BGSP faculty member Siamak Movahedi has published a chapter “The Narcissism of Minor Differences: The Status Anxiety and Disciplinary Intolerance between Sociology and Psychoanalysis” in the recently published book, The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Diverse Perspectives on the Psychosocial (2014). In this book major scholars in sociology and psychoanalysis such as Anthony Elliott, Nancy Chodorow, Catherine Silver, Jeffrey Prager, Neil Smelser, Geore Steinmnetz ,Gilda Zwerman, and others have addressed themselves to the theoretical and professional tensions between the two fields of inquiry.
Ideally, these tensions should transcend the petty rivalries in the academy in favor of understanding the relationship between society and the individual. The general impression that one gets from reading this book is that both sociologists and psychoanalysts have failed in this task.
In the ‘The Narcissism of Minor Differences,” Dr. Movahedi shows how arbitrary the disciplinary boundary is between psychoanalysis and sociology, how psychoanalysis can complement sociology and how structural analysis in one discipline needs the other to explain its pattern and dynamics. Dr. Movahedi then tries to examine the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge. He wonders why Freud was imported to the United States as the ego-psychologist, the psychologist of the autonomous individual, the agent of capitalism, and the purveyor of individualistic ideology; but he went to France to become part of the structuralist intellectual capital of Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and Althusser and a friend of Marx and leftwing revolutionary students.