THE UNCONSCIOUS IN INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY: ON THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC CATEGORIES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

Abstract

The long-held conviction of a mutually exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is interested primarily in the analysis of collectives, has significantly hindered dialogue between the disciplines. Norbert Elias's “figurational” sociology, which has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, has the potential to indicate a way in which social science-oriented historical research might investigate the network of relations between individual and “collective” psychic processes without relying on artificial dichotomies. Elias's figurational theory, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the question of a collective or social unconscious, so this article examines approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.