ABSTRACT
In this eighth chapter, we return to Elias’ last text, Freud’s concept of society and beyond it, where he develops, for the first time, in a direct and systematic way, one of the most important criticisms of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud, according to Elias, was an heir of modern science and Cartesian thought and therefore conceived an ahistorical and universal personality structure. Consequently, he did not take into account the transformations and changes of societies, nor their effects on unconscious psychic processes. By defining the limits of psychoanalysis, Elias wanted to go beyond Freud, recognizing that the psychic structures, the ego, the superego, and the drives, must be understood in relation to society, as an expression of a social grammar and that the unconscious transmits, through generations, certain collective experiences that manifest themselves in the form of symptoms, dreams, and social habitus. Elias’s proposal, then, is to understand that Freudian ideas and concepts must be considered in a procedural perspective, with the risk of assuming an individual understanding of the civilizing process.
