230047 SE On the relationship of sociology and psychology: Herbert Marcuse revisited (2014S)

The relationship between sociology and psychology/psychoanalysis is important and contested, especially against the background of interdisciplinary approaches that are increasingly demanded in sociology. The early Critical Theory explicitly tried to mediate social theory with Freudian psychoanalysis - an approach that has proved to be particularly fruitful with regard to the critical inquiry of ideology and prejudice in the Authoritarian Personality. In 1955 Herbert Marcuse undertook a pioneering analysis of Sigmund Freud's metapsychology in his essay 'Eros and Civilisation'. He starts with the assumption that in late industrial society the strict division between the psychological and the social/political is increasingly obsolete: 'The traditional border-lines between psychology on the one side and political and social philosophy on the other have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era: formerly autonomous and identifiable psychical processes are being absorbed by the function of the individual in the state - by his public existence', he wrote in the preface to the book. Thus, psychological categories became political categories due to the change of the relationship between the public and private spheres. Still, psychology and sociology need to be regarded as two different disciplines with distinctive aims: while the first focuses on the individual as socially embedded, the second aims at analyzing society as a totality. For the latter approach, the adoption of psychoanalytical concepts is most fruitful for an analysis of tenacious and persistent ideologies in late modern society.
This course will particularly focus on Marcuse's seminal work. The aim is to critically work through Marcuse's philosophical and sociological reading of Freud's metapsychology and theory of instincts by means of small group discussions, presentations in the plenum, and close reading of selected paragraphs.
This course is topically related to 230117 Lektüreseminar: Soziologie und Psychoanalyse (Prof. Kröll). It is highly recommended to attend both courses.