Norbert Elias’s Contribution to Psychoanalytical History[1]

Michael Rustin

Introductory Note (for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Seminar)

There are several reasons why I think Norbert Elias’s work is relevant to those interested in the relations between psychoanalysis and other disciplines. The first of these is that his major books, The History of Civilisation and The Court Society, were conceived in the years just after the publication of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents in 1929, and written during the 1930s. They still represent the most sustained attempt by any historian to make use of Freudian perspectives in the description and explanation of large proceses of historical change.

The second is methodological. Elias’s conception of sociology is that it should explore patterns or ‘figurations’ of development, always taking place in time, and always taking account of complex relationships. This he contrasts with scientific methods, sometimes wrongly deployed in the social sciences, which seek to identify causal factors, or chains, expressed as laws, which assume constancy and even, in principle, time-reversibility. What Elias describes as ‘figurations’ seem to be close to the patterns of personality organisation or development, or therapeutic interaction, on which psychoanalytic description is based. Psychoanalysis, in my view, is ‘figurational’ in its character, and antithetical to a certain kind of abstract, universalist and static scientism in academic psychology, in ways which are quite to Elias’s concept of sociology, which for him always has a temporal or historical dimension.

Thirdly, we might note Elias’s great hostility to a certain aspect of the western philosophical tradition, which he regards as mistakenly individualist in its presuppositions, constructing, since Descartes, abstract notions of the self which exclude the various relational dimensions (culture, language, dependence on others) without which no significant self could exist. It may well be that those whose conception of philosophy is more influenced by the later Wittgenstein than by Descartes might feel their philosophical approach is of a different kind than Elias had in mind. But since he engaged critically with philosophy as a mode of thought, his writing might be of interest to philosophers for this reason.

We certainly do need some models and examples of how to think in psychoanalytic ways about phenomena outside the consulting room, and I suggest that Elias provides a good one. We can consider in discussion what might he missing in it, or indeed how his approach be extended to take account of many post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis of which Elias took little explicit account.

Elias’s Unusual Career

One of the major classics of historical sociology – Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process – was first published in German in Switzerland in 1939, but translated and published in English only in 1978. (He had begun to be recognised a decade or so earlier, following the reissue of the German edition of The Civilising Process in 1969.) Elias was born in Germany in 1897, so at the date of translation in to English of his most important work he was already, astonishingly, 81. He had come to England from Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1935 and was briefly interned early in the war on the Isle of Man. He had begun his career in Germany in a junior position at the University of Frankfurt, but in England he found himself working for many years on the margins of academic life as a researcher and teacher. He was given his first university appointment only in 1954, in the Sociology Department at LeicesterUniversity, eight years before his statutory retirement. All of his many works were published and in many cases written after his formal retirement in 1962. Fortunately, he lived to the considerable age of 93, dying in 1990. He became famous in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Holland and Germany, but also with some significant recognition in Britain, and produced significant works in his later life, sometimes with enthusiastic younger collaborators. This was an unusual career pattern, to say the least, and perhaps accounts for the somewhat shadowy place that Elias’s work has in the academy. He was apparently regarded at the University of Leicester as somewhat curious, a man out of his time, and the worldwide esteem he eventually achieved came largely after his academic retirement.

History and Psychoanalysis

Elias thought of himself as a sociologist, not as a historian, so before considering the relationship of his historical writing to psychoananalysis, there is a debate to be had about the relations between the fields of sociology and history. There can hardly be a discussion of Elias’s contribution to psychoanalytical history if one does not recognise him as a historian in the first place. So one should begin by giving some attention to that issue.

Elias’s work is historical in two senses. One of these is literal and obvious – a matter of subject-matter and content. Elias’s largest works, The Civilising Process, and The Court Society seek to describe and explain changes in the behaviour and ‘social character’ of the upper classes in the West, taking place over the period from the Renaissance to the age of Absolutism – the Court Society takes as its exemplary instance the court of Louis IV in France. The researches he and his colleagues later undertook on the emergence of modern sports are also historical in focus, since Elias offers a historical explanation, linked to that underpinning his earlier work, of this development and its meaning. His late and incomplete book on Mozart is similarly historical in its analysis, explaining the ultimate tragedy of Mozart’s life – he died as a pauper – and also his genius, as that of an artist whose attempts to achieve ‘bourgeois’ autonomy as an artist were defeated by the continuing monopoly of cultural power held in Germanic Europe at that time by the courts and the bishops. Elias’s argument is that Mozart tried and failed to find a sufficient market for his work, outside of court circles, particularly when the sympathy for the new enlightenment spirit expressed in his later operas met with an unfavourable response from former patrons in Vienna. Musically, Elias says, Mozart’s intense emotional sensibility, anticipating the Romantic period, took shape within the thoroughly classical musical formation he had learned from his childhood.

The second sense in which Elias’s work is historical is less obvious, and more challenging. He argued, against most of the sociological discipline of his time, that sociology should be the study of processes located in time, and not of states or structures. Sociologists had taken as their primary subject-matter essentially static entities – the Parsonian idea of the ‘social system’ dominant during much of Elias’s career was a prime example and Elias’s implicit intellectual adversary[2] – and had then struggled to explain how changes within and between them could take place. Their usual method of representing change was by contrasts and comparisons of different ideal-typicalstructures – Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, and Weber’s traditional, charismatic and rational-legal types of authority, are leading examples. (This approach has been termed ‘comparative statics’.) How these forms of social organisation actually mutated into one another had usually been a secondary concern for sociology.

Marx came much closer to a conception of society as process, and was thus a significant influence on Elias, but Marx’s work was vitiated for Elias by its excessively teleological and political commitment, and by its privileging of the developments in the sphere of production over all others.[3] Elias argued, in later defence of his Civilising Process thesis, that the establishment of a monopoly of violence by states had been the precondition for economic development, and could not be accounted for as its effect. But Elias was in any case critical of the framing of historical and sociological explanations as questions of cause and effect, holding that the search for laws and causal relations was a misapplication of assumptions about the universal and uniform properties of nature, derived from the natural sciences, to a human and social sphere which was not at all uniform in its essential properties

Elias argued that an underlying atomism and methodological individualism underlies the model of causality which is misapplied in the social science. Quantitative methods can be deemed to be critical to issues of validity only on the principle that the entities being treated as aggregates are uniform. His view, closer to the biological sciences, is that social structures have emergent holistic properties, larger than the sum of their parts, and that valid explanations have to take account of their particularities. This is much closer to the assumptions made in much historical explanation, as welll as, one might add, to explanations in the psychoanalytical field. Elias developed a concept of what he called ‘figuration’, [4] which I think has relevance to all three disciplines of history, sociology and psychoanalysis as a mode of understanding the centrality both of holistic patterning and structure, and process, to all of them.

The first chapter of The Court Society, ‘Sociology and Historiography’, sets out Elias’s position on this issue. He criticised most historical writing, as being excessively descriptive, too much shaped by the value-orientations of historians in each generation, and too much dominated by the idea that explanations of historical particulars can sufficiently be found in the role of individuals and their agency. ‘In historiography’, he writes, ‘there is certainly a continuous growth of particular knowledge, but there is no continuity of growth on the plane of a unifying framework’. (op cit. P 9. ). He is equally critical of versions of sociology, in particular the structural-functionalist theories of Talcott Parsons, which were dominant in the field during much of Elias’s career, whose determinism of structures leaves an unbridgeable gulf between societies and individuals. Weber’s concept of ‘ideal types’, finding typical patterns of social organisation, comes nearer in Elias’s view to a successful synthesis between sociology and historiography. The limitation of this method, he argues, is its extensive nature, its classification of so many historical instances under the same concept as to lead to an undue abstractness and over-generalisation. Weber’s ideal types, in Elias’s view, became overly stretched by the sheer volume of the instances and differences which they sought to encompass. Elias recommends an intensive method of investigation[5] which can identify the detailed patterns of interaction which occur within a typical pattern of organisation, and in particular can enable social scientists to clarify the scope for actions and choices for individuals located in different positions within such a structure. It is this intensive method of investigation of what he calls a ‘figuration’ (configuration is a more familiar term, perhaps) that Elias recommends as the essential work of sociology, and probably in his view of historiography too.

Elias argues that confusions of historical and sociological method have arisen through a failure to recognise and distinguish between three distinct levels of social process. One of these is ‘biological evolution’, which has established certain enduring patterns and capacities in human beings, a genetically-endowed ground from which social development has proceeded. The second is ‘social development’, which has proceeded at a much more rapid pace than evolutionary development. Enormous changes in social configurations have taken place over what is in evolutionary terms the extremely short period of ten thousand years or so. The third is ‘history’, by which he means the actions and changes with occur within the life-span and memory of an individual or a generation, but which are nevertheless subject to the constraints, which are often barely visible to social actors, of a particular social development or ‘figuration’. Elias argues that historians tend to identify with,and focus on, the perspective of individual actors, failing to recognise how individuals’ freedom of action (even if they are powerful monarchs like Louis IV) is always constrained by the larger configuration of dependencies in which they are located. Such configurations persist while many generations of individuals (like individual kings or even dynasties in Court Society) successively pass through them within their life spans. Elias’s idea that different temporalities of change needed to be recognised in historical and sociological study has parallels in the work of the historians of the FrenchAnnalesSchool, and in Althusser’s work which in this respect were influenced by this.

Elias’s view of historical and sociological method, and his insistence on differentiating between the understanding of individuals’s freedom of action, and the structure of relationships which shapes this, has a bearing on the possible role of psychoanalytical explanation in history. In particular, it suggests that psychoanalysis might be relevant not only to understanding the motivations and behaviour of individual historical actors (assuming we know enough about their biographies to make such imputations convincing) but also to understanding the unconscious states of mind engendered at a ‘group’ or ‘social level.’ As we will see, Elias’s own engagement with psychoanalytical modes of explanation is primarily at the level of the group or typified individual, and not in the form of the biographical analysis of historical individuals, or ‘psycho-biography’. It seems likely that this differentiation between the ‘group based’ and ‘individually-based’ application of psychoanalytical ideas to historical materials is a fundamental one, and that the failure sufficiently to recognise it has been a limitation of previous work in psychoanalytical history.

Psychoanalysis in Elias’s Work

The links between Elias and psychoanalysis are very close, both biographically and in the development of Elias’s intellectual work, from its earliest days. He was an associate of S.J. Foulkes, who like him fled to England from Frankfurt (he was formerly Fuchs before his exile) and was his collaborator in the original development of Group Analysis in England in the 1930s and 1940s. He had a personal analysis, although with which analyst I do not yet know. Elias’s methodological insistence that study must be ‘intensive’, and engage with particular details of experience, is reflected presumably in his own form of engagement with psychoanalysis, which was as an analysand and group therapist, and not only as a reader of Freud’s work. It seems that the experience of Group Analysis, in its earliest days, must have been important in enabling Elias to grasp the possible relevance of psychoanalytic explanations to changes occurring at a social level. It is possible that in developing the practice of Group Analysis, with S.J. Foulkes, Elias was able to observe in microcosm some of the psycho-social processes of the inhibitions of instinctual impulse, and the development of a capacity for self-reflection, which he interpreted as fundamental in his account of the larger historical ‘civilising process’ which was the subject of his major work.

Zigmunt Bauman, in a 1979 review article (1979) reviewing four books by and about Elias at the point when his reputation was growing, perceptively noted that The Civilising Process is in effect the embodiment of the thesis of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents as a historical narrative (or perhaps we should say as a narrative of historical sociology.) Bauman pointed out that Elias undertook the documentary field work for his major works soon after the 1929 publication of Freud’s book. The thesis of The Civilising Process is that the development of modern ways of life, culture, and social character depended above all on the inhibition of instinctual drives and impulses, through the internalisation of moral and aesthetic restraints, and through the emergence of forms of symbolic expression that can be equated with Freud’s idea of sublimation. Thus repression and sublimation are for Elias the keys to the understanding of social and cultural development in the West.

Among the primary historical materials on which Elias drew in developing his thesis were books written during the Renaissance, for example by Erasmus, Castigione and Della Casa, to instruct elite circles on prescribed ways of behaving in public. (The title given to the first volume of The Civilising Process in its 1978 publication in England was The History of Manners, though this sub-title, which seemed to some to trivialise Elias’s argument, has been dropped from later editions.). Elias notes how numerous widely-circulated books of etiquette instruct their readers in how to restrain their instinctual and bodily impulses. He discusses the use of knives and forks, nose-blowing, spitting, behaviour in the bedroom, attitudes towards the relations between men and women, and changes in tolerated aggressiveness. His argument is that the prescriptions set out in these manuals of acceptable behaviour reveal as their negative a preceding and prevailing state of affairs, in which little self-restraint and decorum was observed in performance of these functions.

In the pre-civilised state of warrior societies in which the baronial castle was the dominant institution, delight was found, he says, in extreme manifestations of violence, both in battle and in the treatment of deviants and criminals. Women could be taken at will by stronger men, unless protected by their kin. Meals and feasts were uncouth affairs, with people snatching at meat with their hands, throwing unwanted pieces on the floor, spitting and discharging phlegm at will. Urination and defecation could and did take place anywhere.[6]