Psychoanalysis has suffered rough treatment in American mass media in recent decades. Dubious sweeping neurological claims have displaced what are regarded as dubious “talking cure” claims. This cultural trend is reflected in the reflex-like skepticism with which especially under-50 scholars behold the works of Sigmund Freud and his schismatic followers. Political scientists rarely bother with psychoanalysis or tend at best to exhibit a “Freud for Beginners' grasp of the enterprise, which is, after all, an exploration, and canny effort at explanation, of our “inner world” and of the rule of unconscious elements over our intentions and best-laid plans. Inasmuch as the study of the unwieldy “inner self” militates against rational modeling, it is little wonder that psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor since Harold Lasswell's heyday. Indeed, psychoanalysts offer some intriguing comments about underlying motives that drive those of us who pursue rationalist models as adequate depictions of reality, but we need not tarry there.

Here, we have two adept political scientists, adherents of the British variant of psychoanalysis developed by Melanie Klein, tapping this multifaceted tradition for insights into group behavior, a move that is, as analysts readily acknowledge, speculative and only to be conducted with numerous caveats strewn ahead. A methodology devised to probe the innermost recesses of individuals obviously does not commend itself for the analysis of groups or institutions, too. The greatest care must be taken when appraising the results of such a methodological leap. Freud, after all, cautiously warned that his own meta-psychological excursions (Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo, etc.) were “his own affair.” People may have egos, ids, and superegos, but societies certainly do not.

The two books under review display certain merits and some weaknesses of psychoanalysis when applied within social sciences. In Rethinking Freedom, Robert Alford employs psychoanalytical lenses, so to speak, throughout a brilliant little volume examining the meaning of freedom among contemporary Americans. The irony is that Alford is so good an observer that one suspects he could have made many of the same interesting judgments without resorting to psychoanalytical concepts at all. His data unapologetically are some 50 extensive interviews with “about twice as many younger informants (18–30) as older (31–74)” (p. 5)—largely a privileged group located either in elite universities or high-paid occupations. With due allowance for this small and socially circumscribed “sample,” the study is well worth considering.

In reply to “What's freedom?” most interviewees answered “in terms of mastery, money, and power” (p. 9). No surprise. Partly, this robust mercenary view reflects the widening gap in the distribution of wealth, which worried interviewees do not want to wind up on the wrong side of. Partly, it reflects strong conformist, materialist, and homogenizing trends in American culture, which Tocqueville spotted long ago. And, partly, it reflects what Alford calls a borderline personality, writ large. A borderline personality (which is a much more serious clinical condition than the name might imply) is disposed, as one key trait, to all black/all white thinking.

For this young cohort: “Freedom is inversely proportional to dependence on others.” It “is an either-or choice,” which is underpinned by a fear of “narcissistic injury” by “other wills more powerful than your own” so that if interviewees “can't be completely free they want none of it.” There are plenty of exceptions, but fully half the interviewees find no freedom whatever in an unbridled commercial country, democracy or no democracy (p. 13). Alford says they have a point inasmuch as the “political system under which we live is sclerotic, deeply influenced by private power and money and relatively inaccessible to ordinary citizens.” The objective for these interviewees is not freedom, but rather success in acquiring protective devices and gaudy ornaments. They can envision no “alternative social order” in a supposed “end of history era,” nor do they perceive “that control over one's own life is a political, not personal, project” (p. 83).

In the questionable course of transforming a clinical term into a cultural diagnosis (like Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism [1991]), Alford seems well aware of the tricky oscillation between inner representation and outer events, and “between type of society and the traits it selects for and exaggerates.” Borderline thinking, he argues, is exacerbated by modern conditions: “I was not interviewing men and women with a borderline personality disorder but men and women who live in a culture with a borderline conception of freedom” (p. 59).

Hence, freedom is freedom from dependence on others and from intrusion. Perfect isolation—autism, in a word—becomes the illogical ideal. Many fretful interviewees feel “trapped in conventional roles but see no way out” (p. 98). In a radically postmodern competitive universe, they accurately sense that “when all values are equal the power to get what one wants becomes the only standard” (p. 4). These young people are “harshly realistic” (p. 35). So far as they see, wealth and power are bestowed arbitrarily. Alford sees a “danger that they become so deeply cynical about the absence of justice in a world in which fate and force rule that they join with rather than resist it.”

Yet “no limits and no boundaries is narcissism, not freedom” (p. 39). Freedom “stands in a complex relationship with dependency,” argues Alford (p. 103). Rather than autarchy, freedom entails “more a quality of a skill of living with others.” In fact, “narcissism, convention, and obsessive attachment are mitigated by republican political practice” (p. 99.) Seeing clearly, in Alford's terms, “means not so much seeing through or seeing past the reality of everyday life but seeing all the spaces and places within everyday life where alternative ways of living and being … are possible” (p. 98). And, he continues, “[I]t is through acts of transgression with others that individuals are most likely to understand their freedom's often unwitting dependence upon others. This is what Tocqueville meant by self-interest well-understood” (p. 110). Out of this stance arises critiques, for example, of Robert Putnam for putting “social trust first, which is a resource for authority but not for oneself,” and of Jürgen Habermas for equating freedom with rationalism. Political activism mitigates the borderline tendencies Alford rues. In many ways, the book is a plea for, and a guide to, creative, even mischievous, collective action. It is not everybody's cup of tea, but then everybody's cup of tea is always bland.

Isaac Balbus's Mourning and Modernity, a follow-up to his Marxism and Domination (1982), is a collection of 10 essays that apply Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts to an investigation of the upheavals of the sixties (and their interpretive aftermath), the works of Walter Benjamin, the debate over reparations to American blacks, consumerism, cyberspace fancies, and the ecology movement.

Marx is not enough even for Marxists because of his instrumental approach to nature, which is part of the problem (p. 19). The domination of nature, Balbus contends, “is an historically specific form of male domination that owes its existence to a peculiarly punitive form of mother-dominated child rearing” in Western industrial cultures. Against radical constructivists, psychoanalysis reminds us that there are indeed universal problems—the relationships between love and hate, men and women, and individual and groups—that everyone negotiates (p. 67).

Kleinian analysts see our most significant behavior patterns set in early childhood. In Western societies, care falls almost entirely upon the mother who, unable to fulfill impossible infantile demands for perfection, becomes “split” into a “good” and “bad” mother. The child, motivated by anxiety and guilt, learns to integrate both images into a single “mother who is recognized as neither all good or all bad.” Those who succeed in this task are best placed to cope later with emotional crises regarding adult partners or trying events. Most succeed but many fall prey to defenses of idealization, “manic denial,” and/or projection of self-loathed traits upon others. One consequence of such defenses is that women become a scapegoat for the human condition (p. 8). An urge to dominate women and nature is one result. Well, that is a theory.

Oddly, for a sixties activist, Balbus goes on to conjecture that activists have a “rage” against a “maternal” 1960s movement that failed to deliver utopia overnight, and so they contributed to its destruction. Perhaps, but one recalls that the combined police and surveillance powers of the U.S. state emphatically targeted the antiwar movement, too, and had an effect. The movement, in any case, is conceived as a child rebelling against Mom and Dad, exactly as many right-wingers reveled in portraying upheavals at the time (p. 88). He elsewhere argues that whites are “guilty” about denigrating blacks whose culture they love. Balbus, I believe, mistakes a love of aspects of black life for admiration for blacks as whole people (which is how racists can enjoy black music). The other essays are similarly contestable yet interesting forays into cultural critique. The overarching necessity of learning to live with ambivalence within ourselves and in others is not a bad lesson to learn.