ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the sociologists’ coldness comes first and foremost from the basic assumption underlying psychoanalysis, that man’s behavior is to be understood primarily as the manifestation of incompletely socialized instinctual drives which are always seeking to break out in action. Modern sociology may conveniently be regarded as having begun with the publication of Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, and his Suicide may be taken as the first distinctively sociological empirical research of the modern variety. The failure of psychoanalysis to win a firm foothold in sociology is probably best understood in historical perspective. There is another sense of the economic that is also relatively neglected in psychoanalytic thought. Implicit in accepting it are certain suggestions for the further development of psychoanalysis, for movement and growth out of the rather narrow position in which it seems at the moment fixed.
