ABSTRACT
Serge Moscovici first published his monograph La Psychoanalyse, son image et son public in 1961, in which he outlined the conceptual framework of social representations theory in relation to the analysis of the reception of French psychoanalysis. The large-scale empirical study intended to capture the process in which the scientific theory of psychoanalysis had become part of everyday thinking and knowledge. The study consisted of two parts. In the first part a survey using a questionnaire was conducted with 200 subjects. The survey covered a representative sample of Parisians but special sub-samples for age, social status or lifestyle were analysed separately. The groups were compared according to their knowledge about psychoanalysis and their attitude towards psychoanalysis. The analysis revealed that middle-class subjects had significantly more information about psychoanalysis than working-class people, and there were considerable differences among the groups in terms of the age variable too. In the case of most groups a positive or negative attitude towards psychoanalysis was correlated with the amount of knowledge about psychoanalysis.
