Individuals cannot actively overcome alienation, because it is an inherently social condition that is at the very core of modern society. Yet we may be able to take steps toward recognizing the power of alienation over our lives and existence … Compounding layers of alienation undermine our ability to recognize the intrinsic relationship between the growing potential for destruction that comes with the pursuit of prosperity. In analogy to psychoanalysis, sociology must embrace the possibility of and need for socioanalysis as one of its greatest yet unopened treasure troves. Socioanalysis in this sense involves therapeutically enabling the individual to recognize how, in addition to psychological limitations and barriers, there are societal limitations and barriers that both are built into and constitute our very selves as social beings … Whether sociologists in the future will make a truly constructive contribution to the lives of human beings and their efforts to overcome social problems indeed may depend on our ability and willingness to meet the challenge of circumscribing the thrust and purpose of socioanalysis, above and beyond the confines of what Freud erroneously ascribed to psychoanalysis, neglecting that many mental problems are expressions of the contradictions of the modern age. (pp. 41–42)
The topic intrigued me, but at the time I was focused on researching how changes in spatial awareness trigger revolutions in the cultural conceptions we have of our species and how placing earth in its cosmic setting and making a turn toward the creation of virtual spaces has amplified the process of our becoming posthuman; a process that began in the commodification and machinic disciplining of labor under capital.
When I completed that research project, I noticed a stark contrast in how well it resonated with people, and it had less to do with whether they were a sociologist or not and more to do with their age. Those born post-1980 generally accepted the posthuman thesis as an apt description of the material reality that produces the anxiety they experience, while those born prior to 1980 often expressed anxiety over the implications of such a thesis, denying it less on a
Anxiety began to appear to me as not only a prevailing and rising problem in modern/postmodern societies, but as a serious obstacle in the social sciences to theorizing the concrete gravity of modern society and its effects on the future. To gain a better understanding of the causes and effects of anxiety,
Northfield was a military hospital, situated in the Midlands, with the task of treating soldiers who had developed psychiatric problems, with the aim of getting them back into the war. Bion was responsible for the “Military Training and Rehabilitation Wing” … [T]he focus of Bion’s attention was on the properties of the group as a whole. The group had its own dynamics and was not simply an aggregate of individuals [and he treated them accordingly, by questioning the roles within a hospital where the staff and doctors are considered “well” and the patients are, according to their social role, “ill”] … Bion in Experiences in Groups ([1961] 2004) … makes explicit the significance of the unconscious in group behavior, the stance he was working from during the Northfield Experiment was
to make hypotheses about unconscious functioning at the level of the group [and get them to internalize a group super-ego that would regulate the group dynamic]. (pp. 4–6)
From these psychoanalytic roots, the “socio-analysts” have added organizational and institutional theories, as well as group relations and social systems thinking. The goal of this work is not to confront the contradictions of society when they emerge as contradictions of the self, but to find ways to create cohesion in group dynamics. For Bion this involved getting soldiers psychologically ready to return to war. For the new “socio-analysts” this means getting teams in corporate and other institutional environments to function more like a well-oiled machine by aligning the group’s thought processes. These goals are fully in line with the mainstream practices of the social sciences because they affirm the status quo and work to smooth out the wrinkles in the totalizing logics of modern society. Therefore, the practice suggested by Dahms is decidedly different than this version of socio-analysis.
What I develop in this book aligns with Dahms’s suggestion and is more aptly called critical socioanalysis as it is an extension of the critical method. The goal is not to make people more well adapted to modern society, but to help them have a better grasp of what modern society is doing to them as a result of the contradictions that exist between their concept of the self and that of society. Critical socioanalysis reveals this relationship as it examines the horizon of the possible through the work accomplished by the analysand (i.e. a term borrowed from psychoanalysis to describe the person who enters analysis), thereby illuminating the source of their anxiety and what it is signaling to them. As such, the method that I outline here for critical socioanalysis is as different in form and intention from that which goes under the name socio-analysis, as critical sociology is from mainstream sociology.
I do not use the word “advanced” as a value judgement to imply that western modern societies are superior or to imply the counter that eastern societies are primitive. Rather, I use this term in a pathological sense, such as when a medical professional informs a patient that their disease is in an “advanced” form. Western societies have an advanced form of modernity in that the symptoms emanating from the modern condition, as diagnosed by Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud, are in a more acute form in those societies. However, it must also be recognized that with developments such as climate change, societies in the global South are experiencing advanced symptoms of a different kind that result from the modern configuration at an alarmingly higher rate than those in the West.