ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define institutions in The Fabric of Society as “permanent group behavior patterns.” In short, social scientists define institutions as the behavior of people. Psychoanalysis is centrally concerned with “interaction.” The vicissitudes of the drives which Freud described are largely due to the impact of culture—by means of persons other than the subject—on these drives. Psychoanalysis may help restore the possibility of moral choice to a patient. Psychoanalytic theory becomes the less reliable the less it is applied to live patients. Tempting as it may be to conceive of sociology as macropsychology, it is no more correct than it would be to reduce psychology to microsociology. Psychoanalysis offers a reservoir of hypotheses connecting individual personality with social milieu; these hypotheses—in many cases the only ones available—are worth exploring. However, they offer no more than hints contributing to the understanding of the diversity of human culture.
