Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk a little about psychoanalysis, because that is a second career for you. Can we say that you majored in sociology and minored in psychoanalysis? What led you to do that?
The culture at Harvard at the time I was an undergraduate and graduate student was dominated by Freudian psychology. Most of the faculty members were sympathetic to that approach and many of them had gone through the psychoanalytic training that was available to non-medical personnel. I was drawn into this. I appreciated its strengths; never became a convert but was very much exposed and kind of knew, even at that time, that it was going to be a part of my career, though I didn't want to go into medical school and I wasn't sure exactly what -- I knew it would be an intellectual part of my life.
When I was relatively young, about 30 years, I had a breakup of a marriage and an accompanying personal crisis and I decided to seek help, but to seek help in the context of a training analysis, that is to say, a full training of a non-medical practitioner, which was by that time possible. In other words, I took the full training, no inhibitions, and in fact, I became licensed as a psychoanalyst in the State of California to practice if I wanted. I haven't followed a full practice. I've been a therapist and a supervisor off and on, in different times in my career, but psychoanalysis was a fundamental personal experience for me and became a permanent part of my intellectual outlook. At different times, often being asked but sometimes on my own steam, I would write on subjects that attracted me, which I thought had a potential from the development of depth psychology. The result is that book, some fifteen essays, I think, written over about a thirty-year period.
Let's talk then a little bit about the temperament and skills required for psychoanalysis. Are they same or very different?
Overlapping. I would say they're overlapping. The capacity for objectification is clearly there. In other words, if you're treating a patient who is highly disturbed or emotional or obviously full of pain, you have to be able to appreciate what that is, but you have to move a step away, combining sympathy with objective efforts to understand. Of course, the big difference is that -- we were talking about structures earlier -- the whole thing about psychoanalysis is the person. In fact, the field is somewhat oblivious to the larger structural arrangements, except insofar as they become grist for the person's psychological dynamics.
In one of the essays here -- well, there are actually several where you address this problem which has been an element in your career, namely interdisciplinary work. I should mention to our audience that for many years you were Associate Director of the Institute of International Studies which sponsors this program. In an essay on Erikson you write this: "Now when a psychoanalyst or any kind of discipline-oriented scholar makes such a commitment to become more comparative, more historical, more developmental and more incorporative of different analytic levels in his work, this necessarily generates a tension, a kind of disciplinary unease or discomfort. That tension arises from an inevitable pressure to relativize the universals of one's discipline." Talk a little about that.
Actually, thank you for reading that. I hadn't recalled the exact words. It's not bad, actually.
[laughs] So, tell us why it's good.
In a way, it's comfortable to operate within the confines of a discipline. Economics is an extreme case. Here you are, you have a very elaborated set of simplifying assumptions about the world, and by making those elaborated and simplified assumptions you can generate technical solutions much more easily than you can with a looser set of parameters in the world. The disciplines differ in the degree to which they are tight or loose in this regard. But the unease I was referring to is that when you want to relax some of those givens, if you want to take the propensity to consume as an inner dynamic rather than assumption, then you've got to move outside, you lose some of that theoretical specificity that the simplifying assumptions give you, but at the same time you become closer in touch with reality. The problem is to spread out, but at the same time maintain discipline. That's the real tension with interdisciplinary work, I've always discovered, and in a way you have to make up your own discipline -- discipline, small D -- because it's not supplied in any automatic way when thinking about two approaches at the same time. There's a synthesis that has to go on.
I might say that this interest in interdisciplinary [study] started early. The Social Relations department was an interdisciplinary department ...
This is at Harvard?
At Harvard when I was an undergraduate and graduate student. I studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford; my doctoral dissertation was an historical study informed by sociological frameworks, and of course, going into psychoanalysis was yet another extension into the special part of the world of psychology. So, this has kind of been in my blood and I suppose that the statement I made about interdisciplinarity in that essay was probably a kind of biographical statement.
I know you've thought a lot about the history of the intellectual communities, and so on, and you've run the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California (not at Stanford University). What are the kinds of environments that are conducive in making possible the most rewarding outcomes from interdisciplinary work?
I can tell you first an environment that's not very conducive, and that's the university itself. Its structural division into departments, the building of departments around disciplines, the building of careers within disciplines, all conspire toward a narrowing and more specialized line of inquiry, and most people in the various fields tend to go that route, then to make their careers out of more specialized work, and they continue to do it within the confines of the specialization that they chose in the first place or that they've been working in. And the atmosphere of the university with the department in particular is to reward that career line.
It seems to me that aside from any personal predilections one might have toward thinking more broadly or more comprehensively, I would have to say that someplace like the Center is extremely conducive, because you bring people in there -- it has no organization. There are no departments, no age levels, no seniority levels, no nothing. Everybody is equal, everybody is in there doing their own work, but everybody is systematically exposed, not in a compulsory but in an unstructured way, to everybody else. Things begin to spark, and we have had so many testimonies in the reports and the follow-ups of the scholars who went to the Center of contacts they made, friends they established, intellectual influences on them outside their own field, which changed their work sometimes in minor but sometimes in major ways. I think to introduce people into an unstructured situation of that sort probably leads to a kind of encouragement of destructuring their own thinking. I realize this is a kind of biographical statement, and I could probably think of other kinds of settings. The Society of Fellows was a similar experience because people came from everywhere and you necessarily, just through personal interaction, got exposed to their viewpoints.
Next page: Ambivalence
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