A Retrospective Critique of an Overly Empirical and Overly Objective Contemporary Sociology...

• In Event: History of Sociology and Social Thought Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Critique

Abstract

Noting that the idea of history must, owing to its nature, include subjective fractal foci. Because the idea of history is based upon a need to distinguish and isolate crucial aspects of the past, from it's entirety. The magnitude of the past and all of it's component functions, make a total view of “what the past was” impossible (to formulate).
Freudian theory, even including, perhaps, neo Freudian versions – fails to acknowledge the roles played by history, culture and religion, in the formation of the so called “super egos.” In both classical and neo versions, either the super ego – which is not particularly anything other than a basic presupposition – creates the ego, or vice versa. In neither version – perhaps – do society, culture, religion and ideologies influence or create the super ego!
All of this constitutes a nod to Carl Jung, who famously emphasized the differing roles played by different mythological traditions, upon the ego, the psyche and implicitly, upon behavior itself. Mythological traditions being related to and stemming from differing religious and cultural, national and historical influences!
But sociology, in it's rejection of Freudian thinking also appears to have rejected the need, in most cases, to access the repressed and unconscious! (There was an article likely also a book, referring to the “known and the unknown” but in attending ASA meetings, any references to the known and unknown have not been apparent. So that we are left with a subjectively barren and unclear present, which we are only, for the most part, examining and envisioning through empirical and statistical methods. Analyses based on phenomenological and subjective understandings, and those understandings themselves, tend to be avoided and ignored as being “too subjective, too unscientific.”
So these understandings themselves are rarely or never subjected to reality checks.

Author

• David (Jed) D. Schwartz