Abstract
Psychoanalysis was introduced to sociological theory as an effective tool for criticizing society. However, under the psychologizing of society and psychologism, psychoanalysis has been reexamined for an ideological effect that aggravates pathology resulting from self-responsibility and neo-liberalism. In this paper, however, I demonstrate that the critical potential of psychoanalysis has Not been exhausted, by reconstructing the development of the Critical Theory and its acceptance of psychoanalysis. Over the past few years, many sociologists have shown an interest in individualization and the new individualism, but the consideration of and approach toward intrapsychic mechanisms seem to be lacking. This paper makes clear the potentiality of psychoanalysis for social critique from the perspective of methodological individualism, with a focus on the dichotomy between society and the individual.
The history of the acceptance of psychoanalysis is divided into three phases: the first is the epoch of the Nazi Regime in the 1930s; the second is the age of mass society (the end of the individual) in the 1950s and 1960s; and the third is contemporary neo-liberalism after the 1990s. I begin my study by reconstructing the theory of the first two phases, and examining the mechanism of spontaneous obedience under an authoritarian state and the mass society. I then argue that the problem with this theory is that the social critique falls into the performative contradiction, which is similar to the difficulty encountered with the "Dialectics of Enlightenment." Finally, I insist that Honneth's new version of the Critical Theory after the 1990s is free from this theoretical aporia in that it renounces Freud's classical model of psychoanalysis and adopts that of object-relation theory.
