Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis and the Sociocultural Turn: From Cultural Contexts to Hermeneutic Understanding

Abstract

This article addresses the tension between the defining impact of culture on human experience and the role of the person as agent. Focusing on the sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis, it examines the evolution of the notions of culture and the person, first in the culturalist psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, and then in the hermeneutic turn of recent psychoanalysis. The article maintains that persons are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live. At the same time, the manner in which individual psychology is organized and experienced within culture points to the role of agency as an emergent human potential. The article suggests that culture and personal agency are mutually reinforcing and that psychoanalysis must account for both. It develops a hermeneutic perspective as an alternative to postmodernism and concludes by outlining a post-Cartesian approach in psychoanalysis that addresses culture and the person in a non-dualistic fashion.

Notes

¹ In his interdisciplinary study, In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology, the psychoanalyst Alan Roland (1988, p. xvii) lamented “the overwhelming orientation of Freudian psychoanalysis to intrapsychic phenomena generally ignoring how historical, social and cultural patterns shape the inner world … another manifestation of Western individualistic assumptions.”

² As contemporary as Fromm’s stance may appear, however, his views on the relationship between the person and culture still reflect a specifically Euro-American outlook. As Manson (1988, p. 118) pointed out, Fromm remained “relatively indifferent to the cultural context of character formation in non-Western societies,” a critique that certainly applies equally to the other culturalist and neo-Freudian psychoanalysts of the time.

³ In Being and Time, Heidegger (1996) was engaged in an investigative method into the nature of Being. This “fundamental ontology” is based on Heidegger’s call for philosophy to return to the meaning of Being as such. Heidegger referred to the human being that questions the meaning of Being as “Dasein.” Dasein translates literally as There-being, but the German term is retained because there is no English equivalent that adequately conveys its meaning. Heidegger argued that Dasein is neither autonomous nor self-contained, but must always be understood as situated in the world. Dasein exists as “being-in-the-world.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Frie

Roger Frie, Ph.D., Psy.D., R.Psych. is Professor of Education, Simon Fraser University; Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia; and Faculty and Supervisor, William Alanson White Institute.