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In issue 9/1 of PCS, our inaugural issue under our new name and new publisher, we invited members of our editorial boards to write about their views on the relation between the psychic and the social. In this issue, we publish Vic Blake's provocative commentary on my paper from 9/1, "A Fork in the Royal Road: On 'Defining' the Unconscious and its Stakes for Social Theory". Rather than respond to Blake's commentary, I would like to formulate a series of questions that his paper raised for me, in hopes that our readers might wish to carry this conversation further.
Blake feels that my theory of normative unconscious processes offers one way of capturing the social in the psychic (not a way that he endorses), but that it fails to capture the presence of the psychic in the social. Freud's social theorizing largely focused on the way the psychic structures the social, with little attention to the presence of the social in the psyche; how do various psychoanalytic schools theorize that relation today, and what kind of theory is best suited to capture BOTH the presence of the psychic in the social and the social in the psychic?
Is a theory that stresses the impact of social norms on the psyche necessarily determinist?
Despite Blake's discomfort with what he sees as a problematic dichotomization in my paper, I continue to think that a relational model of...