A Review of “Psychoanalytic Sociology” by Dr. Ellie Ragland
What follows is a review from Dr. Ellie Ragland for my new book Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond.
Duane Rousselle’s book, Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond, is a unique contribution to both fields.
He starts off studying Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1929/1930), particularly the phenomenon of social exclusion. Bringing together sociology and psychoanalysis by way of the symptom, he points out that it concerns power in the real, the individual and in social reality. Lacan certainly presented a pro-sociology argument in his discourse theory which proposes that the discourses of the master, university, hysteric and analyst, unlike psychotic speech, make a social bond (1969–70 & 1972–73).
Jacques-Alain Miller has recently said that psychoanalysis is a social fact. The collective treasury of signifiers deposited in the cultural Other contains signs, traces and letters implanted there by the language of the outside world. Rousselle writes that social bonds are created variously in reference to groups: intellectual-internal; social-internal; intellectual-external; social-external.
Topologically speaking, he shows how individuals, taken as properties or elements, are collected in different, but overlapping spaces. He doesn’t claim this topological relationship, but his organization shows evidence of the late Lacan’s thinking about how the relationships of subjects and identifications are connected by neighborhoods no matter how different they are. Social science misses the grouping of internal exclusion, Rousselle maintains.
“He refers to Marx’s well-defined description of being isolated within a group — in the group, but not of the group.”
He spends time investigating the relationship of science to psychoanalysis which exposes its analysands to the deceptive truths of the social by which they live as semblances. Arguing that the group aims for a singular identity against the outside, Rousselle says this structure is a commonality which anarchists judge against. He talks about the in-group phenomenon of the joke only insiders get as an example of delusional knowledge defining “insiders” as well. Rousselle gives an extended example of the offensiveness of humor to an outsider: A customer asks the waiter for cream and the waiter responds, ironically, “we have no milk.” Rousselle says an anorexic would not find the joke funny, food desires being very precise for them, not a matter of laughing about no cream — not even milk.
Rousselle claims that the group “in the know” functions as a fraternity of one; in this way, he emphasizes the proximity of the social and individual. He refers to Marx’s well-defined description of being isolated within a group — in the group, but not of the group. Referring to the contemporary group phenomenon of defining “insideness” by monstrosity or strangeness, Rouselle points out that their bond relies on a kind of morality of cohesion. Freud defended psychoanalytic society by an appeal to their reliance on “the uncanny” (1919). Pointing to the general idea that psychoanalysis is Jewish, Rousselle points to the threat of the outsider, the one not-in-the-know, relying on meta-platforms. Taking Lacan’s point of view, not Freud’s, Duane says the unconscious is politics, outside ourselves.
The exclusion of the subject from society is caused by many things, including what Lacan called our alienated technological world of gadgets, while the focus is on our bodies, not our subjectivities. Duane brings the unconscious to bear on sleep and dreaming and argues that as a society we don’t want to wake up to the real. Segregations, collective isolations and insulation rule, revealing that people find satisfaction in separation. He pinpoints capitalism as the new feudalism within which we are estranged.
“The message of psychoanalytic sociology is that man has become other to himself, that we reject others whose jouissance is not identical to our own.”
What becomes of interpretation now that we have chat GPT, he asks. Where has ethical discourse gone with today’s notions of pills, biological causes and AI as intelligence? As Miller has argued, “Everyone is Mad,” but not psychotic (2008–2009). Psychoanalysis in N. America is outdated, replaced by therapies and pharmaceuticals.
The message of psychoanalytic sociology is that man has become other to himself, that we reject others whose jouissance is not identical to our own. The concept of sex has become radicalized, leaving us without a true basis for a social bond. Simulacrum reigns with makeshifts of modular knowledge, such as a disease model of medicine pretending to treat mental health. The capitalistic alternative offers a society of death. The fall of an Other in whom one can believe responds with pluralities: Jews repress the Other; Christians disavow the Other as imaginary; Muslims see the Other as real, everywhere. Each person is trying to fill the gaping hole in being with beliefs and objects.
We live in a lonely society where capitalism and science (biology plus medicine) control citizens through today’s totalitarian patriarchy. Fascistic jouissance makes the holocaust the ideology of modernity: Exclude difference! Gender has become a myth and the body has become a facticity of performance. Signified meanings have been covered over with the play of infinite signifiers. The hole we all confront cannot be filled or traversed; television has become society’s auxiliary organ.
Duane Rousselle’s book is extraordinary, an unexpected trip into a landscape we recognize as he describes it and which creates in us a sense of horror.
