Psychoanalysis in Modern Social Theory

FAIN: FT-13725-78

Nancy Chodorow
Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)

To write an essay that evaluates a group of social theories that base their claims about the nature of society and culture and about the possibilities for human liberation on psychoanalytical drive theory. These theories begin with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, on to subsequent writers (Brown, Lasch, Marcuse, Roheim, Slater, etc.). The essay will explore how a person is socially and culturally constituted and not the dynamic of individual instinctual repression. A larger project will be developed later on an alternate social theory based on psychoanalytical object-relations theory.