Chiasmatic Crossings Between Freud’s Clinical Projects and Social Concerns

Abstract

The culturally informed metapsychology of Freud’s is horizonal (sic) with psychoanalytically informed accounts of social concerns but not interchangeable. There are limits, to be sure, but evocative and informed chiasmatic crossings between them are generative and serve both fields of psychoanalysis and social thought. Psychoanalysis gives us access to the tragic inner life of humans and their capacity to love and betray, create and kill, among other acts of humans. The psychologically-charged world of social concerns is but an external field of reference that resonates with internal world representations. Inside and outside fold into each other to create a spiral circularity of events and psychological configurations that can be resubjectivized in accounts of human nature and the civilizing process in both psychoanalytic work and practices of social theory.