The Unconscious as Vocabulary of Motive: Cultural Contention and the Ethics of Psychosocial Discovery

• In Event: 383 - Regular Session. Narrative, Biography, and Culture 1

Abstract

In this paper, I explore two cultural conflicts in which actors use biographically-situated claims about the personal unconscious to define issues of moral and political concern. The first case involves the evolving tension between the gay pride community and advocates of sexual reparative therapy over the nature of homosexuality. The second case involves the ongoing dispute between the recovered memory movement and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation over the veracity of recovered memories of child sexual abuse. Both of these public battles took initial form in the same era – at a moment of significant cultural and political change in the late twentieth century when interested parties began to advance an ethic of participatory democracy to undermine the ethic of dynamic paternalism at the core of conventional psychoanalytic theories and practices. Both cases reveal deep seated cultural tensions that revolve around the nature of sexuality, the moral character of particular sexual dynamics, and the boundaries of intimacy. Both concern issues that continue to stir controversy today. Taking a historical, cultural and cognitive sociological perspective, I show how the personal unconscious takes form as contested public narrative when agents use autobiographical stories to define particular issues and experiences as morally problematic. When actors tell stories involving the personal unconscious, they mobilize entrenched cultural and emotion codes as they work to define forces of right and wrong, ascribe innocence and guilt, and account for particular actions and behaviors in the world.

Author

• Thomas DeGloma, City University of New York-Hunter College