only with matters that are second. This book will
have weaknesses enough in the areas it claims to deal with; there is no need to
find limitations in regard to what it does not set about to discover. (Coffman
1974: 13)

Here is an argument which carries the reasonable and self-evident tone

of the earlier points, but one which is 'self-evidently' unreasonable and
'self-evidently' inadequate. If the 'structure of experience' under exami­
nation is that which individuals have of their social lives, then we need
to know the structure of social life before we can examine the experience
of it. But the structure of social life remains to be discovered. If it makes
any sense at all to say that society comes first in every way, it must mean
that society takes a logical and ontological priority over experience and
in both cases it means that we cannot understand experience before
looking at society. Yet these arguments are used to justify the ignoring of
society and to point to the unreasonable nature of criticizing Goffman for
ignoring society.
No great insight or feat of logic is required to point to the contra­
diction in the above quotation; indeed, such a criticism is as self-evident
and reasonable as the position it is criticizing. The same applies to a
number of other inadequacies, and I will try to show this in connection
with the two basic categories that Goffman introduces at the beginning,
the notion of 'frame' itself and of 'key'. As we have seen, he sets out to
study the organization of experience; 'frame' refers to the means with
which that organization is achieved. To begin with, there are 'primary
frameworks', or basic forms of organization that do not refer to any prior
or original interpretation of the world, such as the organization that
transforms the meaningless into the meaningful (p.21). This by itself
raises doubts. 'Frame' must be a defining feature of experience for to
identify an experience as 'meaningless' is possible only in relation to an
experience which is already meaningful, otherwise it would simply
remain unidentified. In other words, even 'unframed' experience must be
framed by framed experience. The suspicion is that Goffman is using the
term 'frame' to indicate nothing more than the fact that our experience is
organized. This is confirmed in that interesting and, one would have
thought for Goffman, important questions about the source of frame­
works are left open. Are they perceptual constructs, conceptual con­
structs, social constructs, or are they simply given in the world? Such
78 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

questions are never asked or answered in a systematic way. It is also

confirmed by the rather cursory discussion of the context of primary
frameworks, to which I will return later. It is further confirmed in that
within primary frameworks practically anything can be 'framed'. The
term here obviously implies something different since it is possible to be
out-of-frame and still identifiable. Exactly what it implies is, however, by
no means obvious. The term seems applicable to a range of very different
phenomena, and it seems that different frames can be differentiated in an
endless number of ways.
A casual search produces the following. In Chapter 3, frames are
distinguished according to the types of 'keying' involved (and the
implication of this will become apparent later); in Chapter 7, 'frame'
refers both to the official view of what is happening in an event and to
the principal focus of attention in interaction; in Chapter 8, frames are
divided between mind and action and are 'anchored' in a 'real' social,
biological and physical world (which presumably thus exists external to
frames); later in the chapter it refers to the organization of involvement
in activity; and in Chapter 13 'frame' refers to the organization of talk.
There are also theatrical frames, radio frames, frames classified according
to the intentions of their constructors and so on. It seems that anything
which can be organized and differentiated can be framed, and it can be
framed in as many ways as there are of organizing and differentiating.
We find exactly the same problem with the notion of 'keying', or the
transformation of an initially given framework into something else, with
a resultant change in meaning. Coffman is primarily concerned with
changes in 'reality meaning', that is, various types of play-acting. The
consistency in the use of the term 'keying' is threatened and then
destroyed by his insistence that 'keying' can refer to any change in
meaning, including 'conceptual' meaning, so that at one point he
suggests that translation from one language to another is a keying (p.
79). It becomes difficult to see what cannot be considered as a keying: a
spoken sentence can be treated as a 'keyed' thought, as can an action,
and a thought can be considered as a 'keyed' action. Insofar as all actions
take place in a specific context from which they take their meaning, any
one action can be considered as a 'keying' of any other or all actions of
the same class. Thus 'frame' and 'key' tum out not to be concepts which
provide new insights and explanation, but words that refer to the fact of
organization and differentiation on the one hand, and to the existence of
changing meanings on the other. They are similar in nature to the term
'interaction' which, as Goffman tells us, is unhelpful since it 'equally
applies to everything one might want to distinguish' (p. 127). Now these
conceptual inadequacies are not difficult to identify; it is a matter only of
looking at the ways in which Goffman uses the notion of 'frame' and
'key'. Yet at the same time they are hidden, they seem both immediately
apparent and not immediately apparent. It is my contention that this
'masking' is an effect of Goffman's style and the way in which he relates
 COFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS 79

to his reader. This is worth investigating, for it reveals the way in which
we can get 'around' the mask, discover the real object and limitations of
his work and arrive at a coherent understanding of both its adequacies
and its inadequacies.
To read Coffman is to be seduced or to refuse seduction. It is not to
enter into a critical dialogue, nor is it to understand another's view of the
world. Initially one must lose oneself in his world or keep out of it
altogether. The seduction fails or succeeds through a double strategy. In
the first place, the reader is led into an 'identification-in-superiority' with
Coffman. We become privileged observers in a special way: we see
through tricks, acts, illusions of all sorts. With Coffman the reader is no
fool. The reader becomes an 'insider', his or her status is confirmed by
the systematic use of argot and suspicion. The alliance is confirmed
when the suspicion is extended by Coffman to himself; it becomes a
knowing alliance in which both Coffman and the reader admit to the
possibility that Coffman might be fooling the reader. The systematic
'frame-breaking' of the introduction sets up a knowing conspiracy which
achieves seduction through a revelation that seduction may be what is
happening. It is not that we are taken in by Coffman's openness; rather
we side with him because of his admitted trickiness. We ourselves
become tricky, knowing and suspicious.
All this would remain ephemeral and perhaps unimportant were it not
for the second arm of the strategy. This is the structure of the exposition.
As I pointed out earlier, there is, by and large, no necessary movement
from one point to the next, but rather an indication, a gesture which
reveals to us the world as it really is, as it obviously is. It is just that we
have not seen it in that way before and all it needed was somebody to
direct our gaze, somebody to show us: 'some apparent exceptions'; 'it is
obvious that'; 'now consider'; 'it is apparent that'; 'the obvious possi­
bility'; 'is surely not'; 'clearly'; 'next examine'. A smattering of these
terms can be expected in any work, but the above list from just over
three pages (440-3) reveals the heart of Coffman's style. Rarely does he
take the responsibility for what he is saying. The instruction at the
beginning of a paragraph - a favourite technique - directs us to some­
thing whether we like it or not. In case we should forget, we are referred
to the apparent, the clear and the obvious. In this context the more
moderate suggestions ('seems to' is the only one occurring in the three
pages mentioned above) take on the appearance of gentle consideration
for the slower reader. The dominant mood is descriptive and affirmative:
Coffman is telling what is happening, not what he thinks is happening.
The alliance with the reader, then, is in the face of a world which is
'just like that'. All one can say immediately is, 'Yes, it is like that', or 'No,
it is not.' In fact, neither response is adequate, or both are equally
adequate: some aspects of the world are 'like that', others are not. To
break free of Coffman's guiding gestures is to begin to distinguish what
he is really talking about, and it is a matter of looking at the questions
80 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

that come out of his descriptions, but which remain unanswered and
often unasked. To take the example of primary frameworks again, I have
already indicated one question concerning their origin. There are a
number of others. After the initial definition of a primary framework,
Goffman delineates ( pp. 21-8) two 'broad classes' of frameworks that he
distinguishes in 'our society'. The first involves natural frameworks in
which events are physically determined and unguided; the second
involves social frameworks where events are seen to be guided by
intelligent beings open to persuasion. These guided doings are open to
two interpretations, one pertaining to the manipulation of the natural
world, the other pertaining to activity within the social framework alone.
All social frameworks involve rules and they are socially distributed and
shared, not necessarily in an even way. To break free of Goffman in this
case is a matter only of following his original intention, which is to study
the structure of experience. There is the beginning of a description of the
structure of our experience in the above but only a beginning. How are
the two classes subdivided? Is the distinction between guided, undeter­
mined and unguided determined events the only distinction we can
make? Is it the most important distinction? Are there areas in which the
distinction does not apply at all? Since we can identify 'events' in both
frameworks, there must be fundamental connections between them.
What are they? Are these classes jointly or separately coherent or are
there contradictions within and between them? Do they structure the
whole of our experience, or most of it, or only parts? I would suggest
that all these questions arise from the preliminary definition and need to
be answered before we can claim to have investigated the 'structure
of experience'. This sort of investigation would take us in the direction of
Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (1970, 1972).
Goffman, however, offers the cursory preliminary definition and then
moves on after admitting its inadequacy. We then find out what he is
really investigating: 'The notion of primary frameworks, unsatisfactory
as it is, does allow one immediately to consider five distinctive matters
and to appreciate something of their bearing on our overall under­
standing of the workings of the world' (1974: 28).
These five matters are events that challenge a primary framework (the
apparent intervention of the supernatural, for instance) and four types of
event that cut across primary frameworks. Each type is considered in
relation to strategies for handling the uncertainties that it produces and
reasserting, if possible, the dominance of the distorted or blurred
framework.
Now, this is not an investigation of the structure of experience, but an
investigation of the techniques by means of which we maintain the
structure of experience. I am not claiming this as a surprising revelation
of Goffman's real concern; like most things about his work, it is
'obvious'. What is not obvious, perhaps, is that it entails doing violence
to what he describes. The 'what' of experience is reduced to the 'how'
 GOFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS 81

and the 'how' is left to stand as the whole of experience. The 'what' of
experience is precisely the meaning of experience, and the questions I
asked about primary frameworks are questions about the meanings we
give to the world and the relationships between them, questions about
the structure of experience. For Goffman it is sufficient that experience is
structured, and once this is granted, he is concerned with the nuts and
bolts that keep it together.
Here we can see what links his work on the presentation of self with
Frame Analysis and enables him to be absorbed into Giddens' synthesis
as part of its utopian base. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a
study of how people get through situations without losing face, without
the act being interrupted. In Frame Analysis he is concerned with how we
maintain and reimpose frames when they are threatened, and Giddens is
concerned with the taken for granted rules which reproduce social
structures. The overall concern throughout is with social order, yet so
often our experience is not orderly.
The violence that the concern with order does to Goffman's subject
matter, then, is to reduce its meaning. Unlike some forms of ethno­
methodology, it is not a near elimination of meaning, but the reduction
of the meaning of experience to one dimension, that of its appearance as
reality. This reduction of meaning allows the remarkable range of
Goffman's examples. It is only if one is concerned with a very limited
aspect of social reality that it is possible to employ a mechanical fault in
an aircraft and a penis lost in a medical accident as examples in the same
argument (1974: 100-101). The reduction of meaning throws light on the
difficulty with the theatrical analogy I mentioned earlier. Ostensibly,
Goffman takes the theatre (or some marginal or extraordinary aspects of
social life) as a means of thinking about and throwing light on everyday
activities. In fact, he is imposing on the theatre the same violence he
imposes on the rest of the world: it is considered only in terms of its
representation of reality, the techniques by which that representation is
achieved and the means by which the audience is kept involved. The
complex dialectics of Pirandello and Genet, not to mention Godard and
other 'tricky film-makers' become, for Goffman, only examples that
reveal techniques of frame maintenance and forms of frame breaking. In
a peculiar misreading ( pp. 284-5) Sartre's attempt to draw out the
meaning for Genet of a feature of The Maids becomes a revelation of a
presupposition about the theatrical frame and nothing more. It is not
surprising that at one point ( pp. 137 8) he is forced to deny that he sees
-

all plays as whodunits: 'Even whodunits have to be more than that.'

Luckily, he can refer to a critic who says that whodunits have something
to say about human destiny. What Genet might be saying throughout
The Maids or The Blacks, however, is of no significance to his argument.
This reduction of meaning has its most profound effect in the matter of
the self. Frame Analysis ends with a long quotation from Merleau-Ponty's
The Prose of the World, followed by a short comment:
82 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOCY

It is not sufficiently noted that the other is never present face to face. Even when,
in the heat of discussion, I directly confront my adversary, it is not in that violent
face with its grimace, or even in that voice traveling toward me, that the
intention which reaches me is to be found. The adversary is never quite
localized; his voice, his gesticulations, his twitches are only effects, a sort of stage
effect, a ceremony. Their producer is so well masked that I am quite surprised
when my own responses carry over. This marvellous megaphone becomes
embarrassed, gives a few sighs, a few tremors, some signs of intelligence. One
must believe that there was someone over there. But where? Not in that
overstrained voice, not in that face lined like any well-worn object. Certainly not
behind that set-up; I know quite well that back there is only 'darkness crammed
with organs'. The other's body is in front of me - but as far as it is concerned, it
leads a singular existence, between I who think and that body, or rather near me,
by my side. The other's body is a kind of replica of myself, a wandering double
which haunts my surroundings more than it appears in them. The other's body
is the unexpected response I get from elsewhere, as if by a miracle things began
to tell my thoughts, or as though they would be thinking and speaking always
for me, since they are things, and I am myself. The other, in my eyes, is thus
always on the margin of what I see and hear, he is this side of me, he is beside of
me or behind me, but he is not in that place which my look flattens and empties
of any 'interior'. (Merleau-Ponty 1974b: 133-4)

The trouble with this description, according to Goffman, lies in the

failure 'to apply to these references to self the analysis they allow him to
apply to other' (1974: 575-6).
Let us look more closely at the quotation from Merleau-Ponty. He is
describing the perception of another person, that much is straightfor­
ward. Now there are certain preconditions that must necessarily exist if
such a description is possible. The most basic is that if somebody can be
seen, then there must also be somebody who sees. There is thus a lack of
symmetry in the perception of another person. To see is not the same as
being seen despite the fact that one implies the other. The difference is
found in the quotation. To be seen is to be reduced to a gesticulating
body: to see is to inhabit a body, to be in possession of one's own
movements and, more importantly, one's perceptions as a synthetic
unity. I am my experience, and all the external gestures which for the
other are signs of an invisible consciousness are for me the places and
movements in which I live as their unity. Like Godard's camera (p. 404),
I can never get behind myself: the dimension of 'subjectivity', of 'lived
experience' is always there. Goffman recognizes the 'other's' existence
but he refers to it only when it suits him and in the discussion of
Godard, for example, it proves a useful tool which justifies disregarding
the meaning of Godard's film. In the matter of the self, however,
Goffman strips away this dimension, strips away not just dimensions of
meaning that are superfluous to his argument, but the very source of the
meaning of experience itself, the living of the experience. His phenom­
enological warrant is used to destroy the very object of phenomenology.
Here is the most insidious result of Goffman's style. Borrowing a concept
 COFFMAN: FRAME ANALYSIS 83

from Sartre (1977) it can be described as effecting a dramatic serialization

of the reader. He or she is seduced into an alliance with Goffman and a
separation from those with whom he is engaged in the flow of inter­
action. The reader becomes other than those with whom he is engaged
and the others become a combination of techniques of 'reality' produc­
tion and maintenance. The reader is then separated even from this
experience and thrust back into the world as just another combination of
techniques, finally being sealed into an alienation as other than himself.
Each of us is reduced only to someone who is seen.
Gouldner (1970: 378-90) has seen Goffman as a symptom of bureau­
cratic consumer capitalism and the theoretical and moral dilemmas to
which that system has led. I would not want to dispute this, but rather to
point to the complexity of Goffman's 'ideological' tendencies and per­
haps reveal one or two further dimensions. At the beginning of Frame
Analysis, Goffman writes: 'I can only suggest that he who would combat
false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much
to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to
provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way people
snore' (1974: 14).
The implication of my argument has been that Goffman has no way of
telling the difference between sleeping and waking, that he strips
experience precisely of that dimension in which it is awake. For Goffman
there is no other state than sleep. In a sense he is right that he is not
providing a lullaby: it is more of a lobotomy. In the development of his
work, the way in which he relates to the reader and to the world he is
describing, we can find laid bare one of those processes by means of
which individuals are kept separate from each other, divorced from their
own experience and bound into impotent observation, the impotence, if
you like, of the consumer in the face of the bureaucrat.
There is more than this, however. The stripping of the self of its
dimension of lived experience leaves only a collection of fragments: 'A
set of functions characteristically imposed in ordinary, literal doings but
separated in all manner of ways in other realms of being' (1974: 575). The
self becomes at most a machine for producing the appearance of reality.
It is a collection of separate, observable parts that mesh together in an
observable way to produce a 'reality'. To observe a person is not funda­
mentally different from observing the parts of a car engine mesh together
to produce motion. At this levet Goffman's work becomes a near perfect
example of a way of thinking about social life that began with the
Enlightenment. It is, moreover, a way of thinking to which Goffman is
usually regarded as an alternative. What is involved is the subsuming of
the 'human' into the 'natural', where 'nature' is thought of as a realm to
be dominated and the source and the object of instrumental manipu­
lation. Goffman does not reduce the 'human' to the 'natural' as such, as
do the more rigorous forms of positivism, but he reduces the 'human' to
a material instrumentality.
84 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

If Coffman is to be criticized, it is in fact less because he operates this

reduction, than because he claims to be doing something else. Once his
'real' concern is identified, this concern is precisely what becomes
important and 'adequate' in his work. In his production of serial
alienation and his reduction of the self he reproduces and, in a sense,
lays bare an experience and a way of seeing ourselves and others which
is a fundamental feature of life in a social system apparently out of
human control. Serialization and its results are not confined to one class
or section of a class. Although its content, its meaning, is different
between and within classes, serialization's basic form is common and it
is this form that Coffman reveals. It is this fact that makes his implicit
ideological assumptions so profoundly ambiguous, for it is no use
asserting against Coffman the multidimensional meaningfulness of our
lived experience and that of others when for ourselves that experience is
usually unrecognized or systematically suppressed. The final and
perhaps conclusive reason for Coffman's 'obviousness' is that he articu­
lates a way of seeing the world that is our own:

To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists

who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry,
and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as
if they still had the capacity to act like subjects, and as if something depended
on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which
conceals the fact that there is life no longer. (Adorno 1974: 15)

The difference between Coffman and Adorno is that the latter is aware of
the possibility of life.
 7

MASCULINITY AND MALE

DOMINANCE

In Chapters 5 and 6, I tried to show how both macro and micro social
theory glossed and hid the experience of the actor. The implication of
this argument is that we need to think of the social actor having a life
which is to some degree relatively autonomous from his or her social
setting. We are not simply the product of role expectations, ideologies,
taken for granted knowledge or discursive practices but we absorb them
through a complex inner process for which I have been using the term
'experience' .
In this chapter I want to look at how we can begin to 'detach' the
individual from the functioning of his or her society while still recog­
nizing that we all have to deal with social conditioning and other social
pressures, whichever conceptual framework we use to describe them.
The rise of modem feminism and the appearance of what used to be
known as 'consciousness-raising' groups, the development of the slogan
'the personal is political' brought together 'grand theories' of society and
attempts to understand day-to-day experience of the world around
issues of sex and gender. Given the early feminist critiques of Freud (see,
for example, De Beauvoir 1960; Figes 1970; Millett 1970) it is perhaps
surprising that psychoanalysis now seems to have become an important
and often unquestioned contributor to feminist ideas.
The two central founding works of modem feminist interpretations of
Freud take up different aspects of his work on women, sexuality and
gender. The first to appear was Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1976). Mitchell adopted a comparatively orthodox Freudian
standpoint, influenced by Lacan. She suggested that there was a
distinctive feminine personality which was part of the patriarchal system
analysed by Freud in his theory of sexual development. This gives the
central role to man's possession of the penis. The woman is faced with
three options. The 'normal solution' in western societies is to accept the
lack of a penis, identify with the mother and seek to gain the absent
penis, and then a male baby, first by transferring her love to her father
and then to another man. The second option is to refuse to acknowledge
the lack of the penis, identifying and competing with men. The third
86 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

option is to remain identified with the mother and this is likely to

develop into lesbianism. The normal woman is narcissistic - she is vain,
jealous and has a limited sense of justice.
The second classic is Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering
(1978). Chodorow draws on post-Freudian object-relations theory. In her
view the crucial issue is mothering, which she suggests proceeds differ­
ently for little boys and girls. I will shortly be looking at this in some
detail, but it ends in a different version of femininity: the woman is seen
as primarily concerned with relationships and with care, making the
needs of others her own and satisfying them by taking care of others.
This lies at the root of women's oppression.
The existence of these two alternatives should in themselves be
sufficient to make one suspicious. Mitchell's woman fits an earlier
stereotype: women are silly, conceited with little desire or ability to
engage in the public sphere. Chodorow's fits a more contemporary
stereotype: women are nurturing, caring beings who bring specific
feminine values to the social world. It begins to seem too neat. When I
originally wrote this chapter I was quite impressed with Chodorow's
approach and was trying to follow through some of its implications for
men and masculinity. As I did so I was already beginning to doubt its
usefulness from a sociological point of view. There was an ominous
familiarity about the argument that I came to realize was due to its
similarity with the arguments of Talcott Parsons in the 1950s and 1960s. I
began to think we should separate personality structures from social
structures if we were to avoid a completely deterministic argument.

The problem of men

This chapter developed from my experience of trying to persuade

students to think and talk about images of masculinity in our society. It
seemed much easier to talk about women and femininity; men, it seemed,
could only be approached through and in contrast to women. There is a
poetic justice in this, following as it does a long period during which the
opposite seemed to be true. There is also an intuition of reality: in our
society, masculinity is organized as 'not feminine', or, more bluntly, 'not
effeminate'. However, this is only a starting point and does not lead
directly to any conception of what masculinity is in terms of personality
structure and dynamics. My first aim, then, is to construct an 'ideal type'
of the masculine character structure. For this purpose I will use psycho­
analytic theory and, in particular, the object-relations theory deployed in
recent feminist work (Chodorow 1978; Eichenbaum and Orbach 1983).
I will argue that these writers have made mistaken or misleading
assumptions about masculinity.
Implicit in the feminist work mentioned above, in a much wider range
of feminist work and in much existing work on masculinity is an
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 87

assumption that the social world is a man's world, not just in the sense
that men predominate to a remarkable extent in positions of power and
privilege, but also in the sense that the social world is organized and
proceeds along masculine lines. It is assumed or argued that, somehow,
men are comfortable in the world outside the home: it is made by them,
for them, in their own image.
I certainly shared this assumption and imagined it would be easy to
move from the structure of masculinity to the structure of institutions. It
is perhaps too easy to do this: it ignores, on the one hand, the complexity
of individual character structures, the recognition and understanding of
which seems to me a central achievement of psychoanalysis and, on the
other, the vast amount of work on the social-structural basis of institu­
tional forms which has little to do with personality structure. I will try
later to suggest the usefulness of an ideal type of methodology for
looking at the relationship between personality structure and social
structure which can allow variations in the personality/society relation­
ship, and look at the possibilities for investigation that this opens up.
These aims, and my method, need some further justification. Why, for
example, should I start with a commonsense conception of masculinity
and its problems drawn from teaching and other discussions? One
answer is that such a conception is found throughout the research
literature and its pervasiveness provides a reason for taking it seriously,
as referring to something really existing and needing explanation.
Further, why should I use object-relations theory and an ideal-type
methodology when much work in this area, particularly modem feminist
work, employs structuralist and post-structuralist ideas and, following
on the seminal work of Juliet Mitchell (1976), a more orthodox Freudian
theory, usually mediated by Lacan and post-Lacanian analysts?
The answer to the second question is more difficult. To begin with I
have a number of theoretical objections to structuralist and post­
structuralist approaches, but this is not the place for epistemological or
philosophical argument. My more substantive difficulties with these
approaches come under the general heading of a loss of or inability to
cope with complexity (or at least any complexity outside that of their
own conceptual structure). To begin with, there is a tendency to see men
in classical Freudian terms as being owners of penises. It is true that
the penis is replaced by its symbolic representative, the phallus, but the
latter remains a blunt instrument. As far as I can see, it is only trans­
latable into social terms as power and it comes to stand for a series of
important psychic processes and relationships which remain unexplored.
A similar process of over-generalization occurs in Lacan's conception of
the mirror stage - the process by which the infant identifies and
identifies with an imaginary conception of itself. Here a series of physical
and psychic relationships to the parent is absorbed into one process of
looking. Lacan's account should be compared with, for example, the
work of Winnicott (1962), Davis and Wallbridge (1983) and, more
88 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

recently, Wright (1991). This sort of over-simplification seems involved in

any approach which starts with a theoretical definition of masculinity. I
will suggest later that it is also involved in my approach but, I believe, in
a much less damaging way.
Having given up the option of starting from an elaborate theoretical
framework, we are left with a reality which, from the available research,
seems easily describable. There is not much debate about what qualities
are masculine as far as our type of society is concerned. On the other
hand, when this reality is probed, all sorts of complexities emerge.
Weber's ideal type methodology presents itself as a way of coping with
this combination of complexity and obviousness primarily because of its
ability to combine rational reconstructions of the world with a recog­
nition of the world's real irrational complexity (Weber 1949).
Modem feminism has not just directed itself at male domination but
also at the nature of masculinity and in tum this has led some men
to question and attack traditional assumptions about male roles and
identities (David and Brannon 1976; Easlea 1981, 1983; Farrell 1975;
Friedmann and Sarah 1982; Hoch 1979; Pleck 1981; Solomon and Levy
1982; Tolson 1977; and more recently Connell 1995; Corrigan et a1. 1985).
Changing patterns of family organization and consequent rising divorce
rates might have led to a concern with the nature of fathering and
fatherhood (Beale and McGuire 1982; McKee and O'Brien 1983) but there
is still very little sociological work on fathers and fathering. Masculinity
rather than fathering has been at the centre of attention. However, it is
striking that this work shares a conception of masculinity with work that
predates modem feminism (Corrigan et a1. 1985). The difference lies in the
evaluation. Whereas masculine qualities were once seen as normal and
good, they are now seen as politically and morally wrong, as perhaps in
crisis, and as damaging for all concerned. The qualities of masculinity,
however, seem invariable and are associated with the male as
breadwinner, provider, worker, the active and public half of the species:
a man is strong, aggressive, rational, independent, task oriented, invul­
nerable and successful (O'Neill 1982}. Such qualities are listed whether the
work is based on attitude surveys or whether it is theoretically derived,
whether it is concerned with identifying a cultural stereotype, a sex or
gender role or the male identity - a man's sense of himself.
My main concern here is with masculinity as identity and it seems to
me that there are conceptual difficulties in analysing identity as a list of
qualities. Such a difficulty emerges in the contradictory perceptions of
masculinity that we can find within our culture. While on the whole the
list quoted above can be taken as a combination of culturally valued
qualities, there is plenty of evidence that their possession can be
experienced in a very different way:

The power of men is first a metaphysical assertion of self, an I am that exists a

priori, bedrock, absolute, no embellishment or apology required, indifferent to
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 89

denial or challenge. It expresses intrinsic authority. It never ceases to exist.

(Dworkin 1981: 13)

And, from a man:

A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies

. . . A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
(Berger 1972b: 46)

Similar observations can be found throughout the literature of modem

feminism. On the other hand, men are experienced in terms of the
traditional (women's) maxim as 'all babies at heart', an image to be
found in some advertising and pervading British TV soap operas. The
contrast is summed up by two friends who independently and separ­
ately offered the observations that men are either 'bullies or babies' or
'louts or cripples'.
The conceptual problem here is how can such an apparently straight­
forward and agreed list of qualities be experienced in such different
ways. Perhaps they should be taken as indicating the predominance of
one quality over its opposite, or as an ideal-ego which can be seen as a
focal point for conflict which in tum can generate the action experienced
as bullying or babyish. At any rate, they should be seen as elements of a
process that needs to be conceptualized. This leads on to an explanatory
problem: presumably these qualities are not contingent, nor contingently
acquired. We need some understanding of the ways in which they are
generated and organized. Available attempts at explanation, in terms of
male inexpressiveness (Balswick 1982) or a fear of femininity (O'Neill
1982) do little more than redescribe the qualities under one heading. It
also seems reasonable to suggest that such an explanation should be
sufficiently flexible to account for different social conceptions of mascu­
linity, which cannot be regarded as fixed, even for modem, industrial
western society, which sets the limits of my present discussion. There
are, for example, perceivable differences in what is meant by masculinity
in northern and southern Europe, in Britain and the USA, and in
different social classes and different generations in British society. At the
very least, these differences can be seen in terms of the predominance of
some generally masculine traits over others, for example, strength and
aggressiveness dominating in some working-class cultures and ration­
ality in some middle-class cultures. This too implies that a dynamic
process is at work.
There are two ways of approaching such an explanation, each of
which might claim to be complete in itself, although I think neither is
adequate alone. The first is external, in terms of role theory, role conflict
and strain and a cognitively based socialization theory. The 'process'
element would be provided by an understanding of the dynamics of
social change. Chodorow (1978) has provided an argument showing the
limitations of this approach, as have Corrigan et al. (1985). My own
90 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

opinion is that the external approach cannot do credit to the centrality of

gender identity to a person's sense of self, or to the complexity of the
internal conflicts that surround gender identity. Both these features are
witnessed in modem feminist writing, literature, psychoanalytic theory
and the experience of most of us. It cannot account for these features
because gender identity and its acquisition is seen in exactly the same
terms as any other aspect of identity: I learn to be a man in the same way
that I learn to be a teacher. It seems to me quite obvious that something
more powerful is at work.
The second approach, the 'internal explanation', is what I am con­
cerned with here. In this respect the effectiveness of object-relations
theory in providing an 'internal' account of femininity seems most
promising for an understanding of masculinity.

Object-relations theory

A full account of the development and nature of object-relations theory

would be out of place here, but it is appropriate to indicate some of the
basic reasons why it is a promising approach. First, male and female
gender identities are intimately bound up with forms of social organiza­
tion and object-relations theory, more clearly than orthodox Freudian
theory, presupposes a basic sociality: that we cannot actually become
selves without incorporating others into our psyche in a fundamental
way. This recognition was already there in Freud, but was secondary to
his theory of drives. For Winnicott (1962) on the other hand, the
relationship is more important than the drive. His famous dictum that
'there is no such thing as a baby' means precisely that there is always a
relationship between baby and carer which must take priority. The
process of growth is dealt with on three levels: the infant's conscious and
unconscious fantasies of others; the infant's environment, the way the
parents care for and relate to the child; and the internalization of these
relationships to become part of the growing ego, or to be split off and
repressed, forming problem areas in adult life. Guntrip puts it succinctly:

The inner and outer worlds have a two-way causal and reciprocal influence.
The kind of relationships parents set up with the child, complicated by the
child's own reactions to the situation, are internalized in the growing psychic
structure and will later on be compulsively externalized again and reimposed
on situations in the outer social world, or else they will be spontaneously
rediscovered in outer situations which correspond in some way to inner ones.
(Guntrip 1961: 360)

The emphasis shifts from a concern with sexuality per se to the infant's
development, from a complete psychic and physical dependence on
others to what Winnicot calls a 'relative independence' (Davis and
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 91

Wallbridge 1983). This provides us with an overarching concept of a

common development which men and women undertake in different
ways, one aspect of which is the development of sexuality and gender
identity. The common goal is relative independence, the common
dangers are those internal and external experiences which cause the
baby, infant or child to fear for its psychic or physical survival. What I
will do now is suggest an ideal type of human development which
enables us to construct ideal types of male and female development in
terms of different variations from the common path. I am using the term
'ideal type' in Max Weber's (1949) sense of a rational reconstruction of an
aspect of a complex and not necessarily rational reality. This has the
advantage of allowing us to maintain a view of masculinity and femin­
inity as different emphases on a common theme - in other words, to
maintain the idea of bisexuality.
The psychic development from complete dependence on the primary
caretaker, in our society usually the mother, is bound up with, but not
governed by, physical development and it is a process by which the
infant gains a sense of its own separateness and boundaries. At the
beginning, she/he is unable to distinguish itself in any clear way from its
environment. There is only the elementary basis of a sense of self and the
mother is required as an 'external ego' which, together with other
relationships in the environment, the infant introjects as part of its own
ego. For present purposes, there are four important aspects to this
process.
The first and most important feature for the satisfactory introjection of
the external ego is that the infant gains a sense of being loved which
becomes a 'self-love', a sense of one's own worth, that one is as worth
looking after as well as one's mother had once looked after one. For
Winnicott, 'good enough mothering' involves the intuitive ability to
sense and meet the infant's needs, and this is experienced by the infant
as a sense of omnipotence - it seems to the infant that its very need has
produced its own satisfaction. As the infant develops physically and the
mother, again usually intuitively, becomes less responsive, she/he is able
to test this omnipotence against the world and gain a sense of external
reality and the limitations of her/his power. It can do this in the
comparative safety provided by the introjected mother.
The second aspect is that, initially through the physical contact of
holding, the infant gains a sense of her /his own boundaries, an ability to
distinguish its own self from other people. It is this which enables and is
encouraged by the mother's return to the outside world.
Third, through the continuity of care, the infant gains a sense of its
own continuity over time, of the permanence of its own self. As it
introjects the external ego, it is able to bear the absence of what was once
necessary for its existence - the physical presence of the mother. The fear
of disintegration once aroused by the departure of the mother becomes
manageable.
92 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

Finally, 'good enough mothering' should enable the infant to express

and cope with its aggression in an environment which remains stable.
Whether the aggression is innate or a product of environmental frus­
tration, the infant learns that its destructive phantasies need not have a
real external effect and that reparation is possible. In other words, it
learns that its aggression is controllable and can be used constructively.
My next step is to look at the development of femininity in this
context.

The development of femininity

Recent work employing object-relations theory, by Chodorow (1978) in

an academic sociological context and Eichenbaum and Orbach (1983) in a
more clinical context, has suggested that there are more or less system­
atic differences in the context in which boys and girls develop towards
relative independence. The following very brief summary is intended to
bring out the main features of the development of femininity.
There seems to be a general agreement that for the little girl the
process is inhibited, that in some significant sense the early identification
with the mother is not overcome and in adult life the woman does not
achieve a full sense of herself: 'A girl does not simply identify with her
mother or want to be like her mother. Rather mother and daughter
maintain elements of their primary relationship which means that they
will feel alike in fundamental ways' (Chodorow 1978: 108). This con­
tinuing identification comes not only from the fact of shared sex. For
Eichenbaum and Orbach, the mother finds herself confronted by a
'needy little girl' who is completely dependent upon her and who
reflects back to her the needy little girl in herself, the part of herself that
she has had to repress as she grew into a woman (in our type of society).
She must both meet the new child's needs and teach her to repress them,
as she has repressed her own. In terms of the development outlined
earlier, the little girl does not outgrow her dependency 'naturally',
through contact with the outside world and the exploration of her
abilities; rather, she must split off and repress the dependent part of
herself. She learns that rather than have her own needs met, she must
meet the needs of others, especially of adult men and children. The core
sense of self is inhibited, and as various roads to independence are not
reached, or found to be socially blocked, so her sense of separateness is
inhibited. She comes to feel herself to be responsible for looking after
others but not as worthy of being looked after herself.
Eichenbaum and Orbach discuss the tendency of their clients to
fluctuate between feeling themselves identical with their mothers and
cutting themselves off altogether; this is parallel to the mother's
ambivalence in meeting her daughter's needs and teaching her to repress
them. Chodorow talks about women's comparatively weak ego
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 93

boundaries, which allow her to empathize too readily with the needs of
others. This seems to point towards a difficulty in maintaining a con­
tinuity in her sense of self, and it seems reasonable to suggest that the
process involves the turning inwards of the little girl's aggressive
feelings. She experiences her own needs, and perhaps even her sense of
her own self, as a fault, as something wrong within her, for which she
must punish herself.

The development of masculinity

I will build up my ideal type of the development of masculinity through

a critique of what Chodorow, Eichenbaum and Orbach have to say about
men. With poetic justice on their side, they invert Freud's line of
reasoning and tend to derive masculinity from femininity; in so doing
each approach grasps something of masculine development and misses
something. Chodorow tends towards emphasizing the 'bully' side of
masculinity, Eichenbaum and Orbach the 'baby' side.
The core of Chodorow's argument is that the little boy is pushed into
an early psychic separation from the mother. Paradoxically, she seems to
adopt a more orthodox concern with the oedipal stage where the little
boy is concerned. She argues that the process of separation becomes
bound up with issues of gender identity:

Phallic-masculine issues become intertwined with supposedly non-gender

differentiated object-relational and ego-issues concerning the creation of a
separate sense of self.
This happens precisely because of exclusive mothering by women, who, in
the absence ( physical or emotional) of the father in the outside world of work,
may confuse her relationship to (her son) with a sexualized relationship to him
as a male. (Chodorow 1978: 107-8)

The boy's sense of self thus becomes bound up with his sexual
identity, and masculinity is constructed against femininity in a separa­
tion generated and sexualized by the mother. During the oedipal stage
this becomes a general separation as the boy takes on those elements of
masculinity that he fears will otherwise be used against him, without
actually identifying with the father as a whole person. This happens
because the father is, by and large, absent from caretaking and the boy is
left to identify with a cultural stereotype. Chodorow argues that mascu­
linity has to be the result of a more conscious teaching process than
femininity. Since men cannot actually become the cultural stereotype, the
stereotype becomes idealized, something to be striven after. In doing so,
men develop strong ego boundaries and find it difficult to risk them­
selves in relationships.
This seems to me to make some sense of the close relationship between
cultural stereotype, gender role and identity and begins to account for
94 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

the 'driven' or 'bullying' side of masculinity, the urgent need to be what

one is not and to have that being recognized by others. In terms of the
ideal type development, it means that men too are not allowed, in our
society, to outgrow their dependency 'naturally' but - unlike women -
are forced into an early psychic separation and independence. However,
it does not tell us much about the internal structure and processes of the
male psyche. Chodorow talks about men having strong ego boundaries
and less complex inner-object worlds. There is, as far as I know, no basis
for the latter assertion. The complexity of the inner-object world depends
upon the complexity of the introjected relationships and the family
provides the basic material for introjection for both sexes. The early
thrust into separation would seem to have consequences not so much
for the complexity as for the organization of the male inner-object world.
Further, 'strong ego boundaries' is a misleading term. I suspect
Chodorow means well-defined and rigid, as opposed to ego-strength
which usually in psychoanalytic discourse has to do with the ability to
cope with strong and ambivalent feelings.
We can go further by looking at the work of Eichenbaum and Orbach.
There, the 'baby' side of masculinity is more clearly in evidence. Their
men are physically and emotionally dependent on women, but they
cannot recognize their dependency and they take their women for
granted. They cannot recognize or understand their partner's complaints.
Yet there is a contradiction in their analysis. They argue that the mother­
son relation facilitates separation, but that men remain dependent on
women and deny that dependency through fear of their own femininity:
'Being like daddy becomes translated into a denial of the ways in which
he is like mother, and a denial of the fact that she is already party of him'
(Eichenbaum and Orbach 1983: 58).
Thus, like women, men have to deny and repress their dependency
needs but with men it involves a denial of their original unity with the
mother, and a rejection of all things feminine. Yet at the same time - and
this is really the core of their argument about masculinity - they see men
as not having to give up their dependency needs, since they are catered
for first by the mother and then by the wife. On the one hand they
regard this as resonant with 'healthy developmental theory', but on the
other hand they see the male ego as fragile and unintegrated.
I suspect the contradiction arises from the tendency to see masculinity
as the opposite of femininity: women have to repress their dependency
needs therefore men do not. At the same time they have to account for
all the defences that men erect against the recognition of their depend­
ency needs. It seems to me reasonable to say that men and women both
have to repress these needs but in different ways at different times. To
account for the 'baby' side of masculinity, we can draw a distinction
between emotional and physical dependency. For the little boy the early
psychic separation must precede full physical separation - he remains
physically dependent on his mother and it seems reasonable to suggest
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 95

that unconsciously, if not consciously, the satisfaction of physical needs

is taken as a substitute for, or a sign of, the satisfaction of emotional
needs which, on an emotional level, remain unrecognized. There seems
to be a repeated pattern in Eichenbaum and Orbach's examples: if
physical needs are catered for, then men are satisfied and cannot under­
stand what their partners find lacking in the relationship.
Men, like women, have to repress their dependency needs, but in the
context of an early psychic separation which can lead to the identification
of emotional care with physical care, thus enabling the experience of
emotional dependency to be avoided. Physical care is simply the
woman's job, the way things are. However, there is always the danger
that the original experience and needs of dependency can be reawak­
ened, together with the other feelings that go with it and this takes us
again to the baby-bully dichotomy. An experience of empathy, of
closeness to another person, can reawaken the feelings of dependency
and, even if this is not exactly the infantile fear of merging with another
person, it can be experienced by the man himself, and others, as the
threatened dependency. The failure of the other to meet these needs -
they cannot be met as the adult male has not been through the process of
learning and growth which enables him to come to terms with them - all
this can produce a narcissistic, envious rage which is aimed, mistakenly,
to secure the satisfaction of his needs. The woman appears as powerful
as the mother had once seemed and must be destroyed. The avoidance of
these feelings encourages identification with the cultural stereotype;
when avoidance is not possible the baby-bully dichotomy becomes
obvious. The slow and painful break-up of a marriage reveals the
fluctuation from one to the other, sometimes by the hour.
During routine adult life, however, these feelings are repressed and
defended against. The implication of my earlier discussion of femininity
was that for women the central defence mechanism is introjection.
Others' needs are introjected as their own and the satisfaction of others'
needs is experienced as the satisfaction of their own needs: anger is
turned inwards and used against the self. For men, the central mech­
anisms are, arguably, projection and denial. Dependency needs and the
associated feelings of rage and destructiveness are experienced as
existing in, and are perhaps even elicited from, others. In particular, it is
women who are seen as dependent and the vital emotional dimension of
a man's relationship to a woman is only half-recognized. Time and
again, Eichenbaum and Orbach's men seem surprised by their partners'
feelings, even when the relationship is on the verge of collapse. I suspect
most people have some experience of the way in which men (usually
other men!) may experience their partner as vindictively destructive and
then act in a way which encourages such behaviour. Routinely, however,
I suspect that the angry and destructive feelings are projected on to the
cruel outside world, the competitiveness of colleagues, the heartlessness
of institutions, the dangerous attacks of political opponents.
96 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

I have tried to construct three ideal types of personality development.

The first might be called a 'healthy' human development in terms of a
steady and growing separation and independence and taking over of the
external ego. The second, feminine, development is a distorted form of
the first, involving a close experience of identity between mother and
daughter continued into adult life, with repression of the little girl's
dependency needs. The third, masculine, development is also a distorted
form of the first, involving the premature pushing of the little boy into
psychic separation and the repression of dependency needs. I have
suggested that the typically feminine defence against dependency needs
is based on introjection, the typically male defence on projection and
denial. The advantage of this approach is that it makes sense of those
qualities that are universally regarded as masculine, and of their
centrality. The masculine personality structure is based on the avoidance
of feelings that for the infant mean the possibility of psychic and possibly
physical annihilation: dependency on others for one's very existence and
the rage which threatens to destroy those very others and therefore
oneself. Further, it sees these male qualities in terms of a dynamic
process in which defences are erected against the experience of infantile
rage and dependence, in the pursuit of an ego-ideal! cultural stereotype.
Adult masculinity can, perhaps, be seen in terms of a cycle in which the
defences enable periods of adjustment punctuated by exaggerated
attempts to identify with the ideal (the bully) and the failure of such
attempts (the baby).

Problems and possibilities

The status of the ideal type

There are a number of objections to the ideal types I have tried to
construct. They amount to the criticism that they are gross oversimpli­
fications and overgeneralizations. In one sense this is certainly true, but
this is the sense which would apply to all ideal types, insofar as they are
rational reconstructions of a complex and perhaps contradictory reality.
Nevertheless, further consideration of the objection will enable me to
clarify what I am trying to do.
The form of the criticism that would come from the professional
psychoanalyst would be that in clinical work what we discover is the
complexity of the individual personality, involving various cross-sex and
cross-gender identifications which undermine any attempt to draw out
neat contrasts between masculinity and femininity (Elshtein 1984). This
argument is reinforced by clinically based attempts to look at femininity,
as opposed to attempts which draw on clinical material but are based
primarily on feminist theory a la Eichenbaum and Orbach. Jane
Temperley (1984), for example, constructs models of femininity on the
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 97

basis of her clinical work which lead to much more politically difficult
questions.
Basically I think this argument is right, and it means looking at the
area or level of reality to which the ideal type is appropriate. I would
draw a distinction between the consulting room and everyday life and it
is really the manifestation of masculinity in the latter with which I am
concerned. There is no reason to doubt that the same 'surface' masculine
behaviour may be underpinned by a variety of cross-identifications as
numerous in their individuality as there are family backgrounds from
which people emerge. While this individuality is important for the prac­
tising psychoanalyst, the common features of masculinity are important
for the sociologist, and the existence of these common features is attested
to by the persistent recurrence of the same qualities in studies of
masculinity.
There is an everyday version of the same criticism which I often find
among male students who contribute to producing the traditional list of
qualities and then protest that they are not 'really' like that, they are
more complex, more 'feminine'. In this, they are often supported by
women students. This points to a further modification of the status of the
ideal type, one already implied in the idea of bisexuality and the internal
conflict which surrounds masculine qualities. We might conceive of the
ideal types of masculinity and femininity as the ends of a continuum
with everybody placed at some point between the two ends, perhaps
most people just one side or the other of some imaginary centre point.
The end points of the continuum exist within the individual personality
as well, as terms of a permanent conflict in which for most of us one
tends to dominate most of the time, with confusion and perhaps collapse
resulting if the dominant pattern should be broken, and the underlying
cross-identifications emerge not in the consulting room but in everyday
life. The appropriate image for the development of masculinity and
femininity is not a common river source which forms into two clear
streams but a three-lane motorway in which one type of traffic (the
heavy goods vehicles perhaps) is channelled into the outside lane,
another (family saloons) into the other, both types mingling in the
middle as they jockey for position, some getting trapped in the 'wrong'
lane. The metaphor seems appropriate for relations between men and
women and between the masculine and feminine parts of the individual
personality. However, it cannot be taken any further, unless you are
willing to imagine each truck joined to each saloon and the drivers firing
machine guns at each other.

Masculinity and male dominance

The idea that there is a connection between gender personality and the
wider social division of labour is a common one. Its expressions range
from the everyday, commonsense crude misogynist 'women are only
98 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

good for one thing' through the paternalistic 'women's place is in the
home', to the conservative theoretical systems of Parsons and the radical
implications of the work of Chodorow, Eichenbaum and Orbach. The
interesting question is not whether there is a connection but what sort of
connection.
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to assume that the connection is causal.
This seems to be the implication behind Chodorow's essentially political
programme of involving men in child-rearing to a much greater extent.
The result would presumably be that over a number of generations
personality structure would change on both sides of the divide, and this
would erode male dominance in the wider society. The difficulty is that
an increased involvement of men in child-rearing would already pre­
suppose a change in the wider society - a general recognition of men's
nurturing possibilities and, in some cases, a radical reorganization of
career structures and conditions of employment. In other words, the
change is unlikely to occur before its supposed effect.
The temptation then is to reverse the causal process to something like
Parsons' functional system. Society requires a division of labour between
home and work and the family adjusts, with the division of labour
between male and female producing the personality structures appro­
priate to their different spheres of influence. There are two objections to
this approach. The first is historical: it seems that family forms were
changing prior to industrialization rather than as a result and, in any
case, industrial society deployed in a new way the patriarchal system
that preceded it. The second is epistemological: the well-worn arguments
that show, to my mind conclusively, that arguments entailing 'functional
causality' are not tenable. It does not follow from the fact that society
requires something, that that something will appear.
An alternative way of looking at the relationship has emerged from
some of the critical literature around Chodorow's thesis (cf. Ferguson
1984; Young 1984). This involves seeing the relationship as one of a
network of possibly causal relations, not as the central or only one. If
there is something about the male personality structure which leads to
male dominance (or vice versa) then it is not the only cause of male
dominance. This seems to me a step forward, away from seeing the
relationship in oversimple terms. The problem with any causal explana­
tion linking the two levels is suggested by the following quotation from a
survey of psychoanalytic work on organizations. Robert De Board,
talking about projection, argues:

This defence offers no permanent solution since the person continues to carry
the danger around with him and nothing is resolved. In terms of mental
energy, projection involves transferring a cathexis involving a perception of the
self to one involving a perception of an external object. To the extent that this
happens, contact with reality is lost. The feeling of anxiety is temporarily
reduced, which is the object of the exercise, but the consequence is that energy,
both mental and physical, is used to attack a 'straw man'. The source of
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 99

anxiety still remains within the mental system, although psychic and physical
resources have been depleted in the process.
In other words, work has been done involving action, feelings and emotions,
but nothing has changed as a result. (De Board 1978: 133)

Thus the use of what I have claimed is a 'typical' male defence is

responsible for 'the most frequent ways in which individuals and groups
lose their effectiveness'. It is reasonable to conclude that whatever
relationship there is, it is not a causal one. I will return to psychoanalytic
studies of organizations later. For the moment, I want to pursue the
nature of the relationship - if it is not causal, what is it?
An answer is given by my use of ideal types: it is perhaps best seen as
an 'elective affinity'. The 'normal' structure and operation of institutions,
as they have developed in modem capitalist society, makes use of and
perhaps routinely (though not necessarily) confirms the routine structure
and processes of the male personality. The basis for such a claim can
be found in Weber's own ideal type of bureaucracy: the separation of
the office holder from the office, the hierarchy of office holders, and the
systematic nature of the rules governing the activity of the office holder,
all enable the denial of emotional life in the workplace and the projection
of feelings of dependency and anger on to other levels in the hierarchy
and on to outside organizations. Certainly, the workplace becomes
ostensibly free from many emotions. The 'technological conception' of
human life and feelings reinforces this (Berger et al. 1974): personalities
and personal relations are seen in increasingly anonymous terms and as
made up of interchangeable and compartmentalized qualities. The real
messiness and the dangerous feelings of human life are pushed elsewhere.
But this 'elective affinity' can break down. The really interesting ques­
tions are why and how and when, and how might the ideal type of
masculine personality help us to understand organizational behaviour?

Psychoanalysis and organizations: the 'man's world'

Psychoanalytic studies of organizational behaviour do not really fit in
with the ideas I have tried to develop here. They tend to fall into two
groups: those concerned with 'normal' situations and those concerned
with areas where anxiety is particularly high, settings which involve
dealing with illness and death. The latter (for example, especially
Menzies-Lyth 1988; Miller and Gwynne 1972) show how the work
situation may become identified with phantasies and feelings belonging
to early childhood, rather than act as a symbolic means of containing
such feelings. This can result in the development of rigid and counter­
productive social defence systems. Menzies-Lyth is concerned with a
teaching hospital in which women predominate, as might be expected
from the earlier argument about the feminine ability to empathize. It
could be argued that the anxieties she describes come precisely from a
too ready ability to identify with the sick and dying and the necessity to
100 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

defend against that ability. Her arguments do suggest a way of looking

at the variable connection between masculinity and bureaucratic
organizations: that routinely these offer a symbolic way of containing,
by denying, the frightening feelings against which men defend them­
selves. When, for whatever reasons, these routine symbolic ways come
under pressure, the defences are strengthened to the point when they
become counter-productive for the organization as a whole - involving
the depletion of resources with no effective change.
The studies of normal situations (for example, Trist and Bamforth 1951;
Trist 1953), presuppose an open-systems theory which would fit fairly
neatly with Parsons' functionalism. As a consequence, they concentrate
on defences which prohibit communications within and between work­
groups and generally ignore the structured divisions of interest within
organizations and settings for distorted communications - settings which
are taken up and used by subjective defence systems rather than created
by them. In other words, they do not take account of the structural
determinants of organizations as opposed to the human inter- and intra­
personal determinants. Organizations are seen simply as the products of
the people who work in them. My argument is that these structural
constraints on the nature of bureaucratic organizations actually require
distorted communication and it so happens that because of child-rearing
methods men are more easily able than women to distort their rela­
tionships in the required way. One sign of the dominant role of such
structural determinants can be seen in the failure of the psychoana­
lytically based approach to work relationships, based at the Tavistock
Institute after WorId War II, to bring about any lasting or widespread
changes.
The sort of sociological/psychoanalytic research which seems to me to
follow from what I have argued and would be needed to establish the
validity of my argument, would involve several levels. Goffman (1968)
talks about an 'institutional self', certain ways of being required by an
organization, and it is possible to produce a psychoanalytic version of
this idea in terms of the feelings and defences employed by the organ­
ization in its routine activities. It might then be possible to suggest a
classification of 'masculine' and 'feminine' organizations. For example, it
seems to me that universities require from their academic staff the
deployment of intellectual abilities, involving an empathy with students
only at an intellectual level, and the deployment of competitive and
aggressive feelings focused in part on their research and in part projected
around a finely graded hierarchy, both within institutions, and outside,
around the hierarchy of universities and polytechnics. They are 'mascu­
line'. Infant schools, on the other hand, require a more encompassing
ability to empathize with children, colleagues and parents. They are
,feminine'.
The next set of questions concerns the existence and fate of women in
masculine institutions and men in feminine institutions. I doubt that
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 101

these comprise solely those whose place on the masculine/feminine

continuum is not consistent with their sex, so the question is what
adjustments, strains and conflicts do they experience and are these
consistent with what might be predicted from the ideal types I have
outlined?
Finally, it would be a matter of looking at situations where a typically
masculine structure of defences is counter-productive - this state of
affairs being identified through the perceived unhappiness of people and
a decline in the organization's ability to achieve its goals. Can the
unhappiness and ineffectiveness be accounted for in part by the devel­
opment of typically male defences into rigid systems? Is there evidence
that the situation is at least unconsciously perceived as being the 'same'
as the phantasized or really dangerous situations of infancy? Do women
in these institutions develop different and more effective ways of coping
with the situation?

Political possibilities

The current increasing focus on masculinity is of course a political issue.

It has to do with changing structured inequalities of power between men
and women, and with changing people, extending the possible life
chances of women in the world outside the home and of men in the
world of interpersonal care and nurturing. The analysis I have suggested
here indicates that these are actually two different tasks. Most modem,
bureaucratic, technologically based organizations require 'masculine'
behaviour, not because they are peopled by men but simply because that
is the way in which they work. The elimination of structured gender
inequality in these organizations will not change men: it might make
them more anxious and, over a period, the reality of women's perform­
ance might make it more difficult to project on to them the qualities at
the root of male anxiety. On the other hand, it will require that women
accommodate to and learn some aspects of masculinity. It seems to me
that this would have no necessary implications for the way men behave
in the home, the nursery or the bedroom; it would, however, intensify
the pressures on couples.
Similarly, it is conceivable that men might engage more in child­
rearing, using the 'feminine' side of their personality. I have already
indicated that if this were to take place in a systematic way, it would
entail considerable changes in career structures and necessarily lead to
any greater structural equality between the sexes. However, it is still
conceivable that in such a situation, women would still largely be con­
fined to the 'feminine' occupations and the reserve army of labour.
Interpersonal relationships between the sexes might change in desirable
ways without any wider effects. Although the two tasks are inter­
connected, they are not mutually dependent upon each other.
102 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

The concern of this chapter has been with personality structure and
dynamics: what sorts of changes does it enable us to envisage? First, it
seems to me to offer no vision of androgyny, an idea often suggested in
the more radical literature on masculinity. Psychoanalytic theory
suggests that there can be compromises but no final resolution of
many internal conflicts, and those between dependence and indepen­
dence, identity and separation are basic to our make-up as human
beings. The conflict between masculinity and femininity is likely to
remain a fundamental internal conflict for everybody, whatever happens
in the outside world. They will not come together into some gentle meld.
Insofar as it is possible to use my arguments to construct an ideal, it
would be a situation in which people are no longer placed on one or the
other side of the masculine-feminine continuum according to their sex,
and one in which the internal combination of what Freud called the
active and passive drives could vary considerably more than it does
according to individual history, circumstances and inclination. This
would enable a range of relationships between men and women varying
from those following a very traditional pattern to those inverting the
traditional pattern. Equality in this context would be the equality of
opportunity to be masculine or feminine in different situations at differ­
ent times, and some ability to choose those situations and times.
I am not sure that my argument actually points to any new ways of
achieving this situation as far as men are concerned. Generally, a well­
established system of defences will break down and require reorganiza­
tion only when it makes it impossible for a person to operate in routine
ways with normal unhappiness. Men are unlikely to change spon­
taneously. The change might be stimulated by structural changes -
perhaps for a few men long-term unemployment might have such an
effect - or more likely by individual and collective challenges by women
influenced by or part of the feminist movement. But psychoanalytic
theory suggests that the first reaction of men to such a challenge is for
the defence system to reassert itself all the more strongly. My argument
does suggest that the process of change will involve a degree of agony.
But for many men, this will not be news.

Ten years after

This chapter was originally written in 1985 when I was in the second
year of my training as a group psychoanalytic therapist and I was very
enthusiastic about the power of some of these ideas. After more than a
decade of my own practice I have come to see the force of the psycho­
analytic criticisms that I tried to deal with in the chapter. On a technical
level Elshtein's (1984) comments about cross-identifications point to the
complexity of contradictions that can be found in any one individual
character, and I have been unable to observe any consistent gender or
 MASCULINITY AND MALE DOMINANCE 103

sexual differences in the use of defensive projection or introjection. The

ideal that I suggested already exists on a psychological leveL What I have
observed is the immense variety of individual reactions depending on
varying situations: women can behave in 'masculine' or 'feminine' ways,
as can men, and they do so in different situations. The 'gender' of their
behaviour is rarely predictable. This is certainly the case with patient
psychotherapy groups and I do not think that sociologists can avoid this
by claiming that therapy patients or therapeutic situations are in some
way special - the same observations can be made in any reasonably open
social group if we are not too blinkered by our sociology.
To excuse myself I should add that it is understandable that people
can be blinkered by sociology, especially if they are sociologists. The
association of certain qualities with masculinity pervades all the research
and arguments that I have been able to discover; it looks as close to
social fact as we are likely to find and it seems to strike a chord in most
settings. I think in the argument I constructed around these ideas, my
mistake was, so to speak, to confuse a stereotype or an ideology with an
ideal type. I would continue to argue that we need carefully to distin­
guish levels of analysis.I have no doubt that what ten years ago I called
ideal types and I would now call ideologies actually exist and in some
situations will be a powerful influence over people's behaviour and the
way they see the world.
Stereotypes exist primarily at a level of cultural analysis. The best
explanation I have seen of their existence is that put forward by Gayle
Rubin (1975), based on Freud's conception of the infant as bisexual, if not
polymorphously perverse. This presents any society with a serious
practical problem: how can the members of that society ensure that
enough people are sufficiently heterosexual to guarantee the reproduc­
tion of that SOciety. This entails in tum ensuring that there is, or people
believe that there is, a difference between men and women. Rubin argues
that the difference is not a natural one:

In fact, from the standpoint of nature, men and women are closer to each other
than to anything else - for instance, mountains, kangaroos or coconut palms.
The idea that men and women are more different from one another than either is
from anything else must come from somewhere other than nature. Furthermore,
though there is an average difference between males and females in a variety of
traits, the range of variation of those traits shows considerable overlap. There
will always be some women who are taller than some men, even though men
are on average taller than women. But the idea that men and women are
mutually exclusive categories must arise out of something other than a non­
existent 'natural' opposition. Far from being an expression of natural differ­
ences, exclusive gender identity is the expression of natural similarities. It
requires repression: in men in whatever is the local version of 'feminine' traits; in
women, of the local definition of masculine traits. (Rubin 1975: 179-80)

I would take this further than Rubin and suggest that different
situations seem to require not the repression but something more like the
104 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

suppression of traits that are socially attributed to the other gender.

Rubin's argument explains the existence of stereotypes, and our need to
think that men and women are different from each other, in such a way
that the need might govern our perception, and we do not see the
remarkably similar interpersonal strategies that men and women pursue.
Each individual will be aware of and use the stereotype in different ways
and to a different extent at different times and in different situations.
And each person will have a different internal relationship to the stereo­
typical part of their personality: it may be experienced as an internal
enemy, an intrusion opposed from outside, an ideal to be aimed at, a tool
to be used to one's advantage in certain situations, something against
which one tries to identify one's own personality and behaviour. Or it
could be all of these things at different times. We shall see in the next
chapter that this becomes very important when sociology turns its
attentions to the emotions.
 8

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS

In Kemper's (1990) introduction to a collection of papers on the sociology

of the emotions presented to the 1987 conference of the American Socio­
logical Association, he laments the long-term cognitive bias in sociology
and sees this as coming to an end with development of the sociology of
the emotions. He rightly dates this development from the publication
of Hochschild's work in 1975 and comments on the way in which
interest in the emotions seemed to emerge in that year among several
thinkers in different places. He speculates that the origin of this develop­
ment might lie in the 1960s Zeitgeist and in a limited sense I think that he
might be right. My concerns in this book with experience, pre-reflective
experience and issues raised by psychoanalysis perhaps have the same
origin, but there is more to it than that.

A sociology of the sociology of the emotions

My purpose here is to try to sound a number of warnings in relation to

the sociology of the emotions, not least that a sociological interest in
emotions can still subordinate them to cognition. On the one hand the
development of the sociology of the emotions is to be welcomed: it is an
area of intrinsic interest and increasing importance. The development of
various forms of counselling and therapy, the ideas of talking through
and talking out which seem to keep so many soap operas going, together
with ideas of personal satisfaction, happiness and the process of personal
reconstruction, which Giddens (1990, 1991, 1992) has identified in his
recent work, all of these things are directly or indirectly about feeling. On
the other hand we need to be careful. It is easy for sociologists to get
caught up in changes in popular culture in a possibly unquestioning
way, for the discipline to become a symptom of what it claims to be
studying. This is particularly the case when the study of the emotions
seems to be self-evidently a 'good thing', tied up with the development
of a kminitjt tjociulo15Y and carryin15 us directly into the v.ray that people
experience the world in their everyday lives. To start with I think we
need a sociology of the sociology of the emotions, a reflexive sociology in
106 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

Gouldner's (1970) rather than Giddens' (1991) sense, a sociology that can
take a critical sociological attitude to itself.
In the case of the sociology of the emotions this needs to work on two
levels - the level of contemporary western society as a whole and that of
the discipline itself. There are a number of attempts to locate emotions in
the overall evolution of human beings and human societies (Elias 1991;
Turner 1996) and with the workings of social structure (Collins 1 975;
Gordon 1990; Hammond 1990) all of which are interesting and useful
enterprises. But I am not sure that any of them provides a critical
purchase that would be useful. Hochschild (1983, 1994) begins to get
there with her theme of commercialization and Wouters (1991),
developing ideas from Elias, gets closer.
Wouters suggests that it is becoming increasingly difficult to express
status superiority in an acceptable way, at least in western society. It
would be generally unacceptable for me to claim superiority on the basis
of the colour of my skin or my strength; the first claim might be accepted
by bigots and the second is patently false. To claim superiority on
grounds of my sex or gender would, one hopes, produce a well-deserved
lynch mob. Money or aristocratic descent might hold water in limited
circles; to claim superiority on grounds of intelligence would, in liberal
academic circles, be bad taste. However, I can talk about my emotions -
I can show myself to be a sensitive, caring person.
Now why should all this be happening now? We can get some idea
from Lasch (1980) when he talks about the development of a narcissistic
culture. The narcissist is always seeking immediate emotional gratifica­
tion and lacks a degree of internal control. In psychoanalytic terms the
super-ego and ego are underdeveloped. Lasch puts this down in part to
the increasing role of the state in child-rearing. The standard psycho­
analytic maxim in this area is the stronger the state, the weaker the
super-ego. Social control comes not from a more or less rational super­
ego and ego making comparatively free and relatively independent
moral decisions but from a strong external source.
This in tum is related to the modem history of the family. It is a truism
to say that it has become an increasingly specialized institution since the
industrial revolution, concentrating on early socialization, and I would
add that this social function creates the family relationships that Freud
analyses. For Freud, the control function of the psyche - the super-ego -
develops primarily through the father and primarily through the father's
prohibition during the oedipal period. The father says no to the child's
desire for the mother and comes between the two, turning the child
around to face the outside world.
At the same time as the early socialization role of the family has
become more important, so the father has been moved from centre stage.
It is now common to find contemporary journalists claiming that men
have no clear role and what this means is that there is no clear paternal
role - in fact the very word 'paternal' and its derivatives 'paternalist' or
 THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS 107

'paternalism' have become terms of criticism if not of abuse. The notion

of accepted authority, the possibility that power may be used for the
benefit of the person over whom it is exercised, seems to have weakened
and faces a notion of power and its exercise as somehow always being
wrong or bad. In Britain and North America we can find multiple
conflicts between these positions where each tends to be forced into
stereotypically extreme versions.
The point for my argument here, however, is that the force of internal
control has been weakened, leaving, as Lasch (1980) points out, the
irrational punitive super-ego as described by Klein greater range within
the individual psyche. That enters into conflict with the desires for
immediate physical, emotional and mental satisfaction which are rooted in
the instinctual aspects of psyche. Demands for emotional satisfaction
appear in all sorts of areas - the punishment of criminals to satisfy victims,
the drawing of boundaries and exclusion of others (or should it be Others?)
to retain a satisfying sense of identity, the demands for control over one's
own life, illusions of self-construction, difficulties in tolerating the possi­
bility that things might go wrong and so on. This occurs as the institutions
which engage individuals in the public arena and enable the development
of a realistic sense of possibilities, not just the family but local communities,
trades unions, professional associations, 'civil society' itself, have all been
weakened by the thrust of the free market. On the one hand the process of
'globalization' seems to produce a distant, powerful system which cannot
be controlled; on the other the individual seems increasingly isolated and
experiences his or her social world as fragmenting.
I have suggested elsewhere (Craib 1994) that all this comes together to
produce what might be called a paradoxical ideology. As individuals
become increasingly powerless, we develop an ideology of self-control
and self-creation, as if we really could control ourselves and our lives.
Giddens seems to swallow this whole and this is where sociology gets
caught up in a social process it does not properly understand. There are
more moderate forms of this phenomenon in the implicit valuation of
ways of dealing with emotions, and of certain emotions over others
which emerge in papers I will discuss below.
I think that the root problem with Giddens' work and with the work I
will discuss later is that they do not present any conception of emotions,
or of the psyche, as something which has a degree of autonomy from the
social and from society itself. Emotions 'happen' in a social context and as
an important part of microsocial processes, but they are not 'produced' by
society. I will suggest shortly that they are best seen as having a life of
their own which is framed and deployed by the social. The situation
which I have described earlier is one where psychotherapy (or rather
some forms of psychotherapy) takes on importance as a means of social
control, either to inhibit emotions (behaviourism and cognitive therapy)
or to manage emotions (humanistic and some forms of psychoanalytic
therapy).
108 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

This creates a situation where sociology is especially likely to be duped

into believing that emotions are simply socially constructed (Harre 1986)
and leads on, at the disciplinary level, to the sociology of the emotions. I
have suggested elsewhere (Craib 1997b) that social constructionism is not
very convincing. It is embraced so readily because it avoids difficult
issues about the object of sociology and its relationship to other discip­
lines and enables us to persuade ourselves that we can talk about any
subject without considering our limitations. I do not want to rehearse
those arguments here but simply suggest that there is little tradition
among sociologists of searching through other approaches to their sub­
ject matter and the temptation is to believe that sociological dimensions
of understanding deal with everything. This gives sociology an imperial­
ist dimension which Strong (1979) describes clearly in relation to the
sociology of medicine.
I want now to present a critique of two papers that appeared together
in Sociology which display the inadequacies of this tendency towards
sociological imperialism and the lack of any real understanding of what
emotions might be. The background to this critique is of course psycho­
analytic psychology but I will try to make my points where possible
simply by pointing to what I suspect are normal everyday experiences.

The limits of the sociology of the emotions

The papers I am going to criticize here (Duncombe and Marsden 1993;

Jackson 1993) threaten to blur a range of conceptual distinctions and they
seem to rule out of court knowledge from outside sociology. This
threatens to restrict rather than extend our understanding of emotional
life by reducing it to its sociological aspects, either by seeing the emo­
tions only as a social construction - the tendency in Jackson's case - or
by adopting the dominant ideology of emotions current at a particular
time, which is what I think happens in the case of Duncombe and
Marsden.

The constructionist view

Sociology certainly has something to say about the emotions, but Jackson
aims to show that sociology has everything to say. She sets up a straw
target - that sociology has nothing to say - and seems to think that we
are faced with a choice of saying everything or nothing. Thus she writes:
'Love cannot be treated as if it has an existence independent of the social
and cultural context within which it is experienced. The idea that emo­
tions are somehow pre-social and therefore outside the sociologist's field
of vision, is beginning to be challenged' (Jackson 1993: 203).
Now I am not sure that anybody has argued that sociologists should
not look at emotions because their origins are pre-social (no references
 THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS 109

are given at this point) but if they did, it would be a very silly argument.
The planet Earth was here well before any human society and if a pre­
social origin means that we cannot study the way in which a phenom­
enon has been absorbed into social life, then sociologists could say
nothing about environmental issues. Since human beings are emotional
beings, sociology clearly has something to say about emotions - but so
does biology, psychology, social psychology and other disciplines.
However, Jackson is not interested in identifying what sociologists
might contribute to a study of the emotions. Against her straw target she
goes on to cite work about the social management of the emotions, the
cultural specificity of emotions, and the social and linguistic precondi­
tions for experiencing and/or expressing emotions. All of this is fair
enough and such work contributes useful insights; but it does not entail
the notion that emotions are socially constructed, only that they have
social implications, or are socially conditioned, or that they are part of
social life. In the next paragraph, Jackson makes a leap to a particular
variant of social constructionism elaborated a few pages later in a
quotation from Alison Jagger:

We have no access either to our own emotions or to those of others, inde­

pendent or unmediated by the discourse of our culture. (Jagger 1989: 148)

which Jackson then goes on to gloss as follows:

There is thus no way of exploring love except through the ways in which it is
talked and written about. (Jackson 1993: 207)

Now this is true, so true that it is a truism: we cannot talk about

anything without language. It does not follow, as Jackson wishes to
think, that language or culture constitutes what it talks about. I cannot
talk about my liver without language, but it does not make any sense to
say that my liver is constructed by language or culture.
It is worth pursuing this: different societies might have different
conceptions of the liver and its function and one might surmise that
modem medical science has a very sophisticated conception of the liver
- much more sophisticated, for example, than classical Greek society.
However, it does not follow that my liver is more sophisticated than was
Plato's liver. Nor does it follow that people who live in cultures that
have no conception of internal organs are people without livers (or
hearts, or kidneys, or whatever).
Now it seems to me that we should at least entertain the idea that
there is a range of emotions common to all humans, perhaps rooted in
our biological make-up, but that the available register of emotions, forms
of emotional experiencing and expression, as well as the wider meanings
of emotions, vary culturally and historically. I suspect that Jackson
would call this essentialism, but I do not consider it any more essentialist
than saying that nearly all human beings have had two arms, but what
110 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

they do with those arms varies culturally and historically. Nor, inci­
dentally, am I sure what would be wrong with such a position even if it
were essentialist, but that is another argument. There is, I think, a prima
facie case for my view. We can read Homer's Odyssey and make some
sense of Ulysses' terror in the face of (or rather between) Scylla and
Charybdis, just as we can make some sense of Penelope's feelings for
him and his for her, and the feelings of both for their son Telemachus
(Knox 1993). We can find the power of the love poetry of The Song of
Solomon; we can understand something of what is going on between
Benedict and Beatrice; and the love stories of Middlemarch and Jane Eyre
also seem familiar, as do the stories of James Baldwin and Edmund
White. In other words we can find ourselves emotionally in the stories of
different cultures and different times - even if our understanding is not
perfect, even if sometimes it might be a misunderstanding. This is an
ongoing struggle of understanding which Alexis (in Jackson's story of
Alexis and Lucy, p. 215) is just beginning. The necessary precondition for
such understanding, which certainly exists however groping it might be
at times, is a world of shared human emotions, the experience and
expression of which changes historically. If this were not the case, then
such texts would be alien beyond our understanding.
In my clinical practice, ideas such as Jackson's are frequently employed
in a defensive fashion, as a way of defusing what is, in reality, a very
powerful emotion. Phrases such as, 'Well, our society tells us to feel such­
and-such' are attempts to bring relief from what is often, in effect,
experienced as torture: sexual jealousy, the agonies of loss, the pain of
betrayal. Of course, such statements do not alleviate the suffering, any
more than a sociological analysis of the discourses of love will stop
people falling in love. Jackson seems to find it a problem that cognition
does not govern feeling, and her argument implies that it should.
However, it seems at least as plausible to suggest that a change in feeling
will lead to a change in cognition, and even more reasonable to suggest
that it is a two-way process.
The social constructionist conception of emotions proffered by Jackson
gives priority to cognition. However, if we think of emotions as having a
life of their own, which might be in contradiction to, or expressed fully
or partially through our cognition to different degrees at different times,
we can think through all sorts of situations with which most people must
be familiar: experiencing feelings we cannot express to our satisfaction;
having feelings that we can express but that others find difficult to
understand; and, most important perhaps, the regular experiencing of
contradictions between our thoughts and our feelings. The paradox
of Jackson's argument and the danger of the sociology of the emotions is
that emotions will be reduced to ideas: they will have no autonomy from
the rational world with which they co-exist.
The other problem that I find with Jackson's approach is that we are
likely to be left without any problem - apart from the endless description
 THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS 111

o f cultural discourse which eventually takes us to a description o f every­

thing. Descriptions do not solve problems such as why people who
believe that falling in love is an ideology manage themselves to fall in
love. The description of a discourse also hides problems. Jackson points
out ( p.207) that our culture separates falling in love from matemal love
for the child, which by and large it does. However, in psychoanalytic
literature (for example, Clulow and Mattinson 1989; Klein and Riviere
1937) there is a strong argument that the two experiences are closely
connected. I would further suggest that the reason that our culture tends
to suppress that link is that if falling in love does involve regressing to
primitive infantile feelings, it could mean that the strong feelings that
exist between real parents and infants have a dangerous sexual com­
ponent. I am not sure that Jackson's approach allows us to think through,
or even about, such possibilities.
When I was interviewed as a potential sociology undergraduate I was
told very firmly that sociology was not about people, it was about
societies. It is possible to understand societies with very little knowledge
of people and it is possible to study the social rules around emotional
experience and emotional expression with little or no knowledge of the
emotional life of the people who have to work within these rules - and
then to mistake the social scaffolding of emotions for emotional life itself.
Jackson assumes that discourse describes real emotions; Duncombe and
Marsden seem to me to mistake a well-established stereotype for reality.

The dangers of empirical research

What strikes me most about the Duncombe and Marsden (1993) paper is
that it reproduces a stereotype of the emotional life of men and women
that predates my birth and probably that of most other living people, yet
it is still going strong: women are responsible for emotional work in
relationships, are more aware of relationships and emotional connected­
ness and so on. Men cannot deal with emotions.
There is no doubt that such stereotypes exist and perhaps at some
levels of analysis they have an explanatory value. If there is a stereotype,
then there will be human beings who will in some, most or even all
situations behave in a stereotypical way; my own interest would be in
the situational logics that make it more likely that the stereotype
behaviour is adopted. I think the stereotypes would be most useful on a
fairly abstract or general level where the story of what really goes on in
people's emotional lives is comparatively unimportant. In the previous
chapter I tried to set out an account of the development of such
stereotypes. They are socially necessary but not necessarily individually
effective. Men and women do not always behave in stereotypically
masculine and feminine ways simply because they are men and women
- any more than the fact that I am a university lecturer, perhaps even a
112 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

stereotypical one, means that I am always and only a university lecturer,

behaving as a university lecturer is supposed to behave. One does not
have to be a postmodernist to recognize that most of us inhabit multiple
roles involving different sorts of behaviour and a constant process of
negotiation. The self that fulfils these roles and negotiates between them
is not a simple entity.
When I first started work as a group psychotherapist, I expected to
find a difference between men and women along the lines discussed by
Duncombe and Marsden; the version which I then held was Nancy
Chodorow's (1978). It was with some surprise that I realized after two or
three years that neither the colleagues with whom I trained nor my
patients fitted these stereotypes. Sometimes they did behave in the
stereotypical way, but the men who could be stereotypically masculine
could also talk with sensitivity and insight about their own feelings,
engage in comforting and supporting others and take part in all the
routine emotional interchanges of the group's life. Women who could be
stereotypically female could also be hurtful, emotionally obtuse and
abusive, defensive and blind and unable to engage in nurturing. To coin
a phrase, it all depended.
Sociologists are likely to overlook these complexities, not least because
they are using sociological concepts which mask them. Jackson's
discourse analysis is about the highest level of abstraction one can reach.
Other sociological concepts such as work, power or equality might be
extremely useful for talking about the economy, or political and social
structures, but it still has to be established that they are appropriate for
talking about emotional life - any more appropriate than the concepts
such as denial, introjection, projection, rationalization, etc. would be
appropriate for talking about social, economic and political structures.
Approaching the sociological dimensions of emotional life wearing my
psychodynamic hat, I would want to offer a set of rough and ready
conceptions of emotional dynamics which should be borne in mind when
thinking about the discourses of emotions, the stereotyping and the
ideologies of emotional life, and which act as theoretical and methodo­
logical warnings: the sociological aspects of emotional life should not be
mistaken for the whole of emotional life. To begin with what seems
evident about emotions in terms of their own - as opposed to social -
dynamics is that they are necessarily contradictory. In the same way that
we have to think of adult life in terms of relative independence or
dependence, so our emotional needs are both for intimacy and for
separation, a contradiction which can at times absorb all our energies
(Bowlby 1971, 1975, 1981, 1988; Winnicott 1958, 1962, 1964). Related to
this is the proximity and mutual entailment of helplessness and
destructive rage, love and hatred, a profound ambivalence that haunts
all aspects of human being (Hinshelwood 1991; Klein 1975b). Some
feelings, some desires and some ways of handling feelings will be - for
one reason or another - dangerous, damaging or socially disapproved of.
 THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS 113

It is this last aspect of emotional life that concerns sociology. A number of

points follow.
Individuals, people - men and women - are by definition engaged in
at least two interlocking forms of emotional work: the 'internal' work of
coping with contradiction, conflict and ambivalence and the 'external'
work of reconciling what goes on inside with what one is 'supposed' or
'allowed' to feel. There are of course as many ways of dealing with all
this as there are individuals, and some will conform more with the social
stereotypes with which they are presented and others less, but it is
important to realize that whatever stereotype an individual might appear
to meet - whether the unemotional, frigid male or the warm caring
female - he or she will be engaged in intense emotional work. We are
not talking about society allocating emotional labour to women; rather
men and women might engage in different forms of emotional labour or
might be assigned different ways of displaying their emotional labour. In
this context apparently 'unemotional' behaviour is very emotional. The
only truly unemotional behaviour I know of is being dead, and it would
be difficult to describe that as behaviour. I might, in ethnomethodolo­
gical terms, 'do dying' but I will not 'do death'.
The next point is that of course there is no simple relation between the
experience and the expression of emotion, and it becomes even more
complex when one moves on to talking about one's emotions rather than
expressing them. Indeed, talking about emotions, part of the emotional
labour that is supposedly assigned to women, can often be a very
effective way of avoiding the experience of emotions, and/or of hiding
emotions that are experienced from oneself and / or of hiding them from
others. On the other hand, actions including the action of not talking, can
be very effective expressions of emotion.
Third, relationships - whether dyads or larger groups - are always
more complex than the individuals who make them up. People can
divide emotions between themselves in varying ways. Couples can swap
feelings that the respective partners find difficult, one saying, in affect
but not in words, for example, 'I'll have the anger if you'll have the
vulnerability'. If partners divide the feelings up in such a way, one can
then say, 'I'm angry because you're vulnerable', to which the other can
respond, 'Your anger makes me vulnerable', and each can avoid having
the feeling that frightens them most. In any case this trading and circu­
lation of emotion is an extraordinarily subtle process and couples tend to
produce an often precarious and extremely important balance - a sort of
emotional equilibrium in the partnership. In this context the standard
stereotypical behaviour of men and women can be a means of fighting a
battle - 'You never talk to me', 'You're always on at me' - which is
actually a defence of the relationship. The unspoken communication
would be something like, 'As long as you don't love me properly, I can
stay in the relationship and fight to make you love me properly. If I
didn't have that fight on my hands, I wouldn't know what to do.' This
1 14 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

produces a situation of mutual 'bleating': a moaning about each other

that allows the situation to remain the same. The relationship really
comes under threat if one partner begins to behave in the way that the
other wishes - if the bargain is broken. It sounds to me as if some of the
couples to whom Duncombe and Marsden talked were caught up in
such relationships.
Overall, behind Duncombe and Marsden's comments and analyses
there seems to be an 'ideal' of a relationship which they find does not
match reality. The stereotypes they are dealing with have been around
for a long time, but over recent decades - at least among the sociology
writing classes, but I think on a wider basis as well - the value rating
of each side has changed. Whereas the culturally valued qualities were
once associated with the masculine, they are now associated with the
feminine. Talking about feelings has changed from an irrelevant feminine
pastime to a sign of social status.
It is easy to be taken in by this change, and I do think it is a change for
the good, but I do not consider that it brings us any closer to the truth
about the way individuals experience emotions, in or out of relation­
ships. It seems to involve identifying emotion with what we normally
associate with the female: caring, nurturing, vulnerability, commitment,
etc. There is next to no mention of emotions such as envy, hatred, rage,
jealousy, sadness, desperation or of the ability to transcend emotion, all
of which have to be dealt with within a relationship. Behind Duncombe
and Marsden I think there is also an assumption of features of what
Giddens (1991) calls the 'pure relationship', the relationship that can only
be justified on the basis of the satisfactions that it produces, its own
intrinsic qualities. Such a notion haunts the remarks of the respondents
quoted in the paper and the authors' own comments. I argue elsewhere
(Craib 1994) that such a view of relationships is best understood as an
ideology of late modernity and that in fact human beings are beings for
whom such relationships are not possible. A relationship will bring
emotional satisfactions and dissatisfactions in more or less equal meas­
ure. What is interesting on a sociological level is why such ideals should
develop; on a psychological level, what is interesting is the way in which
individuals cope with the reality. But if we see emotional life only from
the sociological point of view we run the danger of getting caught up in
the ideology.
There is clearly a methodological problem in all this: how do socio­
logists talk to people about their feelings in a way that can perhaps take
them to the reality beneath the ideology. My experience in therapeutic
contexts is that men and women tend to resort to the social stereotypes
of each other when feeling under threat and when mutual hatred is
closest to the surface. My experience is that people need at least a year
before they can find a level of confidence that enables them to talk about
their feelings in a comparatively uninhibited way. Beyond this it is easy
to make mistakes about feelings; a psychotherapeutic training lasts a
 THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS 115

minimum of three years, often twice that time or longer. One of the few
things we end up certain of is the extraordinary difficulty in distin­
guishing between one's own emotions and those of others and how
readily people tell you what you want to hear. This is especially
apparent in group therapy where the demand is constantly for the group
leader to tell members what to feel and where there is always evidence
that what the therapist wants is picked up and returned by the group,
but it is also clear in individual therapy. All of this is documented in the
literature on transference and counter-transference (see esp. Casement
1985, 1990). Now it would be unreasonable to expect sociologists to train
as psychotherapists or even to spend a year or more getting to know
their respondents and to identify when they are simply getting people to
say what they (the investigators) want them to say. What is important is
that they be aware of the depth of what they are studying and the
comparatively abstract level at which they are studying it.
One of the more interesting implications of my argument here emerges
when we try to think about the relationship between emotion and
identity. If we follow the logic of the Duncombe and Marsden position,
we get the impression that emotions are neatly lined up behind gender
identities - perhaps this is a good definition of a gender stereotype. The
implication of what I have been saying about emotions is that they are
always in a contradictory flux. In this sense they will always work to
disrupt identities and there will be an internal battle to maintain an
identity against a disruptive emotion. There are any number of different
ways in which that battle may be fought and it can be either won or lost.
I would suggest that a victory in such a battle is not a good thing, but in
any case, people's replies to sociologists' questions are likely as much to
be indices of these internal conflicts and/ or defences against their
discovery as they are to honest, considered answers. Perhaps, in fact,
they could not be anything else.
 9

SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND

LITERARY SOCIOLOGY: SOME NOTES
ON JOHN BERGER'S G

If social theory on the grand level does not allow for the comprehension
of experience and as a result finds itself undermined and if micro­
sociological theory also pushes experience into frames which hide
significant dimensions, then how is sociology to approach experience?
One course might be through looking at the way in which sociology uses
language and this may be achieved by comparing it with a literary use of
language - especially when literary language is being used to describe
material that might very well be looked at by a sociologist.
Starting with the assumption that the 'object' of both literature and
sociology is to some extent the same, that is, the description and/ or
understanding of human activities, and given the perhaps rather less
obvious assumption that an incomplete description is inadequate both as
a description and as an attempt to understand, it seems reasonable to
suggest that the relationship between literature and sociology needs to
be investigated on a different level to that established by the sociology of
literature or by the straightforward use of literature as a source for
sociology.
It will be argued here that there is a fundamental complementarity
between sociology and literature, but one that is by no means simple;
they cannot just be added to each other. The point of connection and the
differences between them lie principally in the way in which they use
words to 'contain' meaning and this in tum depends upon the appar­
ently dual, but basically unitary nature of what both attempt to describe.
Using John Berger's G - a Booker Prize winner from 1972 - as an
example of a novel which is intimately concerned with the problems that
occupy many sociologists and social theorists and in some ways handles
those problems more adequately than do the social sciences, I will
attempt to examine the relationship between sociology and literature and
thus the nature of their complementarity.
To begin with, we may look at G as a description of a number of
individuals who belong to certain social classes, and of a society which is
comprised of the relationships between those individuals and classes.
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 117

Berger shows us in particular an ascendant industrial bourgeoisie and a

declining aristocracy; it is the former who are dominant in the novel as in
the world. The latter appear as bemused and degenerate - like Jocelyn
and Beatrice, incestuously impotent in the face of the outside world.
Other classes, or rather the individuals belonging to them, appear as
pawns, either acquiescing in (Leonie) or furiously battling against (Bojan,
Nusa) a destiny constructed for them and which they are incapable of
changing.
It is not, however, the dominant class that has constructed their
destiny. Berger's bourgeoisie are not exceptionally brilliant or exception­
ally powerful men: they are concerned with making money in their
chosen way, with maintaining their status in the circles within which
they move, with preventing the too obvious adultery of their wives, with
producing offspring to inherit their wealth, and with getting a minimum
of excitement out of their lives without endangering their position. In all
this, they are portrayed as good-naturedly stupid (Umberto), plainly
ridiculous (M. Hennequin), or plainly hypocritical (von Hartmann -
significantly a diplomat and perhaps the most immediately powerful).
But we are left in no doubt that they are the dominant class: G's whole
existence is engaged in a running battle with them. They dominate,
however, not by their decisions - they do not wield power; they adjust
to, rather than control, events. They dominate rather by their presence,
their way of life and their morality, the houses they live in. Over and
above them, dominating everybody, is an impersonal History, pro­
gressing along an apparently determined course, aided by human
blunders, joining together, creating and destroying the contingent lives
of the characters, intervening in everything that happens to them.
G, then, deals with the relationships between individuals, the classes
and societies to which they belong and History. What interests us at the
moment, however, is the way in which these problems are dealt with,
the techniques that Berger uses.
To begin with we can look at the central character, 'G' himself, as a
technique, in some way as the technique of the novel. He does not
possess a 'character' in the normal sense of the word: he has few 'traits';
he follows no particular project in the world beyond that of 'life' itself; he
produces nothing and appears to consume little more than he needs; he
has no name, just an initial. He is a sort of walking phenomenological
reduction: the world is revealed to him and, through him, to us 'as it is';
but initially, at least, it is only revealed. His impersonality is built into his
biography: no father (and, by implication, no super-ego) and a mother
who simply gave up her attempt to possess him. He was brought up in
the face of nature rather than society; his attainment of manhood is
attested to by his ability to defeat nature, or be defeated by it and
survive, rather than by the formation of particular types of relationships
with other people. Of course, nature and adulthood are still mediated by
humans - specifically Jocelyn - but before this mediation is operated, G
118 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

appears as detached enough to choose and accept it in advance. At this

stage, G may be seen as equivalent to the sociologist's 'objectivity', an
unworldly way of seeing the world; but he is more than this and at this
point we move from a descriptive to a critical sociology.
The basis for the critical point of view presented to us through G is
nature, or more specifically, a sexuality which is natural but which
transcends the nature through which he first reached his adulthood.
Berger's use of sexuality and nature is the direct opposite to that of
Lawrence. For Lawrence, sexuality and nature make up a mystical stasis,
an ideal to be aimed at, and they provide the basis for a conservative
critique, a justification of feudal relationships. G's sexuality, on the other
hand, is a driving force towards orgasm and nothing else; it goes beyond
the simple conquering of, or adjustment to, or fusion with, nature. It is
an explosive rather than an harmonious life force. Simple triumph over
nature - Chavez's first airborne crossing of the Alps - fades in the face
of G's liaison with Leonie. Nature becomes a setting in which his
sexuality may achieve its end, and nothing else, except perhaps a simple
'being thereness' against which human complicity and hypocrisy is
measured.
It is against this straightforward and urgent sexual drive that bour­
geois morality and life-styles are criticized. It is the attempt of the latter
to capture and tame his sexuality that is at the root of the bitterness and
desire for revenge which become increasingly apparent in G towards the
end. To the extent that an asocial, if not an antisocial drive is thus
transformed into an instrument of social retribution and revenge, a
means of subordinating what was originally seen as its end (that is,
woman), G loses his own asocial nature and is taken up into the
workings of society; the critical instrument becomes a tool of what was
criticized. G, then, is more than a simple revelation of the world. By
identifying his consciousness with his sexuality (the former articulating
the latter in the realization that it is 'only life that matters'), the author
presents us with a critical revelation of the world.
But over and above all this is History. Sometimes it simply runs as a
parallel to the activities of the characters, subordinating the latter in our
esteem while not telling us anything about them, in no way intervening
directly: von Hartmann watches his wife sleep beside him as a crazy
slaughter continues on the Western Front. At another time, it appears as
a crowd of workers resisting troops who hopelessly outmanoeuvre them;
but it appears simply as a background against which G realizes that it is
'only life' that is worthwhile, it is no more than the trigger of that
realization. Sometimes it lifts people up and puts them down elsewhere,
leaving them struggling blindly but ferociously to control it, as with
Bojan. At other times it hovers in the background, sometimes approach­
ing and threatening, but then drawing back (for example, the shortlived
fright received by the guests in the Milan hotel where G stays with his
father after their first meeting), sometimes approaching inexorably (the
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 119

approaching end of routine life in Trieste). Sometimes it reaches down

through its own incarnations of class and war to fix the limits within
which people move and the terms in which they describe themselves.
There is a striking description of Beatrice:

Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men;
no more and no less . . . Precisely because she lacked the pretension of ready
made generalizations and judgments, because she allowed her thoughts to
wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops
oppressing another nation must always maintain - a sense of duty without
end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the
violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged . . .
Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.
She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent
to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain
experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This
happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain
emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an
extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. Medieval witchcraft,
for example, may be seen in this light. A moment's introspection shows that a
large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits
further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are
likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves.
Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now
be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our
recognition. As we have changed Beatrice's.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that is around
her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen
in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly.
Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no
tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
(Berger 1972a: 103-5)

We will look at this description in detail later: it appears in the midst

of some general descriptions and observations on South African history
and on Beatrice's relationship to her husband (a sadist who suffers from
premature ejaculation), which in tum appear in the course of a descrip­
tion of her seduction of (or by?) G.
But History's final intervention, in more senses than one, is its
destruction of G himself, suspected of being an Austrian spy when in
fact he had undertaken a minor assignment from the British as a means
of getting himself out of a country in which he was bored. His attempt
to use History - to use the war as a means to life - is turned against
him. His death is meaningless in terms of History, a contingent and
unimportant event, yet completely determined by the historical events
that went before it. It is a logical conclusion to G's own exhaustion, his
failure to achieve or maintain the 'life' he was seeking, the constant
distortion of his sexuality that we discussed earlier. He lets himself be
carried along by the random crowds that form and disappear at
120 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

History's behest without affecting it; but beyond this, it is a meaningless

death. What it does do, however, is place him firmly back into a world
on which he at first appeared to be only a window, albeit a critical
window. The moment of 'objectivity' and of criticism - that is, G himself
- is taken back into the world that was its object and is destroyed by it.
What are the differences between the way in which Berger deals with
these topics and the way in which they would be dealt with in sociology
or a work of social theory or social philosophy? How, for example, does
G differ from Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1969)? They both have the
same 'object' - the relationship of sexuality and society; they both
attempt to convey to the reader a particular critical point of view
(although not necessarily the same one) about that relationship, a
particular understanding of its workings, using language as a means.
It would be easy to decide that the differences lie in the fact that one
talks about the general and the other about the particular. Marcuse's
work dissolves individual sexuality into the general category of sexuality
and individual members of each class into the general category of class.
Berger, on the other hand, talks about an individual bourgeois, indi­
vidual consciousness and individual sexuality. All this is straightforward
and self-evident, but very inadequate. Apart from anything else, it is also
self-evident that Marcuse can talk about individual consciousness in the
course of his argument and that Berger can make sweeping general­
izations.
Another self-evident difference which can take us further lies in the
fact that a summary or an exposition of Marcuse's arguments, on the
lines of the summary of G that we have just attempted, would be pre­
cisely a summary: a direct restatement of what Marcuse says, in form,
and perhaps even in some ways in content; it would be similar to the
first section of this chapter minus its references to the novel. It would be
an explicit argument involving the manipulation of categories such as
'sexuality', 'class', 'society', etc. and it would talk about its 'object'
directly. This is not to say that Marcuse is not open to all sorts of
interpretations; that his words do not overflow with meanings other than
those they explicitly constitute, or even that the meanings that they do
explicitly constitute are not dubious in some vital way. It simply means
that there is 'a degree of explicitness' found in Eros and Civilization that is
not found in G. The first section of this chapter involved an act of
interpretation of the original text which is different in structure from the
interpretation of Marcuse that would be needed to produce a summary.
The latter would require a negation of the original text which is only
partial, and consequently only a partial reconstitution. Indeed the same
words, the same categories, the same sentence structures may be used in
the summary as were found in the original text; quotations may be used
as an integral part of the summary to replace sentences or paragraphs of
summary. Our discussion of G, however, involved a total negation of the
original text and a reconstitution in a different terminology, 'saying
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 121

something different' to the original text insofar as explicit meaning is

concerned. Where the original text was used, it was as an example, in a
position of subordination to the new text.
A way of rephrasing this difference is suggested by Sartre's comments
on the use of language in literature, philosophy and poetry (1967). It
involves a variation of a fairly conventional distinction between 'sign'
and 'symbol' and essentially refers to the way in which the word points
to its referent. A word used as a 'sign' points directly to its object, in the
way that a signpost points towards a town: it is a means of access to
something else and is inessential in comparison to its object. A word
used as a 'symbol' on the other hand is always, to a greater or lesser
extent, a substitute for its object. It still refers to something outside of
itself, but it does so obliquely; it is as if it were attempting to carry the
weight of its meaning by itself. It should be apparent even from this brief
outline that phenomenology can offer a more subtle and inclusive
conception of language than the structural linguistics that became so
popular in the 1970s and 1980s and its maintenance of the idea of a
referent is arguably more faithful to Saussure than the linguistics that
was developed in his name (see Merleau-Ponty 1974a).
The central point is that Marcuse, sociology and social theory in
general tend to use words as if they were simple signs. Of course, at the
level of conceptual argument, words such as 'sexuality', 'class' and so on
are simple signs, but it is their use as if they were that enables sum­
maries and expositions to be produced in a comparatively straightfor­
ward way (although such a production is never simple).
Our exposition of G also used words as if they were simple signs, but
they were signs which we had to draw out from behind the text itself.
The meaning we gave to the original text was there, but not there in a
direct way. Words in the novel are used as 'symbols' and to produce an
interpretation in the categories of social science we had to penetrate the
symbols. This, however, cannot explain by itself the difference between
sociology and literature. If it could, then it would be easier to grasp the
meaning of, say, Capital than it would be to grasp the meaning of
Gulliver's Travels, simply because the former was more explicit, more
direct. The use of words in literature is, as it were, multidimensional. A
word may not only replace its referent, but it may replace several
'referents'; it can point in many directions at the same time, and point in
no particular direction clearly. It is in one of these 'other directions' that
we can discover the root difference between and complementarity of
sociology and literature.
If we return to the description of Beatrice quoted above, we can see that
the words point in a number of directions. The quotation begins by telling
us about Beatrice's intellectual equipment: her inability to think of her
particular relationship to the rest of the world in the terms in which those
around her think of it. Her lack of the necessary categories of thought is
also a lack of protection. All this could be part of a psychological or even
122 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

sociological study. What marks it off from such a study is what Beatrice is
not protected against - fear, fear of violence, but not fear of present
violence, the violence of white against black, but fear of a future violence,
of black against white. The future erupts into the present in a way in
which it never does in the social sciences. In sociology, for example, the
future might appear in terms of means and ends (Weber) or as a state of
balance towards which social systems tend (functionalism), or as an
implicit ideal (a suggestion put to me by Alan Dawe) but it nowhere
appears with such urgency and immediacy as it does in Berger's
description. And it is not a generalized fear of an 'unreal' future - it is not
a neurosis - it is a fear of a specific and real future.
There follows a paragraph which would not be out of place in the
sociology of knowledge; what distinguishes it is what surrounds it. It is
in no way a conclusion or insight derived from a study of witchcraft or
any other 'mystery' in its historical and social setting. It is the paragraph
that follows it that dramatically tears it away from the social sciences: the
reader is directly challenged to find the ground for the insight in his or
her own experience and not in some study. We are directed not out­
wards to the world around us, but inwards to our own consciousness.
It is in the last paragraph that we find the crucial 'direction' of the
words. It tells us something about Beatrice's relationship to the world,
something which is contained in the previous paragraphs, first as a
description of Beatrice and then as a feature of the relationship between
'ideas' and 'history', but something that is more than these. But what are
we to make of it? Her mouth goes dry and her corsets get tighter, but she
is obviously neither simply thirsty, nor pregnant, nor swelling up in
some way. Worse than that, the world is tilting, her world is tilting, but
she cannot see the tilt and neither can anybody around her. She, how­
ever, is convinced of it; more convinced, apparently, than the man who
created her, who leaves us clutching at the meanings of his sentences.
The description builds up to the tilt, through this strange fear of the
future which only we, fifty years later and more, can recognize, through
the mysteries of our own consciousness to which we are referred on
the way. Yet nowhere are we told what the tilt is: it is indicated by the
words, but the words point towards nothing, or to more unsatisfactory
words. The area in which we have to look is limited: its inner boundaries
by the short, sharp sentences describing Beatrice, its outer limits by the
longer, more complicated sentences that could belong to the sociology of
knowledge. But that is all.
It is here that we reach the limits of words. What Berger points
towards is essentially 'what cannot be said'; a pre-reflective relationship
to the world that reflection continually tries to grasp and pin down, but
fails because it always finds itself in the way. Insofar as consciousness is
always an open movement towards the future and I never reach pure
coincidence with myself, insofar as I never am but always becoming,
then my pre-reflective relationship to the world can never be grasped in
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 123

a satisfactory way. My reflective consciousness, or the consciousness of

others, can hypostatize aspects of the relationship, even if it is necessary,
as Berger suggests, to wait fifty years sometimes before that is possible;
but it can never be grasped in its entirety and in its full flight towards
the future.
This 'pre-reflective relationship' can perhaps be described as a way of
living in the world, or, better, a way of living towards the world. The
words in which we attempt to describe it are the tools of the reflective
consciousness, used to encapsulate the impossible and best used as an
attempt to convey meaning through their own combination of structure
and content (direct meaning) as oblique symbols rather than as signs.
'Tilt' does not tell us what was Beatrice's relationship to the world; rather
it includes, within its exterior function as a sign, a sense that is amplified
by the preceding paragraphs. In this way it takes on a substantive being,
more solid than signs which tend always to give way in front of what
they indicate. It possesses, together with the words around it, a 'thick­
ness' which keeps us within the words rather than referring us outside of
them; the movement outside is left to the last moment when we finally
discover that the words have let us down and the outside is left
unspecified. The only clue is the earlier direct reference to our own
consciousness. If we are referred anywhere, it is to ourselves to find our
own 'tilt' in order that we may find Beatrice's.
'What cannot be said' is quite simply this relationship and nothing
more. Beatrice's 'tilt' is a way of living her lack of intellectual tools, her
world, in a way that is not determined by that world; it is the empty
space towards which Berger's words finally and obliquely point. Yet
because these words contain her way of living her world, living towards
her world, they must also point towards that world. They point to each
other, to the reader, to nothing and to the world; the words of sociology
point primarily to the outside world alone. It is in the fact that both
sociology and literature point to the world in different ways that we
discover their complementarity.
The lived relationship to the world is constantly recurring throughout
G and at each stage it is indicated but not stated: we find it within the
words and at the same time beyond them. Berger's grasp of the sexual
act is through the reasons that forbid its description, through drawings,
through the rhythm and structure of his sentences, and through reference
again to the reader's own consciousness. He talks about what cannot be
talked about by talking about why it cannot be talked about.
Alan Dawe (1973), adopting some of Richard Hoggart's comments
about literature, has argued that sociology, like literature, must in its
own way capture what it is like to be alive at a particular place and a
particular time. It must reflect lived experience in a way that is mean­
ingful to the reader. Our examination of G has revealed that Berger does
not convey to us directly what it was like to live in Europe at the end of
the last century and the beginning of this one. Apart from brief moments
124 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

- the demonstration in Milan, the description of the Western Front, the

appearances of Nusa and Leonie - he tells us very little about the
everyday lives of the mass of the people. What he tells us about are
unique and in many ways extraordinary incidents - incest, seduction,
political intrigue - and insofar as general experiences are dealt with at
all, they are illuminated critically through these extraordinary incidents.
The experience of the masses plays for Berger the role of an historical
background and a subject and basis for criticism, but it is not an end in
itself.
The lived experience portrayed in G is not that described in terms of
psychological categories, or even in terms of emotion. It is essentially
experience that is indescribable, which exists prior to and which over­
flows any description we can attempt. It is the pre-reflective experience
revealed by (but not necessarily known by) the phenomenological
reduction. The world and one's lived relationship to it comprise a unity,
but we can and sociology usually does attempt to deal simply with
the former. To the extent that literature deals with the latter, the two
are complementary. But this is not to say that they should remain
independent; they do have things to learn from one another. We can,
to begin with, learn from G the way in which Berger acts as a social
theorist.
We can start with the commonplace observation that the author is God
to his characters. He or she may reveal his characters to us as puppets,
tell us in asides what they are 'really like', pass compact moral judge­
ments on them, make them dance to the 'message' of the novel. He can
also let them show us the world, reveal the world to us through their
eyes, use them as a lens through which to look at the world. Hemingway
is the obvious example here. Somewhere in between, an author can let us
see the world through his characters, but through developing, choosing
characters. He can let the characters have their freedom as a means of
showing the reader his own freedom; they are both symbols for a
'message' and views on to the world at the same time. Sartre's early
theory of literature avowed a combination of these last two approaches.
Berger adopts the first two approaches and not the third - history is
dominant and here the novel is politically pessimistic. As we have seen,
the world is revealed to us through G; but at the same time Berger makes
explicit his role as an all-powerful God. The description of Beatrice that
we have discussed at length is a God's eye view, from the future, from a
greater knowledge; a view which would, as he explicitly states, have
been completely unavailable to Beatrice herself. What Berger does is to
reverse the way in which these two approaches are traditionally used, at
the same time combining them. His moral criticisms do not come from
his all-powerful position as God, but through the way in which his
characters reveal the world to us. Our view of what the world is like 'out
there' does not come to us only through the eyes of his characters, but
directly from the author as an informed, Marxist God.
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 125

At this point, we come back to the sociologist. His or her point of view
is God-like - and this seems true of all sociology - insofar as the
sociologist seeks to formulate the experience of those he studies in terms
not available to those he studies. He or she is not God-like in the
moralistic way, but in the way in which Berger is God-like. He tells us
about the world to some extent in the same way that Berger tells us
about Beatrice, from a position of different - if not greater - knowledge.
What makes Berger different from the 'traditional' (if that is the right
word) novelist, makes him similar to the sociologist. What makes Berger
different from the sociologist is the way in which he refers to lived
experience and it is this that makes his work more immediately mean­
ingful to the reader, in the sense that it says things about the world that
the sociologist might say, but in a way that directly and indirectly
challenges the reader and forces him or her to make an effort at
understanding which is different to that of straightforward intellection.
We are, for example, forced to look at our own sexuality in a way that
Eros and Civilization can never manage. The description of Beatrice forces
us to recognize our own historical relativity, to realize our own social
determinations in order to understand hers, and to understand the extent
and limits of social determination in general.
If sociology is to learn from literature, then it does not necessarily
involve the adoption of Berger's techniques. It does not mean that the
sociologist should transform him or herself into a novelist or a poet,
any more than the novelist and the poet should transform themselves
into sociologists. The novelist attempting to grasp a lived experience
cannot fail to use his words to indicate the world at the same time as
they indicate lived experience. So far we have argued as if the socio­
logist could use his words to point only at the world, but this is not the
case. We saw that no word used as a 'symbol' is only a symbol; that
eventually it must indicate something beyond itself. In the same way,
no word used as a simple sign is ever only a sign; it must always carry
its multidimensional references even if these are hidden or ignored.
Even the most technical, conceptual language can imply behind itself
a form of lived experience. Although the sociologist might not be
attempting the same task as the novelist, he is using the same tools and
the novelist's 'object' is essentially inseparable from the 'object' of
sociology.
In some ways language is far too subtle a tool to be used for simply
saying things. There are at least three 'forms' of lived experience that
must enter into a sociologist'S work: that of those he studies, the
relationship between himself and those he studies as it is lived by both,
and his own relationship to his ideas. The way in which he lives what he
is saying, and his use of language, if sensitive and conscious, is capable
of conveying something of all three. In addition he is trying to com­
municate with whoever might read him, and communication entails not
only clarity - in fact, it might not entail clarity at all - but an attempt to
126 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND SOCIOLOGY

reach the reader and to create a minimum of shared experience. Again it

is only the sensitive use of language that can achieve this.
It must be emphasized that we are not talking about experience in
substantive terms but about a pre-reflective lived experience. The
difference is that between the description of Beatrice's tilt and saying that
she was anxious, worried or whatever. It is a matter of the 'flavour' of a
life, of a relationship rather than its description. It is the existence and
structure of this lived experience that is revealed by phenomenology.
Although most of what has gone before has been based on the work of
Sartre (especially Sartre 1963a, 1967) there is no a priori reason why the
insights of other writers should not be used as well. It is perhaps in this
way, rather than as a method or as a collection of substantive ideas to
be used when convenient, that phenomenology offers most to the
sociologist.

Coda

Viewing this chapter from twenty years on I am struck by the similarity

of the phenomenological approach I used here to an interpretive
psychoanalytic approach and the way in which psychoanalysis opens up
further possibilities. On the surface they are directly opposed - Sartre's
critique of Freud in Being and Nothingness (1957) argues that conscious­
ness is a pure nothingness. It has no content. It is a only a relationship to
the world, whereas Freud endows consciousness with a content. How­
ever the unconscious itself can become an object of consciousness.
I argued in Part 1, when talking about Sartre and Merleau-Ponty that
they describe different moments of our consciousness of the world and
there is what could be called a phenomenological tradition in psycho­
analysis. Especially in the more therapeutically oriented forms of object
relations theory, in the work of, for example, D.W. Winnicott (see any
collection of Winnicott's papers, 1971a, b, 1975; also Wright 1991) there
are distinct phenomenological concerns, and the two approaches sit
together rather uneasily in the work of R.D. Laing (1960). I think it is
probably Merleau-Ponty's 'moment' of consciousness, particularly of our
consciousness of the body, which would fit most easily with these
psychoanalytic approaches.
However, I think the theoretical compatabilities are less important
than the dimensions of experience which language can both capture and
transform. The 'tilt' of Beatrice's world, for example, represents some­
thing well beyond any language available to her and her contemporaries,
rather as the heroine of D.M. Thomas's White Hotel (1981) experiences
pains from injuries she is yet to receive at the hands of Gestapo death
squads. This is an extreme example of what I would call the level of 'pre­
reflective' and/or 'existential' experience and its more familiar forms
include the sudden and inexplicable experiences of fear and anxiety,
 SOCIOLOGICAL LITERATURE AND LITERARY SOCIOLOGY 127

intimations of death, human vulnerability and the insoluble contra­

dictions of life, the movements of history which affect all those around
us but of which we are barely aware - Auden's cracked teacup which
opens the path to the land of the dead.
The level of experience that is grasped by psychoanalysis is rather
different; it is pre-reflective and/or unconscious experience of the body -
an experience which can be articulated through metaphors of various
types. One way of thinking about psychoanalytic treatment is that it is a
process of generating the metaphors which we need in order to live with
a degree of coherence. What is interesting about it is that not any
metaphor will do. Although people often come into psychoanalysis
looking for causal explanations of their condition, this usually disappears
in the creation of metaphor.
Now returning to different ways of using language, the psychoanalytic
hermeneutic directs us towards looking at sociological texts as psychic
texts, guiding us less to the experience of the author than to the experi­
ence of relationships in the discipline itself. In Part 3 I try to do this in a
discussion of books that explore the social implications of psycho­
analysis.
 PART 3

IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND

PSYCHOANALYSIS

10

FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY

Psychoanalysis has always been sort of happy hunting ground for

philosophers, more often than not hostile and frequently, I suspect,
trying to cut their teeth on an easy target. When philosophers seem to
offer psychoanalysis an admission to respectability it seems to have a
price. The so-called 'underlabourer' conception of philosophy for which
science delivers the goods (knowledge) while philosophy carries out
repair jobs on the tools (concepts) has a sinister aspect. It carries a sense
of philosophical superiority, the schoolteacher philosopher examining the
schoolboy Freud for inky fingers and dirt behind the ears. At its worst,
the philosopher becomes the chief witness and judge for what Irving
Thalberg (1982) unselfconsciously calls the 'philosophical prosecution',
checking conceptual credentials and banishing ideas to the wilderness. It
seems invariably that what is banished is Freud's awareness of the
complexity, ambiguity and contradictoriness of the world and human
beings, and, above all, his awareness of their inevitable irrationality and
nastiness.
Here I want to look at three philosophical approaches to Freud and at
three corresponding ways in which philosophy and psychoanalysis
might learn from each other. Many of my examples will be taken from
an excellent collection of essays (Wollheim and Hopkins 1982) which
adopts a comparatively open-minded philosophical attitude to Freud,
but I also want to look at some wider issues, moving away from the
philosophy of science and linguistic philosophy towards hermeneutics
and philosophical anthropology. I want to present what might be called
a multi-philosophical conception of psychoanalysis, maintaining that it
 FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY 129

employs differing forms of argument, which can be judged by different

criteria, but which nonetheless are related to each other and require each
other for a full understanding. I have argued elsewhere (Craib 1997a)
that sociology has a number of mutually dependent objects of different
ontological status and therefore it cannot be a unified discipline, but
must develop in multiple interconnected directions. I believe the same is
true for all social sciences, including psychoanalysis, and all too often
philosophical approaches to the discipline try to narrow it.

Psychoanalysis as a science

The status of psychoanalysis as a science, or rather the lack of such

status, is the usual ground for the philosophical dismissal of Freud. The
dismissal has been based on positivist/empiricist assumptions about the
nature of a science. In its stricter versions, there are two types of mean­
ingful statement: a proposition about the world which may be verified or
falsified; or a statement which is true by definition, such as all bachelors
are unmarried men (Ayer 1971). All other statements are metaphysical
and meaningless; science deals only with testable propositions. To be
properly testable the theory must be translated into a prediction of a
correlation between two variables which are able to be defined inde­
pendently of the theory itself. In this way general laws are established
which serve to explain individual instances. Thus in the case of psycho­
analysis one would look through Freud's work for a possible correlation,
say, between the existence of a neurosis and the repression of the
memory of childhood sexual impulses. Provided that these could be
identified in non-psychoanalytic terms, one would set about the
empirical discovery of whether such a correlation exists. The dismissal
of Freud found in the writings of Frank Cioffi (1970) and Karl Popper
(1969) rests on the argument that no such testable propositions can be
found in Freud's work, since he bets on every horse. Thus, as well as the
proposition that the repression of the memory of childhood sexual
impulses leads to neurosis, we find the proposition that some neurotics
remember their childhood sexual impulses. This leaves Freud some­
where between a fraud and a speculative metaphysician and I suspect
Popper and Cioffi would not bother to distinguish between the two.
One way in which psychoanalysis may be defended is through the
attempt to show that the clinical evidence on which most analysts base
their work can be considered as 'scientific' in a broad positivist sense.
Perhaps the best known and most thorough attempt at this is by Alfred
Grunbaum (1984) and his conclusions can only be described, at the best,
as highly sceptical. Clark Glymour (1982) attempts to set up a model for
the acceptable employment of clinical evidence, drawing on an analogy
with astronomy and focusing on Freud's study of the Rat Man. This
exercise is largely compatible with a positivist/empiricist view of science
130 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

and can be used to establish at least that Freud was not a fraud.
Glymour, for example, is concerned to show that Freud was able to
revise his hypothesis and theories in the light of the clinical evidence,
something which Popper would deny. On the whole my own view is
that seeking this sort of evidence for psychoanalysis is not likely to be
very productive, although some (for example, Fonagy 1996; Smith 1996)
still seek it and Hopkins (1996) makes a good case that Freud's argu­
ments are compatible with what we regard as scientific reasoning. Cosin
et al. (1982) show in a systematic way not only the lack of sympathy, but
also the misunderstandings and misreadings of Freud present in the
critiques of Cioffi and Popper. They also show the unreasonable nature
of the demands made by the latter on psychoanalytic theory. It is
certainly my own view that if such demands were made on the sciences
generally, very little of modem science would qualify as such.
Some of these demands have relaxed with the opening up of the
philosophy of science since the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). Kuhn was able to demonstrate
the impossibility of theory-free observations and the puzzle-solving
nature of scientific experiments; we do not have access to some inde­
pendent real world against which theories may be tested. Rather, what
we see in the real world depends in part upon the theories we have of it.
The effect has been to relativize theories of science. Taking this position
to its extreme, Paul Feyerabend (1975) advocates an anarchist theory
under the slogan 'anything goes'; in its milder form, the effect seems to
have been to admit Freud into respectable discussion, even if suspicion
still remains. Perhaps the view now is best summed up as benevolent
scepticism. However, this does not take us very far. It could be seen as a
manifestation of repressive tolerance. Once admitted into the fold of the
respectable, Freud can be submerged beneath the respectable arguments.
For Cosin et al. (1982), for example, he becomes a weapon in the attempt
to establish that the explanation of an action in terms of the actor's
reasons for acting is not a causal explanation. Alternatively he may sink
altogether beneath respectable methodology: Suppes and Warren (1982)
develop a mathematical model to classify defence mechanisms. The
model and the classification somehow become ends in themselves, as
though the credibility of psychoanalysis were demonstrated by their use,
at the expense of their meaning.
Grunbaum's (1984) conclusion is that the central problem with clinical
evidence is that it must always assume what it is based upon - there is
no independent measure for clinical claims and this is why psycho­
analysis must depend on experimental or epidemiological evidence. It is
difficult to see how reliable experimental evidence can be obtained and
Smith (1996) shows the problem with outcome studies: even if all
psychoanalytic treatments were successful it would not establish that the
theory underlying those treatments was right - there are plenty of
examples from medicine where treatments work, but for reasons
 FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY 131

unknown to doctors. The absence of experimental evidence is not, how­

ever, fatal; otherwise we would have to abandon evolutionary theories in
biology.
The sort of empirical evidence that one can adduce for psychoanalysis
does not, to my mind, establish Freud's hermeneutic, the validity of
interpretations or of the theories employed by psychoanalysts in making
interpretations. But it does support a proposition that an area exists in
which such interpretations might be of value. I am talking here of the
immense range of evidence assembled by Bowlby (1971, 1975, 1981) and
those working with his theories, and perhaps too the work of Stem
(1985) on early infancy.
Once we move away from this sort of discussion we seem to get
further. Donald Davidson (1982) argues that certain aspects of Freud's
theory are essential if we are going to be able to explain irrational
behaviour. Particularly important is the insight that the mind might
consist of a structure of different parts and that non-logical relations may
exist between these different parts. This is important because it moves
away from the idea of the actor as a single unit, a unitary subject. It is
only a short step from Davidson's argument to a philosophical realist
reading of Freud.
Realism (Bhaskar 1978, 1979; Collier 1981) sees science as involved in
identifying (by means of theory) the unobservable underlying structures
and mechanisms which are responsible for observable phenomena. The
relationship between theory and the observable is thus redefined, so that
the former does not depend entirely upon the latter and we can allow for
the theory-laden nature of observations. It also leaves behind the either /
or focus involved in more traditional notions of evidence - either
evidence supports a theory or it does not. In addition to experiments,
other forms of evidence (including clinical) would be permissible and
other criteria enter into assessing the theory, including in particular the
rational coherence of the argument and the elegance and economy of the
explanation. For a philosophical realist, psychoanalysis can seem an
almost ideal model for a science of the mind. Freud identifies a structure
or series of structures and the relationships between the elements may be
seen as the causal mechanisms which generate if not the thoughts,
fantasies and actions themselves, then the narrative which helps us
understand the thoughts, fantasies and actions. We can move away from
the notion of a simple, rational agent which limits so many philosophical
accounts of Freud.

Reasons, causes and hermeneutics

The first central concern of analytic philosophy is with the scientific

status of psychoanalysis. The second has to do with whether an expla­
nation of a person's action in terms of that person's reasons for acting is
132 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

or is not a causal explanation. Most contributors to Wollheim and

Hopkins (1982) seem to agree that the causal explanation of action in
terms of reasons is possible, although it is different from causal expla­
nation in the natural sciences which, at least for positivists, involves
looking for regularities and establishing general laws. An alternative to
such a view is to argue that human action can be understood only in
terms of logical or conceptual connections and that these are quali­
tatively different from causal explanations. Thus Peter Winch (1958)
would see human action in terms of rule following, and since there are at
least two ways of following a rule - a right way and a wrong way -
notions of cause and of prediction are inappropriate.
Those who believe that causal explanation is possible still see the
cause/effect relation in terms of a juxtaposition of events: the combi­
nation of desire and belief (event A) causes a particular action (event B).
In this context, taking psychoanalysis seriously is a matter of translating
Freud's explanations into causal explanations corresponding to the above
model, often with the explicit aim of removing paradoxes, contradictions
and ambiguities and with a strong suspicion of ideas about the
unconscious and fantasy. At its best, this amounts to a clear presentation
of Freud's arguments, not adding anything to them, but perhaps making
them intelligible to those who might be sceptical. At its worst, it is a
translation which loses a vital part of Freud and colludes in a denial: the
psyche is not allowed to be complex or contradictory or full of para­
doxes. It can only be the simple point of origin of a more or less
rationally explicable action, part of a rationally coherent scheme or
process.
A hermeneutic reading of Freud on the other hand opens up all sorts
of possibilities. Whether we take Ricoeur (1970) or Habermas (1971) we
find an example of a philosopher learning from Freud rather than trying
to teach him. The tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in which
Ricoeur places himself, and which Habermas wishes to take up critically,
deals with the play of meanings and the problem of interpretation. It has
one central problem: that it cannot recognize, let alone comprehend,
what Marxists would call ideology. If the world is described as it is
perceived and conceived by consciousness, then both perception and
conception must stand unquestioned. The only issue is their internal
structure or their 'nature'. There is no way in which people might be
systematically mistaken about the world or about their own motives,
unless it is by the reification of concepts or simple pre-reflective
dishonesty .
Habermas embraces psychoanalytic theory as a way of maintaining a
hermeneutic approach while at the same time allowing for the systematic
distortion of and inequality in communication (for an excellent
discussion, see Keat 1981; see also How 1995). The psychoanalytic pro­
cess provides him with his model of an 'emancipatory science', enabling
the individual to become conscious of the forces which affect his or her
 FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY 133

behaviour, to achieve higher levels of understanding and ability in

communication, and to attain liberation from the analyst through
achieving equality in knowledge and understanding. Ricoeur's explora­
tion of Freud is more complex and moves in a different direction. He
subjects to a thorough critique Freud's 'energetics' - his attempt to
explain psychic life in terms of an energy flow and the accumulation and
release of tension - and then builds up an interpretation of psycho­
analysis which combines Freud's insight into the unconscious distortion
of meanings with the traditional hermeneutic concern with conscious
meanings and interpretations. He employs this reading to situate Freud
among religious and other 'metaphysical' attempts by humanity to make
sense of its condition.
I have spent some time discussing Habermas and Ricoeur because
they offer creative philosophical readings of Freud and they both take us
beyond the bounds of analytic philosophy to the field of philosophical
anthropology, which is where I want to go next. They do not destroy
psychoanalysis, but take it beyond itself.

Freud and human nature

I am using the term 'philosophical anthropology' to cover a range of

issues that can best be summed up under the heading of 'human nature'.
What is it that distinguishes human beings from other animals? What is
common to human beings, qua human beings, independently of histori­
cal and social context? It is an area not very popular among sociologists,
its unpopularity being the other side of the tendency to sociological
determinism that I have mentioned before. Sociology tends to see human
beings only as bearers of social and economic relations or as social
constructs.
Ronald De Souza's (1982) 'Norms and the Normal' divides what he
calls 'theories of man' (meaning humanity) into two broad categories: the
biological and the theological. The latter start from an ideal model which
is seen as to be achieved. For the Christian, Christ is the model. The
former derive normative conclusions from what are taken as innate
human properties. In this respect, Freud is interesting because he does
not fit easily into either of these categories. The 'normal' or 'mature'
human being is not naturally so, he or she is the product of a long
developmental process. At the same time no ideal is posited outside of
that process: 'In the developmental vision of the normal human, we
should find both a source of therapeutic values - whether or not these
coincide with conventional values - and a relative measure of worth, in
relation to happiness, of different levels of experience and activity' (De
Souza 1982: 139).
De Souza then goes on very carefully to elaborate what he sees as
Freud's conception of the valued norm. Such a norm is necessary, as it is
134 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

in biology, for any sort of classification to take place, but since Freud is
dealing with humans this inevitability takes on a value component. De
Souza's argument is intricate and I am not sure that I am doing it full
justice, but he seems to argue that we can draw out a rationalist/
utilitarian 'norm' or 'ideal'. The mature human is not driven by irrational
and obscure forces, but is one who has become able to make rational
judgements about him or herself, the world and his or her relationships.
Thus rationality is a criterion by means of which we can distinguish the
neurotic from the non-neurotic; the value is utilitarian in that such
rational judgements enable us to maximize pleasure and/or happiness.
The neurotic, as well as being irrationat determines his or her own
misery.
However, De Souza sees in Freud's work a number of limitations on
such an ideal. The problem of satisfying internal and external needs, for
example, creates complexities and/ or contradictions, as do the relativi­
ties to which Freud's notion of reality is subject. Further limitations are
created by the difficulty of balancing the claims, on the one hand, of the
different elements in the structure of the individual psyche and, on the
other, of the individual and society. Beyond this, De Souza argues that
Freud conflates two forms of teleology - the evolutionary teleology of
the instincts, and the teleology of aims - without providing an adequate
way of translating the one into the other: '[the instincts] psychological
nature demands to be identified in terms of aims. And the specifications
of these aims are either too narrow to provide the far-reaching
explanations demanded of them or are too vague and abstract to show
their organic origins' (1982: 160). Presumably, an example of the former
would be the sex instinct and of the latter the death instinct.
The question of norms and values, of an ideal, is intimately bound up
with the questions considered by philosophical anthropology: they are
implicit in the idea of there being something common to humanity as a
whole. The sort of argument De Souza draws out of Freud can very
easily be drawn out of the early Marx and often has been. It underlies,
explicitly, much Marxist theory and implicitly provides the vision behind
much Marxist political practice. Marx too falls between the theological
and the biological, and the value is derived from a developmental pro­
cess. The defining features of human beings are that they work collec­
tively to transform their environment and thus to transform themselves.
If these features were realized we would live in a free, cooperative,
rational society, which could be called 'natural' for humankind. Yet it is
the end of a very long developmental process through different forms of
social organization. The vision of the rational and free society is present
in early and later Marxist writings. It is explicit in most 'western
Marxism' and arguably implicit even in the work of somebody like
Althusser, often I think implicit in his style despite his explicit rejection
of the ideas. However, that is another argument. Marxist political
practice certainly carries the ideal of rationality: it is a matter of teaching
 FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY 135

as well as action, of making people's experience intelligible to them in

such a way that they are able to change their lives.
So there is a parallel between De Souza's Freud and a dominant
interpretation of Marx. I think both the Marxist and the Freudian
versions fail. First of all, De Souza exemplifies in sharp relief the
inadequacies of the analytic philosopher's interpretations of Freud. These
limitations are revealed in his apparent conclusion that the difficulties he
identifies in Freud's work are deficiencies in Freud's theory. There is a
more subtle epistemological policing going on here, but still a policing.
There is no consideration of the possibility that the deficiencies are a
product not of theory, but of the nature of the world. Yet if we look at
the deficiencies or limitations he discusses, it can clearly be argued that
these are features of the real world, and that Freud's achievement lay in
identifying them. There are, as far as I can see, no a priori reasons why
internal and external needs should be reconcilable, particularly if, at one
level, the internal needs are demanding immediate gratification. Nor is
there any a priori reason why 'reality' should be unproblematic, or why
the claims of the individual and society should be reconcilable. Part of
Freud's argument shows the necessity of a conflict within the psyche,
and part of his achievement is to show the place of the biological and at
the same time the extent of the plasticity of its psychological represen­
tations. As Wollheim (1982) demonstrates in a different connection, the
bodily functions become metaphors employed by the psyche. Once this
process starts, the metaphysical chain - the chain of displacement - is
endless. De Souza is constantly disturbed by Freud's recognition of the
irrational: witness his comments on the central idea of transference,
which cannot be a guide of the 'norm' because of its irrationality.
The failure of the Marxist version is more apparent. The intractability
of the world has been the driving force behind Marxist theory for the
past thirty years. Usually it has been seen in terms of the external
structure of late capitalism being somehow responsible for the continued
failure of left-wing politics. Much work has concentrated on the issue of
ideology and this has taken various theorists towards Freud. But,
interestingly, those Marxists who have taken Freud seriously have either
policed Freud in exactly the same way as the analytic philosophers or
they seem to have lost any political vision. Herbert Marcuse's (1969) Eros
and Civilization, a truly impressive effort in speculative theorizing, sys­
tematically sets out to reduce the significance of repression as a feature of
human life and tends to underemphasize or omit those elements in
Freud's work which point to ambiguity. Even if we accept Marcuse's
conception of a 'surplus repression' - a repression over and above what
is necessary to keep a society in existence - the 'necessary' repression
still involves the conflicts and compromises that are implicit in Freud's
work. In fact there seems to be no real basis for positing a surplus
repression as a social phenomenon. Certainly all that could be gained
from clinical evidence would be something which might be called
136 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

surplus repression in an individual, but is most usefully thought of in

other ways as the workings of the defence mechanisms, and inadequate
rather than surplus repression.
Beyond this, if we take Freud's argument that the unconscious does
not develop with time, then the unconscious desires with which we have
to grapple - including the death instinct - will always be with us. While
there might be more or less satisfactory compromises, there is no reason
to suppose that a solution of the sort envisaged by Marcuse, the vision of
a libidinally free society in which the death instinct has been mastered, is
actually possible. His interpretation of Freud, one suspects, comes less
from a respect for Freud's theory than from a desire to maintain a vision
of a rationalist utopia. This is the case even more clearly with Habermas,
who uses psychoanalysis and linguistics to give a more concrete
grounding to the traditional notion of Reason. In contrast, Juliet
Mitchell's (1976) reading of Freud - in many ways a very orthodox
reading, employing psychoanalysis to explain the oppression of women
- leaves very little idea of how the situation might change or what it
might change towards.
The equally interesting other side of the coin is that there are Marxists
who take seriously what we can call the irrational or pessimistic impli­
cations of Freud. These are precisely the Marxists who dismiss psycho­
analysis, often on the simple grounds that Freud is pessimistic (see, for
example, Brown 1974). It is reasonable to suggest that there is some
significance in the fact that what philosophy feels it has to edit out of
Freud, or reject him for, is the same, whether it be analytic or Marxist
philosophy - and they are not exactly compatible bedfellows. If so many
philosophers do not want it, then it must be important. The question is,
what are we to do with it? From the treatment of Freud in the past it
seems that we must either reject it in favour of a radical utopianism or
accept it, together with a pessimistic conservatism not dissimilar to
Freud's own.
I do not believe that this choice is necessary, but there are implications
for accepting this darker and more difficult side of Freud. We can keep
the goal of a rational society but there needs to be a recognition that
rationality is a constant achievement, tenuously maintained. It is always
underlain by an irrationality, as healing in the analytic process is always
underlain by the irrationality of the transference that can perhaps never
fully be worked through. It means, for example, accepting that there is
always some part of us that will shun work like the plague at the first
opportunity, that there are destructive or simply irrational elements
which are ours by virtue of being human and are not the simple product
of social arrangements. What enables a radicalism - a socialism - to be
maintained is the fact that in principle we should be capable of dis­
tinguishing between forms of social organization which contribute
towards the possibility of effective compromises between the different
forces and those that do not. This in tum means reconceptualizing social
 FREUD AND PHILOSOPHY 137

organizations in terms other than, or rather in addition to, those of

ownership of the means of production and democratic control.
I do not think philosophy can take us any further than this, but that in
itself would be an achievement since, if I am right, most philosophy, of
whatever tradition, takes us in the opposite direction. I am not sure
whether psychoanalysis can take us any further. It would follow from
what I am suggesting that socialists need to think seriously about the
forms of authority and social control which must circumscribe demo­
cratic control, as well as the forms of democratic control which encour­
age the development of our more rational capacities. It might be that in
post-Freudian psychoanalysis we can find metaphors which are useful
for such thinking. Klein's concept of reparation might be one such
example, but that presupposes a society which is no longer divided
significantly along lines of sex, social class and race. Such structural
divisions prohibit any possibility of metaphorically restoring the
destroyed object. The lesson here, if there is one, is about ways of
handling conflict in a socialist society. It might be that Winnicott's notion
of 'good enough mothering' - or parenting - could be rethought in
institutional terms, as could his suggestion that maturity involves the
ability to play with our insanity.
However far we proceed in such an argument, the raw material of
irrational experience will still be there and, as I try to show in Chapters
12 and 13, it will erupt into our theorizing and space must be created for
it in psychoanalytic practice.
 11

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY

When I began this chapter it was going to be a discussion of the way in

which Freud's work has, over recent years, been incorporated into the
social sciences. Not only was the idea interesting; it seemed to fit neatly
into a wider project. As I was starting work on it, however, it became
caught up with an unexpected bout of self-questioning: what on earth
was I doing reading all this? Did I think it was important or even
interesting? What, anyway, could I possibly have to say about it? I had
spent most of my adult intellectual life in the world of theory, from my
schoolboy conversion to Marxism onwards. For a long time I was com­
paratively happy, but for some years I had been slowly moving away
from it, trying to develop other research interests and moving out of
teaching theory and philosophy. As I worked in what was still, despite
the cutbacks, a comparatively large sociology department, such a shift
seemed possible without causing too much disruption. Events then
seemed to be take me in the opposite direction. I discovered that most of
a particularly heavy teaching load, requiring a great deal of time and
commitment of intellectual energy, would involve theory. The strength
of my reaction surprised me: it was as if, as I was walking through the
prison gates, the judge had arbitrarily added another year to my sen­
tence. The fact that I was reading two books by Christopher Badcock
served to emphasize my reaction. He taught me theory in the third year
of my degree course. Despite the fact that I was at my most radical (it
was 1969) and he was clearly a long, long way to the right, I found him
immensely stimulating. I can remember his classes now where others
have faded. The contrast between my early enthusiasm for theory and
my present distaste was marked. It soon became apparent to me that
these extremes were a particularly clear example of a much more con­
sistent ambivalence. I distrust theory and yet I still think it is important
and I still enjoy it; and when it came to planning my teaching, I found
that I was looking forward to it.
My movement away from theory began when I entered psychotherapy
as a patient, and continued when I later started training as a group
psychotherapist. It was indirect: theory was rarely, if ever, the material of
a therapy session, yet as I grew closer to my own life, theory became less
important. Looking back on my life as a student and then as a lecturer, it
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 139

now seemed that theory provided me with a way of living that I did not
have to own and an arena for some fairly basic desires and feelings to be
acted out, but not recognized. In contrast to the more satisfying life
found through therapy, the world of theory now seemed rather barren
and in some ways very much like a prison. I came to read theory
listening for the unspoken human desires and defences that I knew were
there in my own work and suspected must be in everybody else's.
Even when I was at my most disillusioned with theory I found traces
of enjoyment. I still thought theory was important. To begin with, the
arguments that point to the unavoidability of theory seemed conclusive.
We never have a direct access to the world outside ourselves; it is always
mediated by our language, which contains implicit and explicit theories
of what the world is like and how it works. Simply by calling this thing
in front of me a table, I bring into play a whole series of assumptions
about social organization which together would make up a social theory.
Think, for example, about why I call it a table rather than a workbench
or a desk or a barricade; and then think about the complexity of a society
which provides me with these options. On the whole, I tend to think it is
better to know what we are doing or talking about and both useful and
satisfying to draw out and explore the theory we are using, rather like
the use and satisfaction of a good interpretation, which connects and
goes some way to explaining different experiences.
I also thought and still think that rational thought - theory - is a way
to freedom. It is not all powerful but can give us some control over the
things that happen to us, whether a happening is outside or inside. At
the same time, it implies and depends upon the existence, at least the
possible existence, of a community in which everybody has equal access
to information and the tools of argument, ideas, necessary for debate to
take place. Rational thought which is not open to question from those it
concerns, and the theory I am talking about concerns everybody, ceases
to be rational. For the excluded groups it is a matter of assertion, and the
excluded groups themselves become a source of irrationality.
Here, then, was my ambivalence: theory can be a false world where
life can be lived blindly, and at the same time it can be an essential part
of the real world. Perhaps to some extent it has to be both at the same
time. I find that this still appears in contradictions in what I think and
argue. I find that I can shift from defending theory and its place in a
teaching programme to an hostility worthy of the most dyed-in-the-wool
English pragmatist. I can sometimes find myself taking opposite sides in
the same argument. Against some arguments I will defend, for example,
crude Marxism; against others I will attack it. To some classes I will insist
on the importance and necessity of theory and the rewards of the efforts
required to understand it; to others I will insist on its emptiness.
I eventually decided to turn this piece into a review of four books:
Ilrnan Oilman's Freud and Human Nature (1983) and Freud and the Mind
(1984) and c.R. Badcock's The Psychoanalysis of Culture (1980) and Madness
140 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

and Modernity (1983). I kept my ambivalence in mind as I read them, as

well as the requirements of teaching and the needs of students. I thought
about the books in the context of theory itself: what sort of theory did
they present? Was it 'good' or 'bad' theorizing, rather than right or
wrong theory? Did I like it, rather than agree with it? I came to think
about what could be called 'rules of theorizing', a fairly simple list of dos
and don'ts, ways of approaching and using theory for those 99.9 per cent
of us who are not original thinkers. Eventually, they reduced down to
five:

1 Avoid wishful thinking.

2 Avoid monistic assumptions and explanations.
3 Try to argue intelligibly.
4 Avoid logical hatchet work.
S Maintain a respect for available evidence.

These five rules are not commandments. There are occasions when they
ought to be broken. In other words, I am trying to find some rational
justification for my own contradictions. All in all they add up to a
message that is, to say the least, uninspiring: when it comes to theory, sit
on every available fence. Get off the fence only to come down on the
opposite side to everybody else. There is, I think, a unifying theme. The
rational enterprise is harmed if theory is used to avoid things or to
present solutions to problems, contradictions and complexities which, in
the outside world, are unavoidable and - for the moment at any rate -
insoluble. It is also harmed if theory becomes a site for the disguised
rather than the sublimated exercise of destructive emotions. I will come
back to these rules later; for the moment I want to restate some of what I
have already said and elaborate on it.

Theory as psychodynamics

Theory is important; it is one of the ways in which we come to terms

with reality and extend our practical options. This is as true for social
theory as it is for psychoanalytic theory. Rational thought is in its very
nature a democratic process entailing the possibility of a free and open
society. It is also an aspect of personal activity with a psychological
meaning: it can be interpreted in psychodynamic terms. When I engage
in theory, I am deploying a range of defences and projections; I am not
only acting rationally but bringing into play or even acting out a range of
phantasies and displaced early experiences. The same is as true in the
consulting room as it is in the university and the psychoanalytic insti­
tution, although these issues only become a focus of attention in the
consulting room. Finally, theory is part of a social process: the forms of
theoretical activity people engage in and the theories they construct say
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 141

something about the sort of society in which they live. Problems occur
when theoretical work becomes primarily an expression of individual
psyches and social processes rather than an attempt to grasp the nature
of the world.
I want to argue that there is, in the academic world and outside, a
theoretical culture that is best understood as part of what Christopher
Lasch (1980) refers to as a 'narcissistic culture', and to criticize the sort of
theory that loses contact with the world - that becomes 'unreal'. It does
so by representing the world's complexity as mere complication, or else
it tries to impose a one- or two-dimensional order that is not there.
Within this abstracted theoretical world there is a sort of 'acting out', an
indulgence of the irrational under the guise of the rational.
Now what strikes me about this is that there is a lot of it around,
enough to warrant looking at it as a 'social fact' - a product of the sort of
society we live in more than a matter of individual pathologies. It is
possible to argue that over the course of this century European theory
has become increasingly 'idealistic' in the sense of attributing not only
the meaning of the world, but the world itself, to human consciousness
and/ or its artifacts. The first of these seems to me to be clearly appro­
priate: human beings do endow both the physical and social world with
meaning. The second is inappropriate: to endow something with
meaning is not to create it or to rob it of its independent existence - I
might treat my wife as if she were my mother, but this does not alter the
fact that she is not. European philosophy, however, has travelled this
course from Husserl's phenomenology, which was concerned with the
way we construct meaning, to the theorists of structuralism and post­
structuralism, who write as if the world itself were created by language
or discourse. The Dilman and Badcock books that I will discuss later rest
about halfway along this line of development.
Over the last twenty years, there has also been a quantitative growth
in those working in theory. This is certainly true in British and American
universities, and it cannot be attributed simply to the expansion of
higher education in Britain - the physical growth of the education
system does not determine which ideas become more popular. Whereas
once this type or level of theory was largely confined to philosophy
departments, it is now present in strength in sociology and literature
departments and can be found among psychologists, psychoanalysts
(since Lacan), political theorists and historians. I think it is also true to
say that particularly in Britain, and to a marginally lesser extent in
America, the growth of theory has been at the secondary level of
exposition and elaboration. The Badcock and Dilman books all fall into
this category.
This philosophical development in western thought has often been
noticed by Marxist thinkers, who usually attribute it to the dynamics of
modem capitalism. The concentration of capital and increasingly bureau­
cratic and large-scale organization serve to restrict individual autonomy.
142 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

People become isolated and see themselves alone as the source of

meaning. As the process continues they lose direct contact with reality
and see the world as imposed on them and out of their control, the
magical product of mysterious forces such as language. I have con­
siderable sympathy with this approach, but I think a more sophisticated
analysis is possible. I was struck by a comment Christopher Lasch (1980)
makes in The Culture of Narcissism. He draws on the same social pro­
cesses to argue that the dominant personality structure and the principle
behind many aspects of culture in late capitalism is narcissism. Modem
bureaucratic society prevents the growth of independent characters able
to make moral judgements of their own. This, too, is a familiar theme in
the modem sociology of culture, but Lasch is able, by using psycho­
analytic theory, to make more coherent links than usual between the
wider social structure, family structure and dynamics, and personality
structure.
The comment that drew my attention was this: 'Lacking any real
intellectual engagement in the world - notwithstanding a frequently
inflated estimate of his own intellectual ability - he [the narcissist] has
little capacity for sublimation' (Lasch 1980: 85). It seems to me that this
applies not necessarily to the theorists, about whom I know next to
nothing, but to the theory I want to criticize. It is expansive and com­
prehensive. Even in the comparatively moderate exercises of Oilman and
Badcock we have a systematic definition of maturity and human nature,
presumably universally applicable, from the former, and a world history
from the latter. I will suggest that under the guise of rational thought
much of it implies a narcissistic omnipotence; and in the forms of
argument, a destructive rage. It combines this with another feature of
narcissism commented on by Lasch: a parasitic dependence on master
thinkers. These thinkers are embraced and rejected with a consistency
similar to promiscuous sexual relations. In sociology during the last ten
years, for example, each generation of postgraduates has produced its
own new master. The first I remember from my own postgraduate days
were Harold Garfinkel, the American founder of ethnomethodology, and
Claude Levi-Strauss, the French structuralist. The most recent is
Foucault. In between, many others have put in an appearance. In the
background, Marx and Freud stand firm and there are regular returns to
'close readings' of their work.
If I am criticizing narcissistic theory, then perhaps the 'rules' I found
myself formulating could, in a very elementary way, be seen as an
attempt to strengthen the theoretical ego, on the one hand against a
theoretical id demanding the immediate gratification of a totalizing
theory which has all the answers and excludes opposition; and on the
other against a punishing theoretical super-ego which stipulates that if
the answer is not there, then nothing is. I do not, of course, imagine that
theory can be separated from the psychodynamics of the theorist or from
the social processes in which he or she might be involved. The problem
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 143

seems, rather, to be one of distinguishing between a theory which subli­

mates unconscious processes in the attempt to understand the world,
and theory which simply acts out those processes.
Each 'rule' identifies an aspect of theoretical work which can be seen
as a 'symptom': the use of a particular defence or the expression of a
particular phantasy which avoids contact with the world that theory is
trying to understand. I shall look at each in tum, using examples from
the Oilman and Badcock books and sometimes going beyond these to
look at other popular theoretical approaches. I shall conclude by specu­
lating a little about the more immediate institutional settings which
perhaps reinforce narcissistic theory, and some implications for psycho­
analytic theory and practice. Before I move on to this, however, a
summary of the books themselves is appropriate.

The books

Since I shall be very critical of all four books, perhaps I should say at the
outset that I enjoyed them all and learnt from them. They are stimu­
lating, interesting and clear - in fact it was Oilman's admirable clarity
that led me to think about the significance of unintelligible theory.
Freud and Human Nature (Oilman 1983) consists of a critique of Freud's
conception of sexuality and his theory of the oedipal stage and goes on
to look at his conception of morality and human nature, developing in
the process an alternative theory. Freud and the Mind (Oilman 1984) is an
extended philosophical discussion and critique of Freud's conception of
the unconscious, tackling many of the familiar philosophical problems
surrounding the idea. He is arguing against what might be called 'crude
Freudianism' and in favour of what he regards as a more adequate
psychoanalytic conception of human nature and the human mind.
Freud's crudeness is seen in his attribution of a simple causal role to the
sexual instinct, in the primacy he gave to the sexual instinct, his mech­
anical explanations in terms of energy flow, the determinism implicit in
Freud's use of the idea of the unconscious and his conception of morality
as forced on individuals from the outside under pain of social
punishment. Oespite a criticism I shall be making later, Freud and the
Mind contains one particularly good discussion of the free willi
determinism issue. Oilman argues in both books for a conception of the
human which allows for free will and does not involve simple causal
explanations, and for a conception of human nature in which there is a
place for a natural or innate morality. He bases many of his arguments
on the work of Melanie Klein and the British object-relations theorists,
and it is evident from the nature of his argument that he is eventually
concerned with morality and free will. At the end of Freud and Human
Nature there is a model of a 'mature personality' in which the destructive
side of human existence has been overcome by the moral side; the life
144 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

instinct has conquered the death instinct. For the mature person, infantile
conflicts have been resolved; there is a preponderance of good feelings, a
freedom from destructive and self-centred emotions, a lack of concern
with defences, no fear of feelings, an inner security, deep convictions,
genuine interests, and self-discipline.
Turning to Christopher Badcock's books, the first, The Psychoanalysis
of Culture (1980), takes literally the identity of ontogeny and phylogeny
posited by Freud and argues that we can quite simply psychoanalyse
a culture in the same way as we can psychoanalyse an individual.
Badcock elaborates Freud's notion of the murder of the primeval father
and the building of civilization on the resultant guilt, using modem
evidence from anthropology to reinforce his case. Culture is identified
with the institution of the super-ego, preferably in the individual rather
than the state, and he traces the development of the institution through
different cultures, concentrating, as did Freud, on the interpretation
of religious beliefs. Thus animism corresponds to primal narcissism
and the pre-oedipal phase, totemism to the oedipal period, polytheism
and monotheism to the latency period, Catholicism and Protestantism to
adolescence and psychoanalysis to maturity. Each modem stage rep­
resents a further 'return of the repressed', a coming to terms with
primitive fears and phantasies. He does not shrink from the implications
of this:

It is my belief that if psychoanalysis ceased to be merely a department of

modem medicine and became instead a system of education and the basis of
culture, the universal neurosis which we call 'civilization' would have been
largely resolved and the psychoanalysis of man would have been brought to a
provisional, but successful conclusion. (Badcock 1980: 253)

In the second book, Madness and Modernity (1983), the crisis of modem
culture is seen in terms of a failure of the individual super-ego, a sort of
cultural regression. In some ways - at least in his analysis of the cause of
the crisis - he is not far from Christopher Lasch, but he is at the opposite
end of the political spectrum.
Modem society is seen as a sort of cultural regression: the individual
super-ego has been weakened and there is a tendency for the functions
of the super-ego to be taken over by a strong state. Socialism tries to
carry this to the extreme, producing dependent individuals with no sense
of morality. The democratic state contributes towards this development
in its welfare functions; on the other hand, left opposition to the state is
seen as a refusal to accept the authority of the father, a refusal to develop
through the oedipal stage. Rather strangely, I think, he attacks the dated
bete rouge of student revolutionaries, and I had the rather odd experience
of being dragged back to a persona of nearly twenty years ago.
Both pairs of books are integral parts of a wider project of inter­
pretation and analysis; these have been rather brief summaries because I
am less interested in the content than in the form of theorizing, the
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 145

methods of argument each author uses. This takes us back to my rules.

As I suggested earlier, each rule can be seen as referring to a theoretical
'symptom', a suggestion that something is being acted out rather than
sublimated in the theory. I will now look at each of these symptoms.

The rules

Wishful thinking
By 'wishful thinking' I mean the tendency to construct a theoretical
world according to a usually implicit idea of what the world should be
like. Since theory offers a way of ordering the world, a way out of
confusion, it also offers a way of avoiding confusion where confusion, or
at least complexity, actually exists. I think there is a tendency to wishful
thinking in Oilman's work, in both theoretical and moral terms.
While I agree with many of his arguments, I find myself suspicious of
what he is doing. He uses the language of philosophical correctness,
arguing that he is correcting Freud's errors and confusions. In other
words, he is separating the wheat from the chaff and, of course, dis­
posing of the chaff; it is the familiar practice of trying to get rid of part of
a theory which, for me, hints of wishful thinking. I think that there
certainly is a determinist aspect to Freud's work and I agree that the
arguments against any thoroughly determinist conception of human
action are convincing. Nevertheless, in his 'crude' aspects Freud was not
simply confused or mistaken but trying to grasp something that is as real
as that dealt with in his non-determinist work, and I find his determinist
or crude side helpful.
For example, it makes intuitive sense to me to see depression in terms
of energy flow: the withdrawal of energy from an external object and its
refocusing on internal work and, in the case of a depression which is
blocked, in terms of wasted energy. Similarly, it seems to me that the
classical Freudian understanding of some neuroses, which does give
priority to the sexual instinct and its moulding through the oedipal stage,
is useful. If nothing else it grasps the 'drivenness' of a symptom which is
experienced as determined and beyond one's control, and is a useful way
of decoding its meaning. My own inclination would be to argue that
these aspects of Freud's work are useful but not the whole of Freud - to
dethrone them without executing them. Oilman tries to execute them
and thus risks losing a vital aspect of experience and a useful means of
understanding it.
The removal of undesirable theoretical features of Freud's work is
paralleled by the proposition that we can get rid of the undesirable
moral aspects of human life. Outside the arguments our destructiveness
remains, as do those aspects of our behaviour which can be understood
through Freud's determinism. Perhaps we could see Oilman's attempt to
146 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

remove these aspects as a rationalizing defence against depression, the

depression which comes with recognizing that our omnipotence is a
fantasy and that in fact we do have the capacity and the desire to
destroy.
At the same time Oilman's argument is edging on something positive,
something which is a necessary part of all theory. In the same way,
perhaps, that a good interpretation should draw on the 'healthy' or
'mature' or 'pro-change' aspects of the patient, so a good theory indicates
some way forward; this is built into the very idea of theory entailing
human freedom. There is a narrow line between constructing a utopian
vision which can become a source of intimidation (I certainly found
Oilman's model of maturity intimidating, perfect food for a punishing
super-ego), and holding on to a necessary utopianism as a 'rough guide'
and constructing realistic possibilities of change.
1 suspect that as individuals and as a society we need our utopianism,
but perhaps we should not take it over-seriously. The important point
here is that we do not need a utopian morality or the theoretical asser­
tion of freedom to find a way forward: hope surely lies rather in our
ability to contain our destructiveness, to live with our conflicts and with
that which seems determined within us.
I ought to make it clear, as well, that I would not for one minute
dismiss Oilman's work for this reason. In many ways it is admirable and,
as I have already indicated, there is a very clear and careful discussion of
the free willi determinism issue in Freud and the Mind. All I am saying is
that there is this tendency towards wishful thinking, towards breaking
the necessary connection between theory and the world, a break which
in other thinkers can seal off theory into a self-contained world of its
own. Wishful thinking in theory, then, can be seen as the unrestrained
indulgence of infantile omnipotence - as important to theory as infantile
omnipotence is to a reasonably successful individual development, but
something which has to be modified considerably, if not left behind
altogether.

Monistic assumptions and explanations

By monistic assumptions I mean assumptions that the world is somehow
composed of one type of phenomenon. Classically, variants of material­
ism and idealism tend to make such assumptions: in the one case that
human beings and human action are not significantly different from the
natural world; in the other that the world of humanity and nature is in
effect a product of ideas. The history of philosophy is full of difficult
dualisms which constantly reappear: mind and body, humanity and
nature, subject and object, word and thing. Sociology, for reasons I am
unclear about, has always had a tendency to produce thinkers who claim
to have solved these problems; the more modest present their solution at
book length, although I have occasionally seen it done in a paragraph.
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 147

The most recent variant of this is post-structuralism, perhaps less

among the original thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, but certainly
among those who have taken up the ideas in English - those whom
E.P. Thompson (1978) rather unkindly referred to as the 'lumpen­
intelligentsia'. What seems to have happened is that what was originally
a methodological ploy in linguistics has been turned into a universal
truth. The original ploy was fruitful: by 'bracketing off' the relationship
between a word and its external referent and treating language as a
system of conventional signs, considerable advances were made. It
became possible to understand the meaning of a term from its rela­
tionship to surrounding terms.
There is, of course, no entailment in this idea that the word does not
have a referent, that it does not point to some external object, and
certainly no implication that we cannot know an external object more or
less adequately. However, these implications are all now taken as
established and we are left with language alone, which is seen as actually
producing whatever world we live in. The monistic assumption here cuts
off a good part of reality in the same way as, for example, crude econ­
omistic Marxism cuts off the world of experience and ideas. In post­
structuralism, this tendency has recently been clearly documented and
criticized (Crews 1986) and I do not want to spend much time on it here.
A monistic assumption about the world usually implies a monistic
explanation which, in the case of some forms of Marxism, for example, is
quite explicit: everything is seen as determined by the economic level of
organization. Such monocausal arguments are equally restrictive.
Christopher Badcock manages to produce a psychoanalytic version of
monistic explanation in both his books. His monism appears clearly in
the following:

We have seen that the decisive adaptive advantage in big-game hunting was
in large part economic, that hunting was so much more effective a way of
getting food compared with foraging. But it would be quite wrong to imagine
that material forces operate in some occult way, as proposed by Marx, and that
economic systems and the technology that go with them have any other origin
than the mind of man. When the Wright brothers invented the airplane, they
did not do so because of any crudely materialistic determinism, they did so
because flight provided these two notably celibate young men with one of the
most obvious of . . . all sexual sublimations. And if Marxists will rejoin that
they could only have secured the technological and material wherewithal to
undertake such a sublimation in the context of capitalism, I will reply that such
is undoubtedly the case, but that capitalism, as we shall see in a later chapter,
is itself just such a product of psychology and of a religious ethic which is
based on it. And what is true of the Wright brothers is equally true of the
origins of stone technology and of all other inventions and discoveries in the
economic sphere. (Badcock 1980: 67-8)

This, of course, is pure assertion. If economic considerations were deci­

sive in the development of big-game hunting, then they were decisive
148 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

and material forces have their effect. Even allowing for the fact that the
Wright brothers never got their end away, one wonders about all the
others involved in the development of powered flight; and it does seem a
possibility that the development of aviation after the Wright brothers
had to do with its military potential, its ability to get people from A to B
quite quickly and transport goods to their markets. I would not dispute
the fact that we imprint our minds on the surrounding world, but it does
not follow, as Badcock would have it, that the external world is formed
and governed by our minds, conscious or unconscious. Much of the time,
I suspect, we are investing a largely independent outside world with
meaning.
This sort of monocausal explanation acts like blinkers, leaving unseen
all the other things that go on. It leads straight away to a particularly
obsessive form of wishful thinking, striking me as equivalent to the
unconscious refusal of the Rat Man (Freud 1979) to recognize that his
father was dead. Theoretical work becomes a matter of demonstrating
that the single beloved cause is behind all phenomena, however unlikely
that seems and however strongly the evidence points in the other
direction. Marxism is particularly prone to this. There is the familiar
crude economic determinism and a more sophisticated form where it is
not a single cause which is defended but the theory as a whole which is
at stake. Any theoretical approach which adopts a monocausal position
takes on the air of an evangelical religious belief; there are attempts to
convert the heathen and innumerable ad hoc hypotheses are formed,
some coming close to excuses. There is this tendency in psychoanalysis
too, and when Marxists or psychoanalysts get caught in this position
they become subject to the Popperian criticism: the theory cannot be
proved wrong, it does not respond to evidence, and it is akin to religion.
Yet I actually enjoyed The Psychoanalysis of Culture; I found it interest­
ing, instructive and useful. I learnt more about Freud's theory of culture
than I have from any other source and I gained an insight into cultures
of which I am largely ignorant. It reminded me of my first contact with
Marxism, which was via the more mechanical of Engels' expositions.
Despite the simplicity and dogmatism of the arguments, it opened up a
new world. In Badcock's case, I had had contact with that world
beforehand, but a number of things fell into place. It could be that from
the viewpoint of learning and teaching the simple, monocausal models of
the world do open up areas of understanding; the problems occur when
these are not developed and abandoned, rather as individuals might run
into problems if they do not abandon childhood conceptions of sexuality.
The holding on to total, monocausal explanations and assumptions
seems to me to manifest something like infantile omnipotence.
This, however, should not be allowed to hide the fact that good,
simple causal explanations are available. Any insistence on multi­
causality can become a defence against knowledge, the sort of defence
which, as a patient in the consulting-room, I might begin, 'Yes, but . . . '
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 149

and go on to point out all sorts of situational factors affecting my

difficulties. I am inclined to think that imperialist competition was a
sufficient cause of World War I and that the other contributory factors
worked largely on the result of the first. Yet I know people who would
dispute this as a matter of principle, making, as it were, a religion out of
multi-causality just as there are people who make a religion out of
agnosticism or atheism.

Intelligibility
I feel ambivalent about this. Theory often is difficult, attempting to adapt
an established language to say something new, something which goes
beyond what in any particular case is the 'given', and trying to grasp
something ambiguous. It frequently involves stylistic experimentation:
the attempt to grasp something through form as much as content. In
addition to all this, I am often haunted by the thought that I live in a
glasshouse. As I said earlier, neither Oilman nor Badcock is unintel­
ligible. However, if there is a tendency for theory to pull away from the
outside world and become blind to it, then a complicated language and
style can seal it into its own hermetic universe.
Theory is difficult precisely because it goes beyond a description of
what is available to us through perception and everyday commonsense
and tries to grasp processes and relationships that are neither simple nor
one-way. A theoretical concept is not a simple word. 'The unconscious'
in Freud's work, for example, is more than the simple collective noun
which Oilman defines it as. When Freud uses the term he is certainly
referring to one or more of a range of phenomena, but the word is also
implying the properties that he assigns to the unconscious (its timeless­
ness, freedom from the laws of logic, etc.) and its processes and rela­
tionships to the other elements of the psyche. This is a different and more
meaningful use of the word, which we do not encounter in everyday
speech; it therefore often puzzles people at first. There are indeed some
very difficult conceptual languages in existence, not least in the natural
sciences.
I think there is a point where a difficult conceptual language can turn
into merely a complicated redescription of what we already know. The
history of sociology is full of such complicated descriptions: Parsons'
structural-functionalism, Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and, again,
much recent post-structuralist work. Often, very complicated pieces of
jargon can be translated back into clearer language which actually adds
to the sense:

The concept of 'discursive practices' is part of a theoretical position which

seeks, from a materialist perspective, to forge the conceptual tools which will
allow the analysis of specific practices, their inter-relations and their effec­
tivities within contemporary social formations. The concept signals the
importance of examining the relations which obtain between discourses and
150 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

the practices in which they are always inscribed. It points to questions such as:
what are the conditions of production of discourses within social fonnations?
What are their effectivities? How do discourses interrelate to produce specific
systems of meaning and practice? How are the contradictions produced
through the intersections of different discourses articulated, minimized or
extended? (Adlam et al. 1978: 123-4)

Which, in translation, means: we are Marxists interested in the various

relations between ideas, actions and social structure.
Why do such complicated languages appear? In part, I think it is the
desire for recognition that in our society often appears as a desire for
status, the same desire that can tum my local odd-job man into a
buildings repair specialist. Sociology, as the youngest of human sciences,
is perhaps especially prone to this tendency and the mastery of such a
language marks one out, whether the result is respect or hostility. I have
a sense, however, that there is more to it: that it has to do with making
the world safe and bringing it under control, a phantasized omnipotence.
The dangerous complication of reality is elevated into the comparatively
safe complication of language (indeed, for post-structuralism, reality is
language). Once the language is mastered it becomes possible to do what
you like in this world; the language becomes a screen behind which all
sorts of things may be acted out and omnipotence and narcissism are
'satisfied'.

Logical hatchet work

The last thirty years have seen a remarkable increase in the philosophical
sophistication of theory, particularly radical theory, coming initially with
the translation of Althusser's work. A number of logical razors are now
deployed and the assumption, usually, is that if a logical fault can be
found in an argument then that argument can have no relation to reality.
Behind this is an assumption that reality itself is logical - an assumption
which we must make in a loose form in order to seek knowledge at all,
but which, if it becomes an iron law, simply avoids the complexity of the
world. There is a strong case to be made that we can know some things
about the world; there is little evidence that we can know everything.
The strong assumption of rationality presupposes that we can know
everything, and this involves oversimplifying the world.
My favourite example of the misplaced use of the logical hatchet
comes from structuralist Marxist theory. Althusser (1969) developed a
concept of 'relative autonomy', intended to carry the idea that political
and ideological processes are neither epiphenomenal to nor completely
independent of the economic structure of a society. Rather, the economic
structure sets limits to what is possible in terms of politics and ideas, but
within these limits both may develop independently. I have always
found this idea useful: a comparatively sophisticated formulation which
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 151

manages to get rid of simple economic determinism and the equally

simplistic idea that politics and ideas are independent of economics, and
which also avoids using the empty term 'dialectical' to describe the
relationship. The logical removal of the concept runs as follows. The
concepts of determination and autonomy are contradictory and mutually
exclusive; therefore the concept of 'relative autonomy' is nonsensical; it is
usually replaced with an assertion of complete autonomy based on
'discourse theory'.
There is probably a way round this criticism by specifying aspects
which are determined and other aspects which are autonomous. How­
ever, I am criticizing the idea that even if the argument were correct, it
would provide a reason for abandoning the concept of relative
autonomy. What happens is that we lose a concept which, however
contradictory, goes some way towards indicating a complex and possibly
contradictory reality and replaces it with a fairly simple idea that is
clearly inadequate. This sort of argument is frequently used by philo­
sophers against Freud: if something is unconscious, then we cannot know
it; therefore Freud is talking nonsense when he claims to describe the
unconscious. Dilman verges on the use of logic alone to dispose of the
elements of Freud's work that he does not like, often claiming to be
'correcting' Freud's philosophical errors and 'clearing up' his confusions.
This is the theoretical equivalent of the patient who insists on seeing
things in black and white and has immense difficulty with ambiguity and
ambivalence.
There is a clear connection between this sort of argument and the
theme of omnipotence, and in my experience there is something destruc­
tive in this use of logic. It is a destructiveness often projected on to the
opponent who is being logically destroyed: the 'wrong idea' is seen as
the source of destruction and must therefore itself be destroyed. Perhaps
there are castration associations: the logical knife must be wielded
against the opponent to protect my own vital parts, and I often find an
odd connection between my dislike (fear?) of this type of argument and
my desire to employ it. In any case, it certainly seems to imply the
unconscious statement: 'either I am everything or I am nothing'.
There is, I think, a psychoanalytic variant of the logical argument. The
connection lies in the feeling behind it and the desire to exclude, rather
than in the form of the argument itself. It involves ruling an idea out of
court through interpreting the opponent's motives rather than replying to
the argument. Badcock employs this in Madness and Modernity. Criticism
of Freud by thinkers such as Adler, Jung and Tausk as well as modem
critics is discounted as purely destructive, as symptoms of unconscious
anger, envy, jealousy and so on. Such criticisms are seen by Badcock
simply as attempts to discredit Freud's integrity. The end result is similar
to the result of logical hatchet work: an idea is ruled out of court and the
possibility of further rational argument disappears. Here again
destructiveness is projected on to the destroyer and then destroyed.
152 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

One of the advantages of theory, then, seems to be that destructiveness

can be acted out under the guise of rational argument or psychoanalytic
interpretation. Sublimation would involve the deployment of logic in a
different way: the attempt not to rule an idea out of court, but rather to
bring ideas into play. Such logical arguments can, for example, be used
to good effect against monistic positions. There seems to me to be a fairly
straightforward argument against the assumption I used as an example
earlier - that language creates its objects. If this were so, it would seem
to rule out the possibility of being mistaken, yet the autonomous world
is constantly forcing its presence upon us in the form of mistakes. Our
regular experience of knowing the world better and avoiding mistakes
would not be possible, yet it evidently happens. This does not imply that
the assumption should be dropped. There is certainly a sense (or several
senses) in which language creates its world; it is also the case that
through language we can gain some knowledge of the outside world.
Similarly, the psychoanalytic interpretation of ideas can deepen our
understanding of those ideas, not eliminate them from discussion. For
example, if perhaps we see the conflict between Freud and Jung in terms
of a conflict between father and adolescent son, we can deepen our
understanding both of the interpersonal dynamics of the conflict and,
through the contextual understanding thus provided, of the ideas
themselves. Erikson's work on psychohistory (for example, 1973b) seems
to me to do this very well. To understand the psychodynamic context of
an idea or theory does not make the idea or theory wrong.

A respect for the available evidence

In some ways, this sums up everything that has gone before. The
unavoidability of theory makes it a nonsense to try to chain it down to
empirical data; yet, at the same time, some form of empirical data must
always be the focus of theory. If we can know only part of the world,
and the world is changing, there is always counter-evidence to any
theoretical proposition. Assuming that it is noticed, there will also be
some manipulating since a theoretical framework, because of its
necessity, cannot just be abandoned. However, we need to be conscious
of our manipulation and alert to what we do not know.
This, of course, becomes impossible when a theory blinkers itself to
significant areas of the outside world and attempts to establish an
exclusive superiority. Some theorists behave like the comedian, furiously
packing too much into a small suitcase; as soon as one side is locked, the
other bursts open; or the bottom falls out and remains unnoticed while
more and more is pushed into the top. Others are illusionists who
produce a larger suitcase and maintain that it is really the same one. In
many ways modem Marxism strikes me as the larger suitcase, despite
many claims that it is the same one (the claim taking the form of a close
reading of Capital ).
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 153

Dilman comes close to producing a larger suitcase. There is always a

danger in writing about psychoanalysis without first-hand clinical
evidence (although I do not think this should act as a disqualification). In
the absence of analysands and their resistances and their ability to show,
in various ways, that we have made mistakes, it becomes possible to
construct idealistic goals in direct contrast with Freud's pessimism, and
claim an adherence to Freud.
Badcock, on the other hand, tries to push everything into the same
small suitcase. In The Psychoanalysis of Culture he manages to produce
something like a world history in a couple of hundred pages. Looking
through his bibliography, I wondered whether this was made easier by a
comparatively heavy reliance on psychoanalytic resources - vast
numbers of relevant anthropological and historical works must be
excluded, and an awful lot hinges on the habits of Gelada baboons.
Insofar as I was only scantily aware of this way of looking at history, I
again found it useful. Vast panoramic sweeps, ignoring all the messy
detail, are helpful ways into a field of knowledge, as are monocausal
arguments. However, I am not sure that such works should pretend to
be anything more; they are rather like the courses in some American
universities with one semester on the history of civilization. When he
deals with modem society in Madness and Modernity, however, the
inadequacies of his monism and his treatment of empirical data become
evident. He produces a political analysis which, in range and subtlety, is
rivalled only by the Conservative Party Chairman, Norman Tebbit. My
point is simply that the complexity of modem society and politics cannot
be grasped on the simple model of the oedipal stage.

Conclusion

I have tried to look at a number of aspects of theorizing as ways in

which unconscious phantasies are 'acted out', and where possible to
juxtapose these to uses of theory where perhaps the same phantasies can
be sublimated in useful ways. Thus all the 'rules' I listed at the beginning
ought to be broken at some stage. The common theme in the discussions
so far is that the theory provides a means for establishing, at least in
phantasy, an infantile omnipotence which protects itself by a destructive
rage and a denial of real complexities, ambiguities and contradictions. I
suggested that there has been a quantitative increase in this type of
theory over the past decades and that this can be seen as a symptom of a
cultural malaise, along the lines embodied in Lasch's work. By way of
conclusion I want to look at some more immediate institutional bulwarks
of narcissistic theory and indicate some of the implications for
psychoanalytic organizations and practice.
Perhaps my first point should be that I think theory does actually lend
itself particularly well to a narcissistic use. Simply because it goes
154 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

beyond what can be seen and experienced empirically, it offers a way of

denying undesirable aspects of the empirical, and that is something we
must all enjoy doing. In a culture which facilitates and encourages such a
tendency, it is no surprise to see theory flourishing. However, it seems
arguable that certain institutional arrangements promote and reinforce
theoretical narcissism. I began this chapter by thinking about life in an
academic institution, and there is perhaps something especially suitable
to narcissistic theory in the nature of our universities. Outsiders have
commented to me on the peculiar viciousness of academic life suffi­
ciently often for me to think that it really might be particularly extreme,
although anyone who has read Janet Malcolm's work (1981, 1984) on the
psychoanalytic establishment must realize that it is not unique to
universities.
Entering an academic career (at least when there are such careers
available) is a matter of choice, but a choice initially taken during ado­
lescence, often, I suspect, an adolescence delayed in Britain by the
intensity of pressures on school students. If adolescence is a time of
reworking and rechoosing options available in the first years of our lives,
then theoretical academic pursuits can be a way of avoiding an
unpleasant reality. This avoidance is particularly easy in the exclusive
atmosphere of student life. While for many this might be a vital time of
growth before entering the outside world, there are those who can
choose not to re-enter that world, and there is very little about university
life which forces the outside world on to people. Even in the present
situation of external threats the solution has seemed, for most, to be a
matter of going in the same direction as they were before, only faster and
more intensely, building up the publications and reputations that might
protect their jobs.
This enables the growth of isolated subcultures that support the sort of
largely empty conceptual languages that I discussed earlier. Such a
subculture could work to protect learning, knowledge and culture. I do
not know how narrow a line stands between this function and an empty
self-gratification, but there are signs that the ideal combination of the
two functions is becoming more difficult to achieve; that the tendency to
self-gratification in theory is outweighing the tendency to produce and
establish knowledge and culture; that an organic link with a wider
reality is being severed.
One would expect this to be less the case with psychoanalytic insti­
tutions. They at least have a workface in their connection with those who
tum to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to seek help. However, there
seem to me to be at least three factors which encourage theoretical
narcissism in psychoanalytic institutions, and the incidence of splits and
the bitterness of internal arguments stand as witnesses to the existence of
the tendency. The first is that, given the nature of theory, it is easy to see
how it can be taken up and used blindly as a weapon in the normal
rivalry and competitiveness of institutional life; it is always easier to feel
 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THEORY 155

one is defending knowledge rather than one's own interests. This can be
reinforced by the simple desire to be good at one's job and the security
which that brings. In an excellent short article arguing for an eclectic
approach in psychotherapy, David Zigmund (1986) describes well how
this can operate in a speculation about a doctor who, he suggests,
unnecessarily and unwittingly deterred a patient from a therapy which
could have been useful:

It is likely that he was a therapist of precise and rigorous training and strong
conviction who 'knew' what her psychopathology was and the only effective
therapeutic stratagem to be employed; all else would be an avoidance or
dilution of these central truths . . . His training had made him skillful and
dexterous and many of his colleagues admired and reinforced his articulate
commitment. (Zigmund 1986: 304)

Second, psychoanalysis, in Freud's writing and since, had always had

a tendency to grand theory, to claiming to explain not just a limited area
of individual and group psychodynamics but the nature of society and
history. Freud described sociology as psychology writ large, and while I
would not want to claim that psychoanalysis cannot throw an interesting
light on many areas of social life, to claim it as the basis of sociology or
history, which is clearly what Christopher Badcock is doing, is over the
top. Yet there has been a tum to psychoanalysis in several disciplines,
particularly among radicals, which seems to carry with it the hope that
all problems will be solved. The present writer has been involved in that
tum, and perhaps this chapter is part of it. There is what one acquaint­
ance has called a 'psychoanalysis and culture industry', to which the four
books discussed here very much belong, that has arisen as part of the
proliferation of narcissistic theory.
Third, and finally, there is the tendency in psychoanalytic institutions
to exclusivity and a degree of dogmatism. One may speculate that
perhaps unconsciously Freud and not Bion was the first psychoanalyst to
discover the 'flight-fight' group and to deploy the processes involved to
ensure the survival of psychoanalysis. The tendency of modem analysts
to tum their backs on the rest of the intellectual community and con­
centrate solely on the accumulated body of clinical evidence provides the
basis for narcissistic theory to flourish. The grain of truth in the work of
virulent critics like Gellner (1985) comes in their identification of the
parallels between psychoanalysts' organizational behaviour and theore­
tical debates and the Church and theological debates.
So psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic organization too can encourage
narcissistic theory. Largely, I suspect, we are dealing with processes
beyond an easy conscious control; it is nonetheless important to be
conscious of the dangers and of what we might be doing. It is perhaps
also important to try to draw out the strands of my argument and
construct at least a sketch of a non-narcissistic use of theory. The infantile
impulses remain the same; the difference is that they are put to the
156 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

service of a project other than their own immediate satisfaction. The

original omnipotence can be modified. The desire to know everything
can be coupled with a realization that such knowledge is impossible, and
it follows that the broad theoretical frameworks we produce can be no
more than working maps, to be changed and abandoned as we develop
them.
A sense of modesty is appropriate to any theoretical enterprise,
together with the realization that we will never be defending an absolute
truth. It is important to argue about theory; but the narcissistic rage
which often lies behind such argument can also be modified. It can be
directed, as I tried to show when I discussed logical hatchet work, to
opening up possibilities rather than closing them off. While we need
some intellectual security - we cannot simply surrender all ideas and
somehow give ourselves up to the contradictions and complexities of the
world - we can afford to recognize gaps and difficulties without
collapsing into confusion. It is safe to think in a language which is
intelligible to others and to hold open the possibility that we might be
wrong.
Given this, it is a fairly straightforward matter to justify the breaking
of the rules I listed at the beginning . Wishful thinking can suggest or
even open up courses of action, ideas for social change, as long as we
remain able to recognize their failure and the impossibility of utopia.
Monistic assumptions and explanations can open up and develop new
ways of looking at the world, as long as we realize that once we have
established a way of looking at the world it will have to be modified to
take account of all sorts of other things. It can be important to develop
new theoretical languages, as long as we remain aware of the necessity
to talk to other people. Logical argument is vital, as long as it opens up
theoretical possibilities; and it might even be permissible to ignore
evidence to develop a coherent theory, as long as we realize that we
have eventually to take account of the evidence and modify the theory
accordingly. The important point is that it is possible to think openly,
without being a failure and without being destroyed.
Returning to the main themes of this book, I have tried to show how
theory 'contains' and expresses different emotional and experiential rela­
tionships to the world and these relationships may be seen as opening
up or closing down our ability to understand the world. As I have
suggested before, psychoanalysis can attempt to close down the experi­
ence of experiencing and thinking and that is what I will be looking at in
the next chapter.
 12

WHAT 'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING?

What I want to do in this chapter is to look at the way in which the

meaning of psychoanalytic ideas changes when they are considered
outside the consulting room. Something that appears in day-to-day
therapeutic work in the consulting room to be a benign and helpful
activity can appear in the context of the wider culture in a rather
different way. We can think we are doing one thing, and we can actually
be doing that thing, but we can also be doing something else, which we
do not know about. This should be no problem for those familiar with
the unconscious, but what I am suggesting is that there is also a dimen­
sion of the unknown contained in the wider network of social relation­
ships, the sort of society in which we work and out of which we develop.
My suggestion is that we should at least be aware of how this wider
society might transform the meaning of what we do.
I want to try to make my point through looking at what has happened
to the way in which we have thought about and dealt with death and
mourning over the last century or so. My suggestion is that there has
been a change in what I would call the social organization of mourning,
an attempt to organize the process of mourning, and perhaps even of
dying itself, in such a way that the real pain and loss is denied, that they
can even be seen as 'good things' . At its extreme this becomes a mapping
in advance of the mourning process as something through which people
should be taken; notions of originality, of each grief and mourning as
being unique, individual and unpleasant seem to disappear.
A number of social processes are at work in this change. At an
everyday level, I can see its effects among my undergraduate students
and in experiential groups that I lead. Much of the literature on death
talks about a twentieth-century taboo, even the 'last great taboo', the
subject about which nobody talks. Socially approved mourning rituals
have all but disappeared; the bereaved are ignored, or expected to be
back in a normal life as soon as possible. I am sure that this is true for
some people, but I have noticed that it is certainly not true for others.
When I lecture on death and mourning to social science undergraduates,
there is a rush to write essays on the subject; it is one of the most popular
topics, more popular than sexuality. In the experiential groups, members
often enthusiastically embrace death as a metaphor for the ending of the
158 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

group, sometimes, I think, too enthusiastically, as if they have never felt

the fear of death. When I check the library catalogue, the number of
books about death, grief or mourning seems to increase monthly. We can
add to this the growth of bereavement counselling, of Cruse and of the
hospice movement, none of which points to a reluctance to talk about
death. So perhaps something else is going on.
One method of thinking about it is in the way that Foucault (1984)
discusses sexuality. We tend to see the Victorian period as one in which
nobody talked about sex, but Foucault points out that it was a period in
which talk about sex exploded. More was written than ever before, by
doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, etc. It was a period when
sexuality was catalogued, classified and brought under the control of
professionals, and Freud was part of this. It was also the time when
sexuality became what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls 'seques­
tered' - split off from the rest of social life and given its own specialized
space governed by experts. Perhaps the same thing is happening to
death and mourning. I will be looking shortly at the way in which the
psychiatric profession and then the therapy and counselling professions
have attempted to establish control over mourning. My argument is that
this has been at the cost of an understanding of the real complexity of
grief and mourning at a theoretical level, if not in everybody'S practice.
Further, unless we are careful, our insights become caught up in a
process of social control in which our work is geared, without our
knowing it, less to healing, to the integration of the whole individual, or
to freeing the individual to take his or her own decisions than to
producing the sort of personality that is most suitable to contemporary
society.

Classic theories of mourning

It is tempting to think of changes in theory as developments in theory -

that somehow we are getting closer to the truth as time goes on.
Sometimes such a view is right, but not necessarily so. The deeper we go
into the social sciences, the more likely that the changes in our theory
might be the result of the changing social conditions in which we work
rather than a growth in knowledge. Indeed, in psychoanalytic theories of
mourning I think it is possible to identify a reduction in knowledge
content in favour of the 'positive' view of mourning that we can find so
often today - a view which underemphasizes the straightforward
strength of the pain that is involved and glosses over the depth of guilt
and our inherent ambivalence. This is summed up in a quotation from
the review by Social Work Today of Colin Murray Parkes' Bereavement
(1987), cited on the back cover of the book: 'He has helped us all to
accept our share in the creative use of suffering.' It seems we should
always look on the bright side! Others have noted the same process in
 WHA1'5 HAPPENING TO MOURNING? 159

relation to dying itself. Anna Witham (1985) talks about the idealization
of dying in health professional training and the difficulties that students
have when they come up against the real thing; Robert Kastenbaum
(1982) has made much the same point.
The earlier psychoanalytic theories of mourning - of Freud, Abraham
and Klein - all contain a distinction between normal and pathological
mourning and in this sense can be seen in Foucault's terms as illustrating
a process of a profession carving out an area of power for itself. But part
of my case is that their distinction is qualitatively different from that in
the work of more recent writers. Mourning for Freud (1984) involves a
withdrawal from the outside world and a concentration of energy on the
one who has been lost. This is accompanied by painful feelings of
dejection and an inability to find a new love object. We work through
mourning, with great expense of energy, by repeated reality testing and
finding that the loved one really has gone. We withdraw - de-cathect -
our feelings from the lost one until we are ready to find a new love
object. The basic model is an energy-flow system. Energy is invested in
the loved one, who dies or vanishes. The energy is then withdrawn into
the mourner where it stays for a shorter or longer time until the loss is
accepted, when it is reinvested in a new love object.
Freud argues that we are familiar with this experience, we know that it
will pass and therefore we take it as normal. He went on to identify an
abnormal or pathological mourning - melancholia - in which the
mourner identifies with the lost loved one and directs the criticism and
anger which belongs to the lost one to the mourner. Melancholia, then, is
a state in which we have taken the lost loved one inside and kept him or
her there, attacking ourselves rather than the person who is lost.
In later developments of the theory, we can see the tenuousness of this
distinction in such a way as to suggest that the attempt to maintain it is a
result less of understanding what is happening than of establishing the
mourning process as an area of professional expertise and control.
Abraham (1927), for example, makes the point that the process of
internalization of the loved one is a normal part of mourning and in fact
the 'successful' mourner is able to internalize the lost one as a good
object. The melancholic is unable to achieve this because hostility to the
loved one was so great. This moves us closer to the internal world and
its complexities and the normal/pathological now hangs on the degree
of hostility in the relationship - or perhaps more accurately in the
mourner.
These ideas are developed and rendered more sophisticated in Klein's
work (1986) and the idea of pathological mourning changes again. To
begin with I will take her example of bereavement (a Mrs A after the
sudden death of her son) and examine in particular her first reactions.
Mrs A begins by sorting out letters, keeping her son's and throwing
away the others - disposing of the indifferent and hostile, the bad
feelings. This is seen as an attempt at restoring her son, to keep him safe
160 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

inside her, an obsessional mechanism used as a defence against the

depressive position; the obsessive action wards off the bad feelings. For
the first week there was an (incomplete) withdrawal, a numbness and an
absence of dreaming - Mrs A usually dreamt every night. Her first
dream brought associations with an occasion when she had recognized
that her brother was not as wonderful as she had thought, an event that
was experienced as an 'irreparable misfortune'. The event was also
associated with guilt, as if it were the result of her own harmful wishes
against her brother. Behind these harmful wishes and 'very deeply
repressed' was a desire to punish her mother through causing her to lose
her son; she was jealous of her mother for possessing such a son. This led
her to a death wish against her brother: one of the deeper dream wishes
was 'my mother's son has died and not my own'. This was followed by
sympathy for her mother and sorrow for herself. Her brother had, in fact,
died and besides her earlier sorrow at this event she had, unconsciously,
experienced a sense of triumph. Klein argues that some degree of Mrs
A's ambivalence to her brother, 'though modified by her strong motherly
feelings', had been transferred on to her son and entered into the present
grief.
The first defences, then, were the manic defences against grief: denial
and triumph. In Mrs A's internal world the grief was transferred to her
mother, with the denial that they were one and the same person. Klein
goes on to describe the process of movement into sorrow and recon­
nection with the world, and then the retreat into manic triumphalism
and denial. The whole to-and-fro movement is seen as involving the re­
establishment of the good internal objects with which the mourner can
identify.
I have set out this example at some length because of its focus on the
complexity of the psychological processes of mourning, involving feel­
ings with which it is not normally associated: jealousy, triumphalism and
a desire to punish. Again it also blurs the line between normal and
pathological mourning, rooting the latter in a deeper pathology, which in
tum is rooted in the earliest stages of life and cannot be 'known in
advance'. It seems to me that Klein moves away from thinking about
pathological mourning to the pathological personality. In fact Klein is the
theorist who least fits into my argument and the interesting thing is that
the most recent developments have steadily stripped away the emphasis
on the complexity of the internal world, the less acceptable feelings, at
the same time as they have established mourning as a subject for
professional intervention and control.

The development of contemporary theory

The most recent and dramatic changes in the theory have taken place
over the past three decades, beginning with two papers by Bowlby in the
 WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING? 161

early 1960s (1960, 1961) and followed by Parkes (1972). This decade saw
the appearance of a number of other books on death and mourning (see,
for example, Gorer 1965; Hinton 1967) and the beginning of the con­
temporary discourse on the subject. The work of both Bowlby and
Parkes emphasizes the aetiology of mourning and focuses on 'environ­
mental failure', rather than the dynamics of the internal world. Parkes'
book marks the claim of psychiatry over this realm, arguing now that all
mourning is pathological and should be regarded as a mental illness.
Rather than put forward arguments in favour of such a position, he deals
with arguments against it.
The first is the 'labelling' argument: if we call mourning a mental
illness, we stigmatize those to whom the label is attached. Parkes'
argument is that if we do not call the bereaved mentally ill for this
reason, we are reinforcing the stigmatizing connotations of the term. This
is fair enough if we accept that mourning is a mental illness. Much more
depends on his second argument. He says that people object on the
grounds of the normality of mourning, but measles is normal and
nobody would suggest that it is not an illness. Grief, he argues, like
physical illness, brings discomfort and disturbance of function:

On the whole, grief resembles a physical injury more closely than any other
type of illness. The loss may be spoken of as a 'blow'. As in the case of
physical injury, the 'wound' gradually heals; at least it usually does. But
occasionally complications set in, healing is delayed or a further injury reopens
a healing wound. In such cases, abnormal forms arise, which may even be
complicated by the onset of other types of illness. Sometimes it seems that the
outcome may be fatal . . . I know of only one functional psychiatric disorder
whose cause is known, whose features are distinctive, and whose course is
usually predictable, and that is grief, the reaction to loss. Yet this condition has
been so neglected by psychiatrists that until recently it was not even men­
tioned in the indexes of most of the best known general textbooks of
psychiatry. (Parkes 1972: 25-6)

In trying to define grief in terms of presenting symptoms, Parkes settles

for the pining or yearning that he immediately relates to separation
anxiety and Bowlby's theory of attachment needs. Parkes identifies three
stages of grief (the presenting symptoms changing with each one): first a
numbness; then pining, then disorganization and despair; recovery only
beginning after this last experience.
In the world of the health professional, progress can easily become a
matter of having more illnesses added to the list. On the face of it,
Parkes' argument is plausible and humane - in fact it is plausible and
humane. It also attempts to extend the power of the psychiatric pro­
fession in a way instantly recognizable to readers of Foucault and it
changes the way we think about mourning in a fairly radical way.
One question that emerges is where do we draw the line - should we
regard the divorced, the redundant, or anybody suffering from an
162 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

upheaval in their lives as mentally ill? I would suggest that this

problem has been solved by the growth of psychotherapy, which brings
almost any human state within the range of treatment without having
to medicalize it.
Now what happens in Parkes' account of mourning is that it is seen as
less of an internal psychological process of conflicts and reorganization
in the internal world and the emphasis is more on the emotions, the
external presenting symptoms. By placing it in Bowlby's framework we
are moved closer to a quasi-behaviourism. I do not think that what
Parkes says is wrong - it is less complete than either the Freudian or
Kleinian accounts of mourning, seeing it in terms of cause and effect
rather than as an internal processing of experience.
In more recent psychoanalytic accounts of mourning two tendencies sit
side by side. On the one hand there is an implicit or even an explicit
recognition of the implacability of death, the normality of grief and the
never-endingness of mourning. On the other there is the desire to iron all
this out, tum it into a positive experience and avoid any depth investi­
gation of the internal world.
A set of three papers in a recent issue of Group Analysis is a good
illustration, containing accounts of the work of a group of therapists
from a hospital in Edmonton, Canada, who have developed a pro­
gramme of short-term psychotherapy for loss (Lakoff and Azim 1991;
Piper and McCallum 1991; McCallum et al. 1991). In the first paper
Lakoff and Azim (1991) talk about the contemporary denial of death and
the absence of a recognized place for mourning. They also point to the
difficulties in understanding what successful or unsuccessful, normal or
pathological mourning might be. Quoting a study by Osterweis et al.
(1987: 16), they maintain that length of time is no indicator of patho­
logical mourning, but rather the quality and quantity of reactions over
time. They also suggest that a change that seems to indicate a 'healthy'
recovery in one person could mean the opposite for another. For one
person, throwing him or herself into work may be avoidance; for another
it may indicate a new flow of creativity.
In the second paper, Piper and McCallum (1991) survey the studies of
group interventions in mourning. They begin by lamenting the lack of
involvement of health professionals in providing group services for the
bereaved. They suggest a classificatory schema involving two dimen­
sions, initial and transitional, and two types, normal and pathological.
Help is usually sought in the transitional stage and if the mourning is
normal it is mainly a matter of support and practical intervention.
Pathological mourning may occur at either stage and may take the form
of too much or too little grief - in terms of intensity or duration.
However, although they recognize that duration can mean from two
months to never and individual differences influence progress through
mourning, they then argue that such complication 'may be partially
resolved by considering the debilitating impact of the loss in terms of
 WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING? 163

symptomatology and impaired functioning when determining the type

of mourning process occurring' (Piper and McCallum 1991: 365).
The third paper is an account of a study of the effectiveness of twelve­
week groups for those caught in pathological mourning according to a
standard diagnosis which, presumably, is not derived from the previous
discussion:

Most patients received a DSM-11 1 Axis 1 diagnosis (usually affective adjust­

ment or anxiety disorder) and about one quarter received an Axis 1 1 diagnosis
(usually dependent personality). (McCallum et al. 1991: 377)

The groups were tightly controlled:

Two experienced therapists each led four of the eight groups. They followed a
technical manual and attended a weekly seminar where conceptual and tech­
nical issues were discussed and audiotapes of sessions were played. The
theoretical orientation of the twelve-week, time-limited groups was psycho­
analytic, and this was checked by conducting a process analysis of seven
sessions from each group using the Psychodynamic Work and Object Rating
System (Piper and McCallum 1991) which confirmed that the therapists were
active, interpretive and group-focused, as intended. (McCallum et al. 1991:
377)

In these papers, we seem to have reached the point where it is simply

assumed that professionals should be concerned with the mourning
process and their absence is to be remarked upon. Despite all the reser­
vations, a standard diagnostic tool is used to distinguish pathological
grief and there are manuals by which to guide a closely regulated
therapeutic process. It is clear from the account that while the therapist is
listening closely to the group, he or she knows in advance what sort of
interpretation he or she will make. It is mapped out according to a view
of the appropriate emotions and their expression, rather than on an
intimate understanding of the different inner worlds of the group
members.
We find here a continued degradation of our understanding of
mourning: pathology is defined by a standard measure and 'correct'
feelings are laid out in the discussion of the groups. Anger seems OK but
not hatred; guilt might be appropriate, but triumph is not mentioned.
There is, if you like, a taming of grief and we know what the patient
should be doing. There is, further, a move beyond the identification of
emotion as a sign of pathology to 'functional impairment' which hands
over the definition of 'pathology' to a society which, as many have
pointed out, allows no recognized space for mourning. It is a not very
large step to the attempt at control and limitation of mourning set out in
a recent handbook for healthcare professionals as the aims of a
therapeutic assessment of bereavement:
164 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

1 To facilitate and consolidate a satisfactorily resolving of bereavement.

2 To provide a framework for specific preventive intervention with bereaved
who are at high risk of malresolution.
3 To provide a framework for specific intervention with pathological
bereavements so that these may possibly be diverted to a more adaptive
course. (Raphael 1984: 347)

The job becomes getting the machine back on the road.

Psychotherapy as social control

My argument concerns the way in which our conception of mourning

has changed, especially over the last thirty years. We have lost the depth
that can be found in the work of Freud and Klein, whose papers on
mourning have been seminal sources for psychoanalytic thought. The
development has been away from the dynamics of the inner world
towards classifications based on surface criteria and the development of
schemata, programmes for mourning, stages that people have to be
moved through. These changes have gone along with the growth of
bereavement counselling and division of death and mourning into a
separate area of life - its 'sequestration'. I want now to think about the
reasons why this has happened. Put as simply as possible, my argument
is that as psychoanalytic ideas enter the wider culture they get taken up
and transformed - some aspects get lost and others emphasized. Thus
the creative dimensions of mourning are emphasized and we are led to
think in terms of resolution. It seems to me that this is not a normal
human resistance to the horror of death - other societies and our society
at other historical periods have thought differently - it has more to do
with the sorts of changes we are living through. As these ideas get
reinterpreted in this way, so they come to fill a social function which is
different from the apparently straightforward activity of helping people
with which, at first sight, they are associated. My argument here is that
the ideas and the practices they generate become a form of social control,
the therapy becoming a play of false selves of which the practitioners are
unconscious.
We can see the forms of thinking in the wider culture at work, for
example, in the attempt to produce programmed treatments for patho­
logical mourning. One way of looking at it is the development of a
therapeutic programming of people to deal with new and different
situations. Giddens (1991) argues that the modern forms of self-therapy
and popular self-help books are precisely providing formulae for dealing
with life in what he calls 'late modernity'. It is possible to push this a bit
further. Over the last decade or so the computer has provided new
metaphors for talking about human beings. Whereas in the 1 960s
psychology departments might have been full of rats and pigeons and
 WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING? 165

mazes, they are now full of computers and their object of study is
thought of as a computer. The move from behaviourism to cognitive
psychology has not been a movement towards intellectual depth. In this
context, if some of the insights from psychotherapy can be simplified and
standardized, they can be seen as programmes for the human computer.
The growth, in the USA, of twelve-step programmes for practically
everything is an extreme example. This is of course reinforced by con­
temporary concerns with the economics of healthcare, the need to be
seen to have a product to sell and a product that is successful. There
might not be much demand for a therapy that promises only a return to
'normal human misery'.
The place of the market in healthcare systems is a symptom of a much
wider and deeper change that sociologists refer to as 'late modernity' or
sometimes 'postmodernity' (see Giddens 1990; Harvey 1989). Harvey
argues that the economic basis is the development of factory production
which has moved to the third world, and the rapid transferability of
money capital, which has meant a radical reorganization of the labour
market in the west and intensified competition. Large-scale systematic
production has declined, with rapid growth in part-time or short-term
contract labour. 'Careers', while not disappearing, are rarer and more
difficult to hold on to and the emphasis in production and supplying
services is on high turnover and short-term processing. In this context
goods and services that are used up as soon as they are supplied are
ideal (and of course psychotherapy can be seen as such a service). If we
think of this in terms of the individual and individual experience, we can
see that it can generate a great deal of anxiety.
These changes have speeded up a process that began with the growth
of large, urban complexes, a process of external isolation and internal
fragmentation. In Kohut's (1971) work on narcissism, he comments on
the change in family structures since Freud was working - from a
situation where there was too much contact between parents and
children to one where there is too little. This has been accompanied
through this century by the steady loosening of community ties,
increased geographical and social mobility (the latter both up and down)
and the decline of what we might call 'holding organizations'. I have
already mentioned the family and the local community but we can add
to those, in this latest rush of fragmentation, business and service
organizations (such as British Rail and the NHS), trade unions and
professional associations as self-governing bodies - all the collective
entities which could stand between the individual and some much
wider, anonymous entity we call society. Giddens talks about the devel­
opment of abstract systems, the anonymous juggernaut of modernity, at
least as it appears from the point of view of the individual.
What happens in such a situation, it seems to me, is first the process of
mourning becomes not just a model for major life changes, as it was with
the classical theorists, but also a model for everyday life. The modem
166 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

therapies that Giddens discusses discourage people from trying to make

lasting attachments and urge a living for the moment only. Psycho­
analysis does not go as far as this, and I doubt that it ever could, but its
contribution to the contemporary denial of pain and complexity lies in its
approach to grief and mourning. We can tum loss into 'growth' or
'creativity', and perhaps we do not need to think about the loss. In a
society which is increasingly frightening, we can think of change as
always positive, when in fact it is arguable that it is increasingly
destructive - of relationships and lives.
It is arguable that psychotherapy in contemporary society runs the
danger of becoming an abstract system, an institution providing
formulae for living as psychotherapists try to proselytize in newspaper
columns and popular books. The difficulty, of course, is that as psycho­
therapists we share the same anxiety as everybody else. We have the
same threats to our livelihood; our relationships fail; friends and
colleagues move away, or we move away from them; our jobs are
threatened or our private practice comes under strain. We seek our own
formulae for living - in fact I suspect that many of us undertake training
to try to find such formulae. Perhaps it is a sign of good training that the
students completing it are more anxious about their lives than they were
at the beginning, but - going by public pronouncements - there seems to
be a large number of therapists and counsellors in possession of some
sort of truth. Returning to grief and mourning, it seems to me that we
need comparatively little experience to realize its individuality and the
sometimes astonishing way in which a person finds his or her way
through it, to a different life or to their own death - or the equally
surprising way in which they might decide not to move on from
mourning. I suspect that an 'authentic' therapy should respect decisions
which, according to an abstract framework, are pathological and perhaps
drop the distinction altogether.
This means taking risks, recognizing that we do not possess formulae
for living - or for dying - and that we are as isolated and threatened as
everybody else. The alternative is that psychotherapy becomes an
encounter not between therapist and patient in a joint search for meaning
but between two false selves, the therapist hiding behind his or her
formulae or programmes which emphasize only one side of our lives, the
patient adopting that false self in an attempt to please and reassure
the therapist. If mourning is the discovery of the meaning of what has
been lost, in all its ambiguity, ambivalence and complexity, then this
discovery is prejudged and fenced in if we set out already knowing what
should be happening. The more anxious we are, the more we will need
to cling on to such formulae; the more our patients will become like the
anxious infant trying to protect a more anxious parent by being what
the parent wants. In such a situation, our work can seem very successful.
On the other hand, we can help the patient to suffer. If we see success as
therapists only in enabling creativity and happiness or in being effective
 WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MOURNING? 167

in some tangible and possibly measurable way, if, in short, we see

ourselves as selling goods on a market to attract customers or to please
management, we are developing a false world which will collapse only
too easily in the face of our critics.
 13

CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY

By way of conclusion, I want to tum again explicitly to the issue of

identity and bring together some of the heterogeneous themes of the
chapters in this book around suggestions about how we might begin to
understand our experience of identity. Many of the ideas I try to develop
here originate in psychoanalysis but I am not trying to develop a
'psychoanalysis of identity'. Even less am I trying to develop a sociology
of identity - various versions of such a sociology already exist and I
devoted Chapter 1 to criticizing them. Rather I want to try to elaborate a
number of ideas which might be able to sensitize sociologists to the
experience of those they study, not only when they are talking about
identity but when they have anything to say that impinges upon indi­
vidual human being and acting. At the very least they should act as a
warning against simple sociological determinism and assumptions of
rational action based on cognition.

The experience of psychic space

One accompaniment of the development of object-relations theory in

psychoanalysis has been an implicit and often explicit view of an inner
life which has it own 'space'. Indeed the psyche is often referred to as a
container and the emotional function of the parent and of the therapist is
seen as a matter of 'containing'. It is this inner space that the 'normotic'
character denies and to begin I want to try to explore how we might
conceive of 'inner space'. Freud left us with a notion of a psyche within
which three structures engage in a necessary conflict with each other.
This by itself is sufficient reason to prefer the more contemporary term
'psychodynamic' to 'psychoanalytic'. When we try to understand a
person's experience of the world, we do not discover what is happening
through analysis, through breaking experience down into its component
parts, we understand it as a dynamic process in which external and
internal stimuli are in constant interaction with each other. We find in
this internal space not only the drives and their conscious and uncon­
scious representation, but also our internal objects, those immediate
family members or caretakers whom we have 'taken in' during the
 CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY 169

process of our psychological development, integrating or failing to inte­

grate them with the other structures. Our emotions arise in the interplay
between our experience of the outside world, and the unconscious
phantasies we construct out of the contents of our internal world, and
our conscious, more rational attempts to make sense of what we do and
how we are in the world.
We are inevitably engaged in some sort of relation to this internal
world. The 'normotic' character denies its existence and tries to limit its
contact only with the rational and conscious elements of experience,
those related more or less directly to the external world. One could
perhaps make a crude contrast with the narcissistic character who sees
the external world only in terms of inner fantasies and needs which are
felt to be of overriding importance. Although these are opposite ways of
dealing with the internal world they are both reactions to the anxiety
generated by its existence. On the one hand we can be afraid of the
depth, complexity and ambivalence of our desires, afraid of what we will
find within ourselves if we look too hard. On the other hand we can be
afraid of finding that our experience of the outside world is mistaken,
that the world is not as we would like it to be. Both reactions, the
normotic and the narcissistic, are ways of closing down the complexity of
our inner world and the difficulty of dealing with its relationship to the
outer world.
Psychodynamic therapy works with an implicit set of values around
the notion of the inner world and inner space. I think it is worth drawing
out some of these because they can provide a useful standard for a
critical approach to social identity and a standard for social criticism.
Elsewhere (Craib 1994) I have attempted to define these values in terms
of ambiguity and difficulty, contradiction and negativity. Trying to think
about the same issues in terms of psychic space, they all point to the
importance not only of recognizing an inner world but of allowing its
complexity and recognizing the value of the way in which it frustrates
our desires. One way of looking at psychotherapy is as a way of
'enlarging' psychic space and at the same time recognizing its limits, a
modification of both the normotic and narcissistic sides of the
personality. On the one hand, the patient learns that he or she has
aspects of personality of which he or she has been unaware, and that are
on initial discovery disturbing or frightening. The 'enlargement' of inner
space is a matter of becoming more conscious of these parts of oneself.
On the other hand the patient becomes aware that he or she is not
responsible for the actions of other people or the state of the world
around them. This releases energy which can be devoted to more
practically effective action and understanding of the world.
In Chapter 2, I contrasted Lukacs' notion of experience with that
implied in contemporary 'identity politics'. In terms of psychic space, the
distinction is between a contradictory experience which pushes people
into a deeper exploration of their world and their relationships and what
170 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

might be called a unitary experience of self which closes down internal

psychic space and can be seen as an attempt to avoid the difficulties
implicit in complex and contradictory experiences of oneself and the
world. Simmel (1971) talked about the complexity of our experience of
the modem world and of the necessity to defend ourselves from it nearly
a century ago, but it seems to be an insight which has been lost many
times since then.
One of the ways in which we try to protect ourselves from the anxiety
of living is by trying to identify ourselves with something, by trying to
make our social identity into our identity. If, for example, I take my
gender as a basis for my identity and join one of the various men's
groups which promise to enable me to discover my 'real' masculine self,
or alternatively to rid myself of my more traditional, macho or chauvinist
elements, then I am being offered a 'new' self which will carry all sorts of
satisfactions. I will be relieved of those parts of myself of which I do not
approve, which I find uncomfortable, and I will receive the praise and
support of those who are embarked upon the same course. I will not be
plagued with self-doubt or, if I am trying to tum myself into a 'new man',
I might find myself plagued with the delicious self-doubt which I will
take as a sign not of internal trouble but of my salvation.
This search is for narcissistic satisfaction and involves a different form
of politics to that based on alliances and conflicts between different
interest groups. The latter is always a matter of negotiation and com­
promise around ideas and policies. Identity politics seems to be largely a
matter of being recognized and political argument is a matter of making
a case to be recognized: I am a victim of traditional sex-role stereotyping;
I am bravely struggling against such stereotyping; I am searching for a
real self which is beyond question or doubt.
From this perspective perhaps the sociologically interesting questions
are not about social identity at all and especially not about the social
construction of identity, but about the nature of the social conditions
which encourage individuals to 'close down' their psychic space around
one or another social identity and the social conditions which encourage
an opening up of psychic space in an attempt to explore oneself and
one's relationships. I would suggest that the more socially isolated
individuals become and the more their world is subjected to change, the
more they are to seek reassurance and relief through a social identity
experienced in such a narcissistic way.
The paradox of such a search is that it is inherently unstable on both
an intrapersonal and an interpersonal level. The only reason I seek to
identify with my social identity (rather than, for example, use it for my
own purposes) is because I am aware of internal complexities and
contradictions to such an extent that I find it difficult to tolerate the
anxiety they provoke. In order to try to suppress an awareness of the
complexities, I have first to be aware of them; in other words I can only
try to achieve an identity in this sense if I am already aware that I cannot
 CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY 171

achieve it. The question then becomes one of for how long I can fool
myself, and the harder I try the clearer the signs that I have failed. This
psychological relation to oneself is what Sartre (1957) called 'bad faith'
and can be understood in either psychoanalytic or existential terms - in
both cases it is a matter of trying to be what one is not and cannot be.
The failure on an interpersonal level comes through the parasitic
nature of narcissistic attachment. If a particular and limited experience of
the world (my truth as a man) is at the basis of my identity, then it must
be confirmed and shared at all times, yet no two people have the same
experience of the world. The more I get to know my new comrades, the
more I realize how I differ from them and the more I see in them the
things that worry me about myself which I am trying to avoid. The
temptation is always to find a new and purer group where I hope to
avoid these difficulties. Such fragmentary narcissistic tendencies have
always been present in conventional politics, usually at the far right or
left of the political spectrum, but they seem to be at the centre of identity
politics.

Identity and the self as container

In interactionist terms I have been talking about a situation in which the

'1' attempts to become the 'me', to close down internal space. There is
however another sense in which one can be said to have an identity and
this lies in the ability to say '1' - the ability that Jenkins seems to put
down to simple physical continuity. When I use the word '1', I am doing
more than simply asserting my habitation of a body: I am adopting an
attitude to the world and to myself. I can talk about myself as a complex
object, as containing (in interactionist terms) several or many 'mes' or (in
psychoanalytic terms) a number of levels and objects. I am constantly
trying to reorganize these contents in conscious and unconscious narra­
tives, in which I both control and am controlled by different elements. It
seems to me that it might be useful to think of identity, this '1', as what
organizes the contents of the containing psyche. A part of this 'I' is the
rational, thinking self: I am aware of different aspects of myself, different
desires, perhaps even contradictory desires, and I am constantly trying to
organize myself to take or avoid decisions in the world. In this sense, the
more I become aware of myself, the greater my internal psychic space,
the more free I become in my dealings with the world.
However, the rational capacity alone does not allow me to take
decisions; they arise in the peculiar conjunctions of rational thought and
the flow of feelings and unconscious processes. My ability to be aware of
myself, my conflicting and possibly unpleasant desires, the various
complexities and contradictions of my real identity as opposed to my
social identity, will vary from time to time and place to place. The 'I'
here is fulfilling the role that Freud gave to the ego. Again it seems
172 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

reasonable to suggest that the greater the external anxieties and the
external demands placed upon me, the less able will I be to tolerate and
think about internal pressures and demands. Even at the best of times,
however, such demands and pressures are difficult to deal with.
In this sense of identity, a threat occurs when the contents of the
psyche seem likely to break free of the organizing 'I' - when I am being
flooded by my emotions, when my ideas seem to take on a life of their
own that I cannot control, when I feel pulled in different directions or
immobilized by mysterious forces. I might describe this as a feeling of
losing control, falling to pieces. There might be a point where I am
unable to contain the experience at all and I resort to violence against
myself or against others. The paradox of many suicide attempts, and
perhaps of many suicides, is that they are attempts to preserve one's
identity. In more traditional psychoanalytic terms, 'ego-strength' is
important here, but that strength consists in the ability to tolerate strong
and distressing emotions. The sociological questions in this context must
include not only the present wider social environment but also family
structures and child-rearing practices which enable the development of
ego-strength.
At times of pressure a normal process of emotional intersubjectivity
can become apparent. It is common for psychoanalysts to talk about
projection as a defence mechanism and Kleinians will talk about a
process of projective identification. Projection is a psychological operation
by which I fail to see some threatening or unpleasant part of my own
make-up but recognize it readily in other people. Such a mechanism can
be seen as the basis of homophobia. If I am anxious and threatened by
my own homosexual desires, then I can deal with them by projecting
them into other people and dealing with them there by persecuting and
attempting to suppress them. Projective identification is a more profound
form of projection. Instead of just seeing the feared quality or emotion in
another person, I behave in such away as to lead the other person to
experience that quality in themselves.

Linguistic and emotional intersubjectivity

The dominant sociological understanding of intersubjectivity seems to be

that it is a matter of shared ideas or shared language. The latter has been
most recently taken up by Habermas (1992) who sees the linguistic tum
in twentieth-century philosophy as solving the traditional problems of
the philosophy of consciousness. The traditional problem is that of
solipsism - how can the analysis of my consciousness move to the
understanding of the existence of other consciousnesses, or how can an
analysis that starts with my consciousness even establish that other
consciousnesses exist. To begin with a shared language into which we
are all socialized but in terms of which we can individuate ourselves and
 CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY 173

find separate identities overcomes this problem and Habermas is par­

ticularly enamoured of G.H. Mead in this respect.
Much of what he says is important but he accepts unquestioningly
Mead's cognitive bias. I would suggest that psychoanalysis offers a basis
for understanding intersubjectivity as primarily an emotional phenom­
enon which actually determines, in the sense of limits or enables, our
ability to communicate with a shared language.
Psychoanalysts would argue that we can see in the relationship
between the baby and its carers the earliest and most primitive way in
which we communicate our ideas to other people. It is the way in which
the infant sends and the adult receives messages about its being in the
world. When a baby cries, gurgles, screams, squeaks, moves in a certain
way, it produces a feeling in the caretaker. The baby clearly cannot say
what it needs, the caretaker often cannot put his or her own responses
into words but through combinations of intuition and trial and error
responds in a more or less adequate way.
Throughout our lives we are giving and receiving such emotional
messages; it is the basis of the transference and countertransference on
which the process of psychodynamic therapy centres (Casement 1985,
1990) and most psychoanalysts would regard it as a process of uncon­
scious communication. It is something that we come into contact with in
our everyday lives - we must all have emotional reactions to each other.
Sometimes we are more aware of them than others - perhaps when we
meet somebody with whom we find a mutual sexual attraction or when
we meet somebody to whom we take an immediate dislike - and at
other times we are aware of them as a sort of background noise to our
encounters, perhaps a barely noticed feeling of comfort or discomfort.
Sociology has little conception of these emotional interchanges. The
closest I have found is Goffman's (1971 ) discussion of signs 'given off' in
interaction, over which the self has no control.
Now as integral to this emotional communication, I would argue that
there is an element of projective identification. There is a sense in which the
baby communicates its needs by putting its feelings into the carer. As
an extreme example, a baby that is panicking for whatever reason,
screaming, throwing itself around, tensing, arching and stiffening its
spine will induce a fear - a panic - in the carer to which the carer has
to respond more or less adequately. This would be a matter of trying to
contain one's own panic while trying to continue to hold the baby and
comfort it as steadily as possible. My ability to comfort the baby would
depend on my ability to contain my own panic. Much more is involved
in these early relationships (see Klein 1987) but in the context of my
present argument this is the most important.
If this sort of communication is possible, then it seems to presuppose
that by virtue of being human we share a range of emotions with which
we not only communicate to each other but which we share with each
other. I 'hold' the baby's panic so that it can restore its own calm. It is a
174 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

common experience in group psychotherapy that feelings are passed

around and divided up between group members - one member will be
particularly sensitive to anger, another to depression and so on. The
group will try to establish an emotional division of labour which enables
each member to avoid the feelings that he or she feels most difficult. I
have come across situations where one person carries nearly all the
strong feelings in the group and then becomes the group's patient in
whom the other members try to 'cure' the feelings that they find difficult.
It is common to find a similar sharing out between partners or family
members.
In everyday interactions, this mutual interpenetration of identities
might remain hidden and at a comparatively low level of intensity. The
greater my internal space and the stronger my ego, the less need I will
have to lodge a difficult part of my identity in another person. However,
no one person can contain the whole of human experience and some
level of interpenetration of identities is necessary for individual survival
and mutual understanding. To talk about identity as a category for
organizing relations misses entirely this sense in which each of us is
actually part of the other, whether we like it or not. Identity politics
implicitly breaks this fundamental human relation and is perhaps the
appropriate politics in a market dominated society where dependence is
feared and despised and independence a valued aim. There is a further
paradox in this argument, in that the more pressure I come under, the
more I try to hold on to my identity by putting parts of it into other
people - the parts I find most difficult - but keeping that relationship
profoundly unconscious.
On a more abstract level its seems to me that linguistic intersub­
jectivity is dependent on this more fundamental emotional intersubjec­
tivity which enables the identification necessary for language to be
learnt. First we feel, and then later we learn to speak about our feelings.
The recognition of emotional intersubjectivity takes us to the life world
explored by Merleau-Ponty. The sociological questions here are again
about what social conditions can enable the exploration of this inter­
subjectivity and its institutional development.

The emergence of the unthought

So far I have talked about the experience of identity in terms of psychic

space; how the attempt to 'become' an externally given identity closes
down psychic space and inhibits processes of thinking and feeling. I have
talked about the self as a container and identity as the ego-structure that
is consciously or unconsciously engaged in trying to cope with the
internal life that takes place in our psychic space, and I have talked about
identity as being implicated and depending upon a profound emotional
intersubjectivity. All of these aspects are implicated by the use of the
 CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY 175

pronoun '1', and 'I' can be aware of and talk about some of things that
are going on within my psychic space and between myself and the
people around me. But there is also much there of which I am not aware
and this appears not just in Coffman's sense of something unintention­
ally 'given off' but as a colouring, an aura (in a metaphorical rather than
a metaphysical sense), a feel. If I listen to somebody talking I can hear
things which are not said or which are the opposite of what is said. If the
person opposite me says, and believes, 'I am not angry', but I see the
tension in the facial muscles, the white knuckles on clenched hands and
hear the rasping force of the voice, then I sense something else.
It is not so obvious when the other person is writing but as I pointed
out in the introduction, when one comes across terms such as 'tech­
nologies of the self' something is implied which is not being said
directly. It could imply a critical attitude, but when it is used in con­
junction with terms such as 'rigorous theorization' this becomes less
certain. A rigorous theorization does not allow for a critical distance, it
does not offer psychic space as an important value. 'Technologies of the
self' would only offer a critical metaphor if it were acknowledged that
the self were not actually accessible to technological metaphors. I think
that this is what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote in her diary:

And as for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth
is, one can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes: but look at
the ceiling, at Grizzle [her dog], at the cheaper beasts in the zoo which are
exposed to walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in. It slipped in this
afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absent­
mindedly; but what was I going to write? (Quoted in Lee 1996: 529)

The soul is what cannot be conceptualized, the internal processes, the tilt
experienced by Beatrice in G. It is not part of the world around me but it
is immediately I look at something and react to it. We can conceptualize
in very general terms what goes on here but that is all. It is perhaps best
seen in terms of Winnicott's (1964, 1971a) notion of transitional objects
and a transitional area.
A transitional object is the object adopted by the infant from which he
or she will be inseparable, possibly for a period of years. It could be a
cuddly toy or a dirty old piece of blanket, the attempt to wash it proving
traumatic. It is as if it is essential to the child's being, let alone his or her
identity. Winnicott suggests that it makes no sense to ask whether this
object is part of the child's outside world or internal world. It is part of
both - a material object which is not a figment of the child's imagination,
yet which has a meaning for the child way beyond any utilitarian or
aesthetic value it might have.
This is the area of everyday creativity and perhaps also the area at the
root of artistic and scientific creativity. It is also the most deeply personal
area of my being where the uniqueness of my personal identity is to be
found. The interesting sociological questions here are again about what
176 IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

sociological conditions enable people to develop and explore this area

and to use it creatively. I am less sure that it is an area that contributes
much to sociological analysis - rather it marks the limits. A lot of
sociological analysis can in fact ignore its existence, but it accounts for all
the things that sociological explanations do not predict or find them­
selves unable to explain.

Conclusion

I have argued explicitly and implicitly through this book that identity
needs to be understood in the wider context of something called the self
and that both self and identity have important psychological and social
dimensions. Neither the self nor identity are simple social products,
rather in the end they are areas of individual and collective freedom
which are constantly threatened by the structures and ideologies of the
wider society. The very theory and practice which enables us to begin to
understand this area of freedom - psychoanalysis - is a theory and
practice which can easily threaten it through the ease with which it can
try to produce formulae for living. The practice which should be opening
up psychic space ends by closing it down.
It seems to me, sadly, that a sociology which does not know its limits,
which tries to produce sociological explanations of the self, or of identity,
can do nothing to enhance human experience of the world or human
freedom in the world. In fact it does just the opposite - it closes down
possibilities of understanding and action by denying or ignoring the
existence of experience. We are left either with the socially constructed
individual or, in Anthony Giddens' variation, the reflexive, cognitive self
of late modernity which is constantly able to reconstruct itself.
The areas of experience and identity that I have been talking about in
this chapter are areas which can enable us to keep a distance between
ourselves and the 'technologies of the self', the 'discursive practices', the
ideological and structural positionings or whatever we want to call
the social forces which press down on us to restrict or eliminate this
distance. What I have called the important sociological questions are
those about how this distance can be extended.
This is not an easy matter for two reasons. The first is specific to
sociologists, where the dominant tradition has been to ignore or deny the
existence of this area of experience, and Simmel's radical insights have
only occasionally resurfaced. We need to reverse the way we think about
the relationship between identity and the social and to limit the
dominant explanatory thrust of sociology.
The second reason is universal: because such an extension means
extending the areas of life in which we experience conflict, discomfort
and pain. The opening up of psychic space involves recognizing parts of
ourselves that we do not like or even find abhorrent and disgusting. The
 CONCLUSION: EXPERIENCING IDENTITY 177

strengthening of the ego entails tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty and

insoluble conflicts. The recognition of the fundamental nature of
emotional intersubjectivity involves recognizing our dependence on
others, even (and perhaps especially) on those we despise.
Finally, the recognition of what I have called the transitional area of
creativity involves the recognition of our freedom and responsibility for
what we do, and the risks of failure and loss that go with human action.
The discovery of freedom is the discovery of multiple forms of suffering
and perhaps the most meaningful personal sense in which we can talk
about having an identity is that our identity is the result of the quality of
our suffering.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham, K. (1927) Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.

Adlam, D., Henriques, J., Rose, N., Salfield, A., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V.
(1978) 'Authors Response', Ideology and Consciousness 3: 122-7.
Adorno, T.W. (1973) Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Adorno, T.W. (1974) Minima Moralia. London: New Left Books.
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Sanford, AN. (1950) The
Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.
Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx. London: Allen Lane.
Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books.
Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970) Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.
Arato, A (1972) "'Lukacs" Theory of Reification', Telos 1 1 : 25-66.
Ayer, AJ. (1971) Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Badcock, c.R. (1980) The Psychoanalysis of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Badcock, c.R. (1983) Madness and Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Balswick, J.O. (1982) 'Male Inexpressiveness: Psychological and Sociological
Aspects', in Solomon, K. and Levy, N.P. (eds), Men in Transition: Theory and
Therapy. New York: Plenum Press.
Beale, N. and McGuire, J. (eds) (1982) Fathers: Psychological Perspectives. London:
Junction Books.
Benton, T. (1977) Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Berger, J. (1972a) G. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Berger, J. (1972b) Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Berger, B., Berger, P. and Kellner, H. (1974) The Homeless Mind. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Bhaskar, R. (1975) 'Feyerabend and Bachelard: Two Philosophies of Science', New
Left Review, 94.
Bhaskar, R. (1978) A Realist Theory of Science. Sussex: Harvester.
Bhaskar, R. (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism. Sussex: Harvester.
Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.
London: Free Association Books.
Bowlby, J. (1960) 'Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Childhood', The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 15: 9-52.
Bowlby, J. (1961) 'Processes of Mourning', International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
42: 317-40.
Bowlby, J. (1971) Attachment and Loss Vol. 1: Attachment. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 179

Bowlby, J. (1975) Attachment and Loss Vol. 2: Separation, Anxiety and Anger.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bowlby, J. (1981) Attachment and Loss Vol. 3: Loss, Sadness and Depression.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brown, P. (1974) Towards a Marxist Psychology. New York: Harper and Row.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge.
Casement, P. (1985) On Learning From the Patient. London: Routledge.
Casement, P. (1990) Further Learning From the Patient. London: Routledge.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. and Gruneberger, B. (1986) Freud or Reich: Psychoanalysis
and Illusion. London: Free Association Books.
Chodorow, N. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the
Reproduction of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chodorow, N. (1985) 'Beyond Drive Theory: Object Relations and the Limits of
Radical Individualism', Theory and Society, 14: 271-320.
Cicourel, A V. (1973) Cognitive Sociology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cioffi, F. (1970) 'Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science', in Borger, R and Cioffi,
F., Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Clulow, C and Mattinson, A (1989) Marriage Inside Out. London: Penguin.
Collier, A. (1981) 'Scientific Realism and the Human World', Radical Philosophy,
29: 8-18.
Collins, R (1975) Conflict Sociology. New York: Academic Press.
Connell, RW. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Corrigan, P., Connell, R and Lee, J. (1985) 'Towards a New Sociology of
Masculinity', in Brod, H. (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's
Studies. London: Allen and Unwin.
Cosin, B.R, Freeman, CF. and Freeman, N.H. (1982) 'Critical Empiricism
Criticized: The Case of Freud' in Wollheim, R and Hopkins, J. (eds),
Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 32-
59.
Craib, 1. (1988) 'The Personal and Political', Radical Philosophy, 48: 14-15.
Craib, 1. (1989) Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Limits of SOCiology. Brighton:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Craib, 1. (1992) 'Response', in Dryden, W. and Feltham, C (eds), Psychotherapy
and its Discontents. Buckingham: Open University Press. pp. 243-9.
Craib, 1. (1994) The Importance of Disappointment. London: Routledge.
Craib, I. (1997a) Classical Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Craib, I. (1997b) 'Social Constructionism as a Social Psychosis', Sociology, 31 (1):
1-15.
Craib, 1. (forthcoming) 'The Lessons of Group Therapy', in Feltham, C (ed.), The
Witness and Vision of the Psychotherapist. London: Sage.
Crews, F. (1986) 'The Big House of Theory', New York Review of Books, 29 May.
Dahrendorf, R (1964) 'Out of Utopia: Toward a Reconstruction of Sociological
Analysis', in Coser, L. and Rosenberg, B. (eds), Sociological Theory. New York:
Collier Macmillan. pp. 209-27.
David, D.5. and Brannon, R (1976) The 49% Majority. London: Addison Wesley.
Davidson, D. (1982) 'Paradoxes of Irrationality', in Wollheim, R and Hopkins, J.
(eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
pp. 289-305.
180 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, M. and Wallbridge, D. (1983) Boundary and Space: An Introduction to the

Work of D. W. Winnicott. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Dawe, A. (1973) 'The Role of Experience in the Construction of Sociological
Theory', Sociological Review, 21: 25-52.
De Beauvoir, S. (1960) The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape.
De Board, R. (1978) The Psychoanalysis of Organisations. London: Tavistock.
De Souza, R. (1982) 'Norms and the Normal', in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J.
(eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
pp. 139-62.
Dilman, I. (1983) Freud and Human Nature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dilman, 1. (1984) Freud and the Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
Duncombe, J. and Marsden, D. (1993) 'Love and Intimacy: The Gender Division
of Emotion and "Emotion Work''', Sociology, 27: 221-42.
Dworkin, A. (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women. London: Women's Press.
Easlea, B. (1981) Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy'S Confrontation with
Women of Nature. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Easlea, B. (1983) Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear
Arms Race. London: Pluto Press.
Eichenbaum, L. and Orbach, S. (1983) Understanding Women. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Elias, N. (1991) 'On Human Beings and Their Emotions: A Process - Sociological
Essay', in Featherstone, M., Hepworth, M. and Turner, B. (eds), The Body:
Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage.
Elshtein, J.B. (1984) 'Symmetry and Soporifics: A Critique of Accounts of Gender
Development', in Richards, B. (ed.), Capitalism and Infancy. London: Free
Association Books.
Engels, F. (1940) Dialectics of Nature. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Erikson, E. (1973a) Childhood and Society. London: Triad/Paladin.
Erikson, E. (1973b) Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: W.W.
Norton.
Farrell, W. (1975) The Liberated Man. New York: Random House.
Ferguson, A. (1984) 'On Conceiving Motherhood and Sexuality: A Feminist
Materialist Approach', in Trebilcot, J. (ed.), Mothering. New Jersey: Roman and
Allenheld.
Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method. London: New Left Books.
Figes, E. (1970) Patriarchal Attitudes. London: Faber and Faber.
Fonagy, P. (1996) 'The Future of Empirical Psychoanalysis', British Journal of
Psychotherapy, 13: 106-18.
Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, M. (1984) A History of Sexuality Vol. 1 . Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1979) 'The Rat Man', in Pelican Freud Library Vol. 9: Case Histories 1 1 .
Harmondsworth: Pelican. pp. 33-1 16.
Freud, S. (1984) 'Mourning and Melancholia', in Collected Works, Vol. 1 1 .
Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 245-68.
Freud, S. (1985) 'Civilization and its Discontents', in Civilization, Society and
Religion, Pelican Freud Library Vo1. 12. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 243-340.
Friedmann, A. and Sarah, E. (1982) The Problem of Men. London: Women's Press.
Gallagher, C. (1980) 'The New Materialsm in Marxist Aesthetics', Theory and
Society, 9: 633-58.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 181

Gellner, E. (1985) The Psychoanalytic Movement. London: Paladin.

Gergen, K. (1991) The Saturated Self. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens. A. (1973) The Class Structure of Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, A. (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, A. (1977) Studies in Social and Political Theory. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, A. (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Vol. 1 : Power,
Property and the State. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Glymour, C. (1982) 'Freud, Kepler and the Clinical Evidence', in Wollheim, R.
and Hopkins, J. (eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 12-3l.
Goff, T. (1980) Mead and Marx. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goffman, E. (1968) Asylums. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goffman, E. (1971) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis. New York: Harper Row.
Goldmann, L. (1964) The Hidden God. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goldmann, L. (1971) 'Reflections on History and Class Consciousness', in
Meszaros, I. (ed.), Aspects of History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin.
Goldmann, L. (1977) Lukncs and Heidegger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Gordon, S.L. (1990) 'Social Structural Effects on Emotions', in Kemper, T. (ed.),
Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotion. New York: State University of
New York Press. pp. 145-79.
Gorer, G. (1965) Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. London:
Cresset.
Gorz, A. (1975) Socialism and Revolution. London: Allen Lane.
Gouldner, A. (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann.
Grunbaum, A. (1984) Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Guntrip, H. (1961) Personality Structure and Human Interaction. London: Hogarth
Press.
Habermas, J. (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests. London: Heinemann.
Habermas, J. (1987) Knowledge and Human Interests. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Halberg, M. (1989) 'Feminist Epistemology: An Impossible Project?', Radical
Philosophy, 53: 3-7.
Hall, S. (1996) 'Introduction: Who Needs Identity?', in Hall, S. and Du Gay, P.
(eds), Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.
Hammond, M. (1990) 'Affective Maximization: A New Macro-Theory in the
Sociology of Emotions', in Kemper, T. (ed.), Research Agendas in the Sociology of
Emotion. New York: State University of New York Press. pp. 58-8l .
Harding, S . (1986) The Science Question i n Feminism. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
182 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harding, S. (1991) Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? Buckingham: Open

University Press.
Harre, R. (1986) The Social Construction of the Emotions. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Post-Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hegel, C.W.F. (1977) The Phenomenology of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. New York: Harper Row.
Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. (1975) Precapitalist Modes of Production. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. (1977) Mode of Production and Social Formation. London:
Macmillan.
Hinshelwood, R. (1991) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free
Association Books.
Hinton, J. (1967) Dying. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hirst, P. (1979) On Law and Ideology. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hoch, P. (1979) White Hero, Black Beast. London: Pluto Press.
Hochschild, AR. (1975) 'The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected
Possibilities', in Millman, M. and Kanter, R. (eds), Another Voice. New York:
Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Hochschild, AR. (1983) The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human
Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hochschild, AR. (1994) 'The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the
Abduction of Feminism: Signs from Women's Advice Books', Theory Culture
and Society, 1 1 : 1 -24.
Hopkins, J. (1996) 'Psychoanalysis and Scientific Reasoning', British Journal of
Psychotherapy, 13: 86-105.
How, A (1995) The Habermas Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social.
Aldershot: Avebury.
Jackson, S. (1993) 'Even Sociologists Fall in Love: An Exploration in the Sociology
of Emotions', Sociology, 24: 201-20.
Jagger A (1989) 'Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology', in
Jagger, A and Bordo, S. (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions
of Being and Knowledge. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Jenkins, R. (1996) Social Identity. London: Routledge.
Kastenbaurn, R. (1982) 'Dying is Healthy and Death a Bureaucrat: Our Fantasy
Machine is Alive and Well', in Dimatteo, M. and Friedman, H. (eds),
Interpersonal Issues in Health Care. London: Academic Press.
Keat, R. (1981) The Politics of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud and the Critique of
Marxism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Keat, R. and Urry, J. (1975) Social Theory as Science. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Kemper, T. (1990) Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Klein, J. (1987) Our Need for Others and Its Roots in Infancy. London: Tavistock
Press.
Klein, M. (1975a) Collected Works Vol.l: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works.
London, Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1975b) Collected Works Vol. 1 1 1 : Envy and Gratitude and Other Works.
London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1986) 'Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States', in
Mitchell, J. (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 183

Klein, M. and Riviere, J. (1937) Love, Hate and Reparation. London: Hogarth Press.
Knox, B. (1993) The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the
Classics. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kohut, H (1971) The Analysis of the Self New York: International Universities
Press.
Kojeve, A. (1969) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. New York: Basic Books.
Kover, J. (1988a) Against the State of Nuclear Terror. London: Free Association
Books.
Kovel, J. (1988b) In Nicaragua. London: Free Association Books.
Kover, J. (1988c) The Radical Spirit. London: Free Association Books.
Kovel, J. (1988d) White Racism. London: Free Association Books.
Kovel, J. and Craib, 1. (1990) 'Marxism and Psychoanalysis - An Exchange',
Radical Philosophy 55: 25-30.
Kuhn, M. and Partland, T. (1972) 'An Empirical Investigation of Self-Attitudes',
in Manis, J.G. and Meltzer, B.N. (eds), Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social
Psychology. Boston: Allen and Bacon. pp. 83-90.
Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lacan, J. (1968) Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits. London: Tavistock.
Laing, RD. (1960) The Divided Self Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Laing, RD. (1967) The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmonds­
worth: Penguin.
Lakoff, RS. and Azim, HF.A. (1991) 'Society's Changing Views on Mourning',
Group Analysis, 24: 355-62.
Langan, T. (1966) Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Lasch, C. (1977) Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic
Books.
Lasch, C. (1980) The Culture of Narcissism. London: Sphere Books.
Lasch, C. (1984) The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. London:
Picador.
Lasch, C. (1995) The Revolt of the Elites and The Betrayal of Democracy. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Lee. H (1996) Virginia Woolf. London: Bloomsbury.
Little, M.l. (1985) 'Winnicott Working in Areas Where Psychotic Anxieties
Predominate: A Personal Record', Free Associations, 3: 9-42.
Lukacs, G. (1971a) History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lukacs, G. (1971b) Soul and Form. London: Merlin.
Lukacs, G. (1972) Lenin. London: New Left Books.
Macadams, D.P. (1993) Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the
Self New York: N. Morrow.
McCallum, M., Piper, M., Hassan, W.E., Azim, A. and Lakoff, RS. (1991) 'The
Edmonton Model of Short-Term Group Therapy for Loss: An Integration of
Theory, Practice and Research', Group Analysis, 24: 375-88.
Mcintosh, D. (1994) 'Language, Self and Lifeworld in Habermas's Theory of
Communicative Action', Theory and Society, 23: 1-34.
MacIntyre, A. (1958) The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
184 BIBLIOGRAPHY

McKee, L. and O'Brien, M. (eds) (1983) The Father Figure. London: Tavistock.
McMylor, P. (1994) Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity. London: Routledge.
Malcolm, J. (1981) Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. London: Pan.
Malcolm, J. (1984) In The Freud Archives. London: Fontana.
Mannheim, K. (1972) Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere Books.
Marx, K. (1973) 'Introduction', The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of
Political Economy. London: Allen Lane and Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1974) The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1 844. London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Masson, J.M. (1985) The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction
Theory. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Masson, J.M. (1989) Against Therapy. London: Collins.
Mead, G.H. (1938) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Menzies-Lyth, I.E.P. (1988) 'The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence
Against Anxiety', in Selected Essays Vol. 1 : Containing Anxiety in Institutions.
London: Free Association Books. pp. 43-99.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969) Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist
Problem. Boston: Beacon Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974a) Adventures of the Dialectic. London: Heinemann.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974b) The Prose of the World. London: Heinemann.
Miller, E.J. and Gwynne, G.V. (1972) A Life Apart. London: Tavistock.
Millet, K. (1970) Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday.
Milner, M. (1969) The Hands of the Living God: An Account of Psychoanalytic
Treatment. London: Hogarth Press.
Mitchell, J. (1976) Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
O'Neill, J.M. (1982) 'Gender Role Conflict and Strain in Men's Lives', in Solomon,
K. and Levy, S. (eds), Men in Transition: Theory and Therapy. New York:
Plenum Press.
Osterweis, M., Solomon, F. and Green, M. (1987) 'Bereavement Reactions,
Consequences and Care', in Zisook, S. (ed.), Biophysical Aspects of Bereavement.
Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Parkes, CM. (1972) Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Patton, P. (1978) 'Althusser's Epistemology', Radical Philosophy, 19: 8-18.
Pilgrim, D. (1992) 'Psychotherapy and Political Evasions' and 'Rebuttal', in
Dryden, W. and Feltham, C (eds), Psychotherapy and its Discontents.
Buckingham: Open University Press. pp. 225-43, 249-52.
Piper, E. and McCallum, M. (1991) 'Group Intervention for Persons who have
Experienced Loss: Description and Evaluative Research', Group Analysis, 24:
363-74.
Pleck, J.H. (1981) The Myth of Masculinity. London: MIT Press.
Popper, K. (1960) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson.
Popper, K. (1969) Conjectures and Refutations (3rd edn). London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Raphael, B. (1984) The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring
Professions. London: Unwin Hyman.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 185

Reich, W. (1957) The Sexual Revolution. London: Vision Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Rubin, G. (1975) The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of
Sex', in Reiter, R. (ed.), Toward An Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1944) In Camera. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Sartre, J.-P. (1948) Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schoken Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (1957) Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1963a) The Problem of Method. London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1963b) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1967) What is Literature? London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1977) Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: New Left Books.
Schutz, A. (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Segal, H. (1964) An Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Heinemann.
Simmel, G. (1950) 'The Metropolis in Mental Life', in Wolff, KH. (ed.), The
Sociology of Georg Simmel. pp. 409-24.
Simon, W. and Gagnon, J.H. (1986) 'Sexual Scripts: Permanence and Change',
Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 15: 97-120.
Smith, D.L. (1996) 'Should Psychoanalysts Believe What they Say?', British Journal
of Psychotherapy, 13: 64-74.
Solomon, K and Levy, N.P. (1982) Men in Transition: Theory and Therapy. New
York: Plenum Press.
Stavro-Pearce, E. (1994) 'Towards a Posthumanist Feminism', Economy and
Society, 23: 218-45.
Stedman-Jones, G. (1971) 'The Marxism of the Early Lukacs', New Left Review, 70:
27-64.
Stem, D.N. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis
and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Strong, P.M. (1979) 'Sociological Imperialism and the Profession of Medicine',
Social Science and Medicine, 13: 199-215.
Suppes, P. and Warren, H. (1982) 'On the Generation and Classification of
Defence Mechanisms', in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (eds), Philosophical
Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Perss. pp. 163-79.
Temperley, J. (1984) 'Our Own Worst Enemies: Unconscious Factors in Female
Disadvantage', Free Associations, pilot issue: 23-38.
Thalberg, 1. (1982) 'Freud's Anatomies of the Self', in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins,
J. (eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
pp. 241-63.
Thomas, D.M. (1981) The White Hotel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Thompson, E.P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin Press.
Tolson, A. (1977) The Limits of Masculinity. London: Tavistock.
Trist, E.L. (1953) Some Observations on the Machine-Face as a Socio-Technical System.
London: Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
Trist, E.L. and Bamforth, KW. (1951) 'Some Social and Psychological
Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal Cutting', Human Relations, 4:
3-38.
Turner, J.H. (1996) 'The Evolution of Emotions in Humans', Journal of the Theory of
Behavioral Sciences, 36: 1-29.
186 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waters, M. (1995) Globalization. London: Sage.

Weber, M. (1949) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe: Free Press.
Willmott, H.C. (1986) 'Unconscious Sources in the Theory of the Subject: An
Exploration and Critique of Giddens's Dualistic Models of Action and
Personality', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 6: 105-21.
Winch, P. (1958) The Idea of a Social Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Winnicott, D.W. (1958) Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis.
London: Tavistock.
Winnicott, D.W. (1962) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1964) The Child, The Family and the Outside World. Hannonds-
worth: Penguin.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971a) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971b) Therapeutic Consultations. London: Hogarth Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1975) Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth
Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1987) The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a
Little Girl. Hannondsworth: Penguin.
Witham, A. (1985) 'The Idealization of Dying', Free Associations, 3: 80-91.
Wollheim, R. (1982) 'The Bodily Ego', in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (eds),
Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.
124-38.
Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (1982) Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wouters, C. (1991) 'On Status Competition and Emotion Management', Journal of
Social History, 24: 699-717.
Wright, K. (1991) Vision and Separation between Mother and Baby. London: Free
Association Books.
Young, I.M. (1984) 'Is Male Gender Identity the Cause of Male Domination?', in
Trebilcot, J. (ed.), Mothering. New Jersey: Roman and Allenheld.
Zigmund, D. (1986) 'Babel or Bible: Chaos or Creativity in Psychotherapy', British
Journal of Psychotherapy, 2: 302-9.
 INDEX

Abraham, K. 159 Collins, R. 106.

action and structure in social theory Connell, R. 98
67-71 consumption, sociology of 36
Adlam, D. 150 Corrigan, P. 86, 89
Adorno, T.D. 33, 42-6, 50, 51, 84 Crews, F. 147
agency 63, 66, 68-9, 71
Althusser, L. 8, 27, 33, 49, 66, 134, 150 Dahrendorf, R. 71
ambivalence 54-61 David, D.S. 88
Arato, A 25 Davis, M. 87, 90
Ayer, AJ. 129 Dawe, A 122, 123
Azirn, H.F.A. 162 De Beauvoir, S. 85
De Board, R. 98
Badcock, C. Chap. 11 passim defence mechanisms 95-109, 140, 160,
Balswick, J. 89 172
Bamforth, K.W. 100 Derrida, J. 147
Baudrillard, J. 33 De Saussure, F. 39, 121
Beale, N. 88 Descartes, R. 34
Berger, J. 89 Chap. 9 passim De Souza, R. 133-5
Berger, P. 99 dialectics, the dialectic Chaps. 2, 3
Bhaskar, R. 30, 131 passim
Bollas, C. 1, 10 Dilman, I. Chap. 1 1 passim
Bowlby, J. 1 12, 131, 160, 161 Duncombe, J. 108, 1 1 1-15
Brannon, R. 88 Durkheim, E. 71, 76
Brown, P. 136 Dworkin, A 89
Butler, J. 8
Easlea, B. 88
Casement, P. 59, 1 15, 173 ego ideal see super-ego
causality 66-7, 143, 147-9; functional ego identity see Erikson, E.
causality 98 Eichenbaum, L. 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98
Chasseguet-Srnirgel, J. 58 Elias, N. 106
Chodorow, N. 50, 86, 89, 92, 93, 94, 98, Elshtein, J.B. 96, 102
112 emotions, sociology of 11, 51, Chap. 8
Cicourel, A 68 passim; emotional intersubjectivity
Cioffi, F. 129 173-4
class, social class, class consciousness Engels, F. 35, 148
Chap. 2 passim, 35, 37, 64, 117, 120 epistemology 71; see also science
Clulow, C. 111 Erikson, E. 53, 65, 69, 152
Collier, A 131 ethnomethodology 68, 72, 81, 149
188 INDEX

existentialism 10, 35, 65, 72; see also Halberg, M. 30

Sartre, J.-P. Hall, S. 7-9
Hammond, M. 106
Farrell, W. 88 Harding, S. 14, 30
fathers, fathering 88 Harvey, D. 2, 165
femininity Chap. 7 passim Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 20, 32, 43, 46
feminism 3, 14, 54, 85, 105; feminist Heidegger, M. 64, 65, 72, 73
standpoint epistemology 30 hermeneutics 63, 66, 67, 128, 131-3
Ferguson, A. 98 Hinshelwood, R 1 12
Feyerabend, P. 130 Hinton, J. 161
Figes, E. 85 Hirst, P. 8
Fonagy, P. 130 Hochschild, A. 3, 105, 106
Foucault, M. 8, 76, 158, 159 Hoggart, R 123
Freud, S. 4, 11, 85, 90, 93, 102, 103, 106, Hopkins, J. 128, 130
126, Chap. 10 passim, Chap. 1 1 Horkheimer, M. 42
passim, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 171; How, A. 132
and Marx Chap. 4 passim Husser!, E. 34, 141; see also
Friedmann, A. 88 phenomenology
functionalism, structural functionalism
66, 122; see also Parsons, T. ideal types (gender development) 86,
87, 88, 91, 94, 96-7, 99
Gadamer, H-G. 73 identity politics 31, 34, 170
Gagnon, J.H. 27 internal space 58, Chap. 13 passim
Garfinkel, H 149
Gellner, E. 155 Jackson, S. 108-11, 112
gender, gender stereotypes 103-4, Jagger, A. 109
1 1 1-15 Jenkins, R 3-6, 10
Gergen, K. 6-7 Jung, C. 152
Giddens, A. 2, 10, 40, 43, 60, 61, Chap.
5 passim, 75, 81, 105, 106, 107, 1 14, Kant, I. 17
158, 164, 176 Kastenbaum, R 159
globalization, 2 Keat, R 132
Glymour, C. 129, 130 Kemper, T. 106
Goff, T. 27 Klein, M. 51, 107, 111, 137, 143, 159-60,
Goffman, E. 11, Chap. 6 passim, 100, 164, 173
173, 175 knowledge, sociology of 14
Goldmann, L. 14, 19, 43, 44 Knox, B. 110
Gordon, S.L. 106 Kohut, H. 165
Gorer, G. 161 Kojeve, A. 34
Gorz, A. 36 Kove!, J. 51-4
Gouldner, A. 83, 106 Kuhn, M. 26
group-in-fusion 36, 37; see also series, Kuhn, T.S. 130
serialization
Grunbaum, A. 129, 130 Lacan, J. 8, 34, 35, 85, 87, 141
Gruneberger, B. 58 Laing, RD. 33, 72, 126
Guntrip, H. 90 Lakoff, RS. 162
Gwynne, G.V. 99 Langan, T. 41
Lasch, C. 106, 107, 141, 142, 153
Habermas, J. 40, 49, 68, 69, 132, 133, Lee, H 175
136, 1 72, 173 Lenin, V.I. 21
 INDEX 189

Levi-Strauss, C 73 Orbach, S. 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98

Levy, N.P. 88 Osterweis, M. 162
Little, M. 56
Lukacs, G. 10, Chap. 2 passim 37, 40, Parkes, CM. 158, 161-2
47, 51, 169 Parsons, T. 61, 71, 72, 86, 98, 100; see
Luxembourg, R. 21 also functionalism
Partland, T. 26
Macadams, D.P. 33 Pascal, B. 44
McCallum, M. 162, 163 phenomenology 10, 34, 35, 37-42, 71,
McGuire, J. 88 82, 117, 126, 141
McIntosh, D. 39 Pilgrim, D. 54-61
McKee, L. 88 Piper, M. 162, 163
Malcolm, J. 54, 154 Pleck, J.H. 88
Mannheim, K. 29-30 Popper, K. 47, 129, 148
Marcuse, H. 50, 120, 121, 135, 136 positivism 67, 129
Marsden, D. 108, 1 1 1 -15 postmodemism, postmodemity 6, 31,
Marx, K., Marxism Chap. 2 passim, 33, 39, 47, 49
37, 38, 40, 42, 64, 72, 73, 134, 135, post-structuralism 7, 39, 49, 87, 141,
141, 147, 150; and Freud Chap. 4 147, 149, 150
power 66
passim
praxis 15, 16, 20-2, 35
masculinity Chap. 7 passim
professions, professionalization
Masson, J. 54
58-60; professionalization of
Mattinson, A. 1 1 1
bereavement counselling Chap.
Mead, G.H. 4, 5 , 27, 40, 75, 173
12 passim
melancholia 150
projective identification 172
Menzies-Lyth, 1. 99
psychotherapy and inner space 169
Merleau-Ponty, M. 10, 20, 33, 35,
37-42, 47, 81, 82, 121, 126, 174
realism, critical realism 15, 66, 69
Miller, E.J. 99
Reich, W. 49
Millett, K. 85 relativism 14, 29-30, 40
Milner, M. 59 Ricoeur, P. 132, 133
Mitchell, J. 85, 86, 87, 136 Riviere, J. 111
modernity, late modernity, late Rubin, G. 103-4
capitalism 2, 3, 61
mothering Chap. 7 passim; of Sarah, E. 88
daughters, 92-3, of sons 93-6 Sartre, J.-P. 33-7, 40, 47, 51, 54, 81, 83,
121, 124, 126, 171
narcissism 106, 141, 142, 153, 154, 165, Schutz, A. 37
169, 170, 171 science, social science, Chap. 2
normotic personality, the 1, 168-9 passim, 46, 59, 63, 66, Chap. 10
passim
object-relations theory 87, 90-2, 143, script, scripting 27
169 Segal, H. 59
O'Brien, M. 88 self, the 75, 84
omnipotence, infantile omnipotence series, serialization 35-6, 43, 83,
146, 150, 151, 153 84
O'Neill, J.M. 88, 89 sex, sexuality 27, 50, 90, 91, 93, 1 18,
ontology 65, 67, 69, 71, 129; ontological 120, 123, 143, 157, 158
security, 72 signs, symbols 121-7 147
190 INDEX

Simmel, G. 5, 170, 176 Trotsky, L. 41

Simon, W. 27 Turner, J.H. 106
Smith, D.L. 130
Solomon, K. 88 unconscious, the 68
Stavro-Pearce, E. 39
Stedman-Jones, G. 14, 18, 22, 30 Wallbridge, M. 87, 90
Stem, D. 131 Warren, H. 130
Strong, N. 108 Waters, M. 2
structuralism 37, 63, 73, 87, 141 Weber, M. 25, 62, 64, 88, 91, 99, 122
structuration theory Chap. 5 passim, Willmott, He. 72
75 Winch, P. 132
super-ego 107, 1 17, 142, 144, 146; and Winnicott, DW. 53, 56, 72, 87, 90, 91,
ego-ideal 52 1 12, 126, 137, 175
Suppes, P. 130 Witham, A. 159
symbolic interactionism 27, 75, 171; see Wollheim, R. 128, 132, 135
also Coffman, E., Mead, G.H Woolf, V. 175
Wouters, e. 106
Temperly, J. 96 Wright, K. 106
Thalberg, 1. 129
Thompson, E.P. 147 Young, 1.M. 98
Tolson, J. 88
Trist, E.L. 100 Zigmund, D. 155