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• Neil Smelser über Psychoanalyse
Auszüge aus einem Interview
Let's talk a little about psychoanalysis, because that is a second career for you. Can we say that you
majored in sociology and minored in psychoanalysis? What led you to do that?
The culture at Harvard at the time I was an undergraduate and graduate student was dominated by
Freudian psychology. Most of the faculty members were sympathetic to that approach and many of
them had gone through the psychoanalytic training that was available to non-medical personnel. I
was drawn into this. I appreciated its strengths; never became a convert but was very much exposed
and kind of knew, even at that time, that it was going to be a part of my career, though I didn't want
to go into medical school and I wasn't sure exactly what -- I knew it would be an intellectual part of
my life.
When I was relatively young, about 30 years, I had a breakup of a marriage and an accompanying
personal crisis and I decided to seek help, but to seek help in the context of a training analysis, that is
to say, a full training of a non-medical practitioner, which was by that time possible. In other words,
I took the full training, no inhibitions, and in fact, I became licensed as a psychoanalyst in the State
of California to practice if I wanted. I haven't followed a full practice. I've been a therapist and a
supervisor off and on, in different times in my career, but psychoanalysis was a fundamental personal
experience for me and became a permanent part of my intellectual outlook. At different times, often
being asked but sometimes on my own steam, I would write on subjects that attracted me, which I
thought had a potential from the development of depth psychology. The result is that book, some
fifteen essays, I think, written over about a thirty-year period.
Let's talk then a little bit about the temperament and skills required for psychoanalysis. Are they
same or very different?
Overlapping. I would say they're overlapping. The capacity for objectification is clearly there. In
other words, if you're treating a patient who is highly disturbed or emotional or obviously full of
pain, you have to be able to appreciate what that is, but you have to move a step away, combining
sympathy with objective efforts to understand. Of course, the big difference is that -- we were talking
about structures earlier -- the whole thing about psychoanalysis is the person. In fact, the field is
somewhat oblivious to the larger structural arrangements, except insofar as they become grist for the
person's psychological dynamics.
In one of the essays here -- well, there are actually several where you address this problem which has
been an element in your career, namely interdisciplinary work. I should mention to our audience
that for many years you were Associate Director of the Institute of International Studies which
sponsors this program. In an essay on Erikson you write this: "Now when a psychoanalyst or any
kind of discipline-oriented scholar makes such a commitment to become more comparative, more
historical, more developmental and more incorporative of different analytic levels in his work, this
necessarily generates a tension, a kind of disciplinary unease or discomfort. That tension arises from
an inevitable pressure to relativize the universals of one's discipline." Talk a little about that.
Actually, thank you for reading that. I hadn't recalled the exact words. It's not bad, actually.
So, tell us why it's good.
In a way, it's comfortable to operate within the confines of a discipline. Economics is an extreme
case. Here you are, you have a very elaborated set of simplifying assumptions about the world, and
by making those elaborated and simplified assumptions you can generate technical solutions much
more easily than you can with a looser set of parameters in the world. The disciplines differ in the
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