Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In your presidential address to the American Sociological Association you focused on the concept of ambivalence, which is quite interesting. First, tell us about that concept, but secondly, was that a product of the confluence of two disciplines, psychoanalysis and sociology, or was it independent of that?
I got influence from both sides, I suppose. From the psychoanalytic side, psychoanalysis from its classical days has undergone a lot of changes and a lot of the original Freudian formulations, such as the primal horde, the life wish and death wish, some of the aspects of the theory of dreams, the Oedipus complex -- a lot of those have either been discredited or highly qualified. But in my own experience and in becoming acquainted with the history and nature of psychoanalytic thought I saw that one of the most vital and unyielding concepts was that of ambivalence. The idea is that toward an object, or toward another person, or toward an idea, one can simultaneously, and usually does simultaneously, hold both positive and negative attitudes or orientations, and that these are parts of your own psychic reality, but they're not the most comfortable part of your psychic reality. The world isn't simple enough if you have to think all the time about your being both drawn and repelled by something, so the tendency is to simplify this and to categorize more into absolutes of one's liking. But if you get into it -- I think I gave the example in my presidential address that in a parade of presidents through which one's life has gone, one usually, clearly has preferences. And you, on the surface, think of someone you really detest, but when you begin to think about it, you begin to uncover that it's not all that simple, that even your heroes have their problems and maybe your villains have their virtues, and you have to recognize that. Well, from the psychoanalytic side it's a persistent and valuable perspective.
There's a notion of sociological ambivalence that isn't so developed but nonetheless is important, and that has to do with the structuring of contradictory expectations into the similar role, in other words, that leads you to be both drawn into and away from that particular role. There have been analyses of the medical role, of the role of wife and husband, of children, whatever, that simultaneously attract and repel, or demand and prohibit, behavior; so that there is a kind of confluence there. The main thing that led me to go into more and more areas which seem to be applicable is that it yielded a great deal of intellectual harvest for me, that you could understand a lot of things about otherwise perplexing phenomena by understanding the orientations that people have, which are ambivalence and insoluble, and therefore repetitive, because they keep trying to solve these ambivalences which won't go away.
That isn't the way Americans think of things. We tend to think of things as problem solving, that you have a problem, well, you work it through, you solve it, you get a result. Life isn't that way. Life is a constant struggle over the same battles that you've been fighting all of your life.
This notion offers a nice balance to the social sciences where there's been a heavy emphasis on what is called rational choice theory, where these kinds of issues are put aside.
This was the starting point of my presidential address, was to take economic theory of rationality, which was univalent utility, what attracts you. Well, there're disutility too, but the two never mix together. So, that's univalent and not very emotional as a theory. I took this as a starting point of the limitations and said, "Look, there are types of situations in which that kind of rationality seems to apply," and that means mainly the institutionalization of choice. But when you get the institutionalization of relationships in which you have no choice, in which you're dependent, that's where ambivalence thrives. You're in them and you can't get out of them. These are, of course, a parent/child relationship, and many, many others we could identify. This led me to insights on a whole wide range of phenomena that were otherwise not connected, except by this idea that they run on ambivalence.
Is it fair to say that ambivalence has intrigued you as a scholar all along? Because there is in your work a remarkable capacity to see all sides of issues and to attempt to synthesize them and integrate them.
Yes, that was in my work earlier, before I even got acquainted with psychoanalysis, this partial accepting and partly rejecting the standard formulations and explanations of things. That's ambivalence at work. The word actually shows up in some of my early work, which I didn't realize until I went back and took a look, that it was there that often. I start off a book by indicating that ambivalence is what really drives us. Even in my methodological book on comparative analysis, I started out about the ambivalence toward what's different from us. That's what holds back a lot of objective comparative analysis, is the "other" is always a subject of ambivalence. But that sort of came out, I didn't plot it out as a result of some formal training. I guess it's kind of the story of my life.
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