Introduction

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part discusses that it was Erich Fromm who started a long line of politically conscious social scientists who argued that social order rests on the repression of individual human desire and knowledge of the full truth about how social structure works. It explains Norbert Elias’s portrayal of power as relational, something that is generated during the interaction of privileged insiders and underprivileged outsiders. The part argues for the social, and that they find it difficult, because most psychoanalysts see the social as born of the psychological, as a symptom, not a cause. The members of a traumatized social system tend to get sucked into generalizing from the person to the group to the system, and generate metaphors and hypotheses that revert to the analytic tradition which Fahad Dalal criticizes.