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• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Isaac Kramnick, English Middle-class Radicalism In the Eighteenth Century
• I: I Social and Political Thought
• Community, Individuality, and Freedom
• Rousseau's Social Thought
• A Sociological History of Utilitarianism
• Spencer and Comte In American Labor Thought
• Bureaucracy In Weber & Kafka
• Bergson's Political Doctrines
• Oakeshott's Political Theory
• Oakeshott's Political Philosophy
• Undermocratic Liberal Republicans
• Wilkes and Radical Politics
• Late Liberal Imperialism
• Kant and Reason In Politics
• II: Education, Politics, and Values
• Schools and Political Socialization
• Schooling For Imperialism
• The Political Economy of Public Schooling
• Federal Education Policy
• The Problems of Federal Education
• William James As Individualist
• Existential and Phenomenological Education
• Early Federal Educational Policy
• Education, Labor Markets, & Controlled Youth
• Government Control of Universities
• III: Economic Thought and Values
• Business and Legal History
• Schumpeter's Economic Theories
• Menger and Entrepreneurship
• Saint-simonian Economic Ideas
• The Free Market & the Third World
• Democratic Capitalism, Justice, & Religion
• Property, Law, and Economics
• The Economic Analysis of Law Vs. Values
• IV: Foreign Policy and Ideology
• The Attractiveness of War
• Walzer On International Morality
• Eduard Bernstein and Imperialism
• Roosevelt Vs. His War Critics
• American Preconceptions of Japan
• The Marshall Plan and Russia
• V: Self-knowledge, Autonomy, and Liberty
• The Self In Political Thought
• Autonomy, Self, and Will Power
• Self-knowledge: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel
• The Egoist As a “psychopath”
• The History of Social Psychology
• Psychology, Self, and Society
• Free Will, Responsibility, and Motivation
• Free Will, Purpose, and Responsibility
• Political “groupthink” and Reality
• Personal Freedom and Autonomy
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Psychology
• Sociology

Psychology, Self, and Society

Dr. Alexander Mitscherlich

• Frankfurt

In the past fifty years psychology has succeeded in developing objective methods for studying human behavior. These research techniques have led to general statements on the probability of particular human responses under specified conditions. According to Prof. Mitscherlich, however, these advances have been achieved at the cost of a considerable impoverishment of outlook. Academic psychology's elimination of such crucial human factors as individual subjectivity and self-reflection has reduced this science to a kind of “human engineering.” Instead of cultivating and deepening human awareness, it relies to a large extent upon lack of awareness for its success in the “prediction and control” of behavior.

Pre-experimental psychologists, by contrast, viewed their function in almost Socratic terms. They sought to provide individuals with reliable help in the task of self-understanding. They assumed that each person was unique in his responses to the physical and social environment which he encountered. Because he was a decision-making being, the individual was not governed by species-specific behavioral patterns.

The hypothesis that man's psyche can be studied like any other natural object gave rise to laboratory techniques which effectively eliminated any examination of the inner, decision-making man. Experimental psychology's focus upon exterior behavior turned it into a “psychology without a soul,” cut off from actual life-situations and thus meriting the ridicule it has received.

Sigmund Freud, while admitting the necessity of isolating natural laws of behavior, recognized the folly of eliminating so crucial a human dimension. He, therefore, tailored his method to the object of his research. Depth psychology relied on a more cumbersome, long-term observation of emotional processes within the dynamics of a true two-person relationship. A perceptive and trained observer derived general statements concerning human behavior based on the unfolding of this dynamic process.

In Prof. Mitscherlich's view, the results of such human-oriented study have been both fruitful and far-reaching. Developmental and social psychologists as well as researchers in other fields of applied psychology have long accepted notions of the unconscious process and the role it plays in generating conflict and decision. These psychologists have also made extensive use of the theory of defense mechanisms which serve to attenuate a conflict in impulses.

Nevertheless, the split between depth psychology and experimental psychology remains. According to Mitscherlich, academic psychology consciously or unconsciously encourages regressive social processes by its manipulation (in conditioning) of low-level motivation, such as the need for social approval. By relying upon immature emotional functions to exercise scientific control and by excluding critical self-perception, modern experimental psychology actually works against the assertion of individuality and augments already heavy social pressure at the level of “archaic psychic responses.”

Looking toward the future, Mitscherlich finds hope in the possibility that psychoanalysis may extend its curative influence beyond the level of the two-person relationship to the level of society as a whole. The insights of psychoanalysis into the sublimation of human instinct, emotional deformation, rational hypertrophy, and the formative pressure of social conditions might well help alleviate many pathogenic social conflicts and encourage the development of higher ego functions on a mass scale.