The Unconscious: A Perspective from Sociohistorical Psychology
Numerous scholars including social philosophers of the Frankfurt
school and psychological anthropologists have argued that a
cultural or sociohistorical approach to psychology cannot
completely explain psychological phenomena. In this view,
cultural psychology may comprehend the sociohistorical
organization of conscious phenomena such as attitudes or
customs, however it cannot explain subtle, arcane unconscious
processes. Accordingly, sociohistorical psychology must be
supplemented by Freudian concepts which do comprehend the
unconscious. Recently, Dorothy Holland (1992), a psychological
anthropologist, has complained that social cognitive theory does
not account for unconscious phenomena such as "censorship" and
"psychic strife," and she advocates importing other theories
such as psychoanalysis to fill this void. I dispute this
contention. I shall attempt to demonstrate that a
sociohistorical psychological analysis can illuminate phenomena
that a