Matt ffytche, 'Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Traumas of History: Alexander Mitscherlich Between the Disciplines'

This paper aims to track the rifts which occur when psychoanalysis moves ‘across the disciplines’. In particular, it examines the limits on representing history in psychoanalytic social psychology as practised by various key mid-century figures, including Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focusing primarily on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt School, was influenced by Erikson, Riesman and others, but was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in post-war Germany. This makes him significant for tracing the ways in which the experiences of the Second World War and the Third Reich were filtered out of psychosocial narratives being constructed in the period – precisely the accounts in which one might expect such ‘trauma’ to be a major object of attention. Mitscherlich’s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-written with Margarete Mitscherlich, appears to provide a counter-narrative in which the historical experience which had been filtered out finally floods back into the theorisation of German psychology and society. However, in contrast to much contemporary work, I argue that this ‘epoch-making’ book in fact doesn’t really hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. Thus the final limitation I consider is itself a historical one: these more sociological writers from the middle decades of the century were cut off from the ‘psychoanalysis of history’ because they wrote before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s, which led to the formation of trauma studies and the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the transgenerational transmission of trauma. The post-1990s concern with history and mourning allows one to pin-point some important limitations within the project to apply psychoanalysis to society, as it was conceived in the immediate post-war climate.