Expansion and Constraint in Freud's Contribution to Social Theory: Discussion of Nancy Chodorow's "Freud in his Psychosocial Generation: Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, and Du Bois".

This essay is an appreciation of the life and work of Nancy Chodorow, one of the most influential and insightful psychoanalytic sociologists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Her critical feminist analysis-of mothering and gendering in general-integrated Ego Psychology, Object Relations Theory, developmental psychoanalysis, and structural-functional sociology, opening new visions, which she articulated throughout all of her work. That Chodorow was also a practicing analyst further distinguished her from most of her analytically-inflected academic colleagues. In discussing Chodorow's paper, Seligman agrees that Freud's invention of psychoanalysis offered an essential contribution to sociology, along with its clinical and psychological significance. At the same time, however, she distinguishes between psychoanalysis and work of the seminal sociologists that she cites: The analytic focus on individual minds differentiates it from those theorists' prioritizing the social world and collective experiences and variables.