Norbert Elias’s Contribution to Psychoanalytical History1
Michael Rustin
Introductory Note (for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Seminar)
There are several reasons why I think Norbert Elias’s work is relevant to those
interested in the relations between psychoanalysis and other disciplines. The
first of these is that his major books, The History of Civilisation and The Court
Society, were conceived in the years just after the publication of Freud’s
Civilisation and its Discontents in 1929, and written during the 1930s. They
still represent the most sustained attempt by any historian to make use of
Freudian perspectives in the description and explanation of large proceses of
historical change.
The second is methodological. Elias’s conception of sociology is that it should
explore patterns or ‘figurations’ of development, always taking place in time,
and always taking account of complex relationships. This he contrasts with
scientific methods, sometimes wrongly deployed in the social sciences, which
seek to identify causal factors, or chains, expressed as laws, which assume
constancy and even, in principle, time-reversibility. What Elias describes as
‘figurations’ seem to be close to the patterns of personality organisation or
development, or therapeutic interaction, on which psychoanalytic description
is based. Psychoanalysis, in my view, is ‘figurational’ in its character, and
antithetical to a certain kind of abstract, universalist and static scientism in
academic psychology, in ways which are quite to Elias’s concept of sociology,
which for him always has a temporal or historical dimension.
1
An earlier version of this paper was first given at the History and Psychoanalysis Seminar
convened by Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor at the Institute of Historical Research on
January 28 2009
1
Thirdly, we might note Elias’s great hostility to a certain aspect of the western
philosophical tradition, which he regards as mistakenly individualist in its
presuppositions, constructing, since Descartes, abstract notions of the self
which exclude the various relational dimensions (culture, language,
dependence on others) without which no significant self could exist. It may
well be that those whose conception of philosophy is more influenced by the
later Wittgenstein than by Descartes might feel their philosophical approach is
of a different kind than Elias had in mind. But since he engaged critically with
philosophy as a mode of thought, his writing might be of interest to
philosophers for this reason.
We certainly do need some models and examples of how to think in
psychoanalytic ways about phenomena outside the consulting room, and I
suggest that Elias provides a good one. We can consider in discussion what
might he missing in it, or indeed how his approach be extended to take
account of many post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis of which
Elias took little explicit account.
Elias’s Unusual Career
One of the major classics of historical sociology – Norbert Elias’s The
Civilising Process – was first published in German in Switzerland in 1939, but
translated and published in English only in 1978. (He had begun to be
recognised a decade or so earlier, following the reissue of the German edition
of The Civilising Process in 1969.) Elias was born in Germany in 1897, so at
the date of translation in to English of his most important work he was already,
astonishingly, 81. He had come to England from Germany as a Jewish
refugee in 1935 and was briefly interned early in the war on the Isle of Man.
He had begun his career in Germany in a junior position at the University of
Frankfurt, but in England he found himself working for many years on the
margins of academic life as a researcher and teacher. He was given his first
university appointment only in 1954, in the Sociology Department at Leicester
University, eight years before his statutory retirement. All of his many works
were published and in many cases written after his formal retirement in 1962.
2
Fortunately, he lived to the considerable age of 93, dying in 1990. He
became famous in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Holland and Germany,
but also with some significant recognition in Britain, and produced significant
works in his later life, sometimes with enthusiastic younger collaborators.
This was an unusual career pattern, to say the least, and perhaps accounts
for the somewhat shadowy place that Elias’s work has in the academy. He
was apparently regarded at the University of Leicester as somewhat curious,
a man out of his time, and the worldwide esteem he eventually achieved
came largely after his academic retirement.
History and Psychoanalysis
Elias thought of himself as a sociologist, not as a historian, so before
considering the relationship of his historical writing to psychoananalysis,
there is a debate to be had about the relations between the fields of
sociology and history. There can hardly be a discussion of Elias’s contribution
to psychoanalytical history if one does not recognise him as a historian in the
first place. So one should begin by giving some attention to that issue.
Elias’s work is historical in two senses. One of these is literal and obvious – a
matter of subject-matter and content. Elias’s largest works, The Civilising
Process, and The Court Society seek to describe and explain changes in the
behaviour and ‘social character’ of the upper classes in the West, taking place
over the period from the Renaissance to the age of Absolutism – the Court
Society takes as its exemplary instance the court of Louis IV in France. The
researches he and his colleagues later undertook on the emergence of
modern sports are also historical in focus, since Elias offers a historical
explanation, linked to that underpinning his earlier work, of this development
and its meaning. His late and incomplete book on Mozart is similarly historical
in its analysis, explaining the ultimate tragedy of Mozart’s life – he died as a
pauper – and also his genius, as that of an artist whose attempts to achieve
‘bourgeois’ autonomy as an artist were defeated by the continuing monopoly
of cultural power held in Germanic Europe at that time by the courts and the
bishops.
Elias’s argument is that Mozart tried and failed to find a sufficient
3
market for his work, outside of court circles, particularly when the sympathy
for the new enlightenment spirit expressed in his later operas met with an
unfavourable response from former patrons in Vienna. Musically, Elias says,
Mozart’s intense emotional sensibility, anticipating the Romantic period, took
shape within the thoroughly classical musical formation he had learned from
his childhood.
The second sense in which Elias’s work is historical is less obvious, and more
challenging. He argued, against most of the sociological discipline of his time,
that sociology should be the study of processes located in time, and not of
states or structures. Sociologists had taken as their primary subject-matter
essentially static entities – the Parsonian idea of the ‘social system’ dominant
during much of Elias’s career was a prime example and Elias’s implicit
intellectual adversary2 – and had then struggled to explain how changes
within and between them could take place. Their usual method of
representing change was by contrasts and comparisons of different idealtypical structures – Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, and
Weber’s traditional, charismatic and rational-legal types of authority, are
leading examples. (This approach has been termed ‘comparative statics’.)
How these forms of social organisation actually mutated into one another had
usually been a secondary concern for sociology.
Marx came much closer to a conception of society as process, and was thus
a significant influence on Elias, but Marx’s work was vitiated for Elias by its
excessively teleological and political commitment, and by its privileging of the
developments in the sphere of production over all others.3 Elias argued, in
It is another example of Elias’s situation of displacement within his discipline that he was not
seen as a significant figure in the major anti-functionalist controversies in sociology of the
1960s.
3 The Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer and others was also located at the University
of Frankfurt, in the same building as the Department of Sociology where Elias was a protégé
of Karl Mannheim, who like him came to England as a refugee from the Nazis. Elias’s work
came to represent a line of development distinct from that of the Frankfurt School Marxists,
though he shared with them a deep interest in the psychoanalytical understanding of social
and historical processes. Perhaps the most important difference between them lay in Elias’s
insistence on the necessary separation of social science from political commitments. This
commitment to scientific understanding as an autonomous value also later separated Elias
from his former mentor Karl Mannheim, who as a sociologist in London sought to apply
2
4
later defence of his Civilising Process thesis, that the establishment of a
monopoly of violence by states had been the precondition for economic
development, and could not be accounted for as its effect. But Elias was in
any case critical of the framing of historical and sociological explanations as
questions of cause and effect, holding that the search for laws and causal
relations was a misapplication of assumptions about the universal and uniform
properties of nature, derived from the natural sciences, to a human and social
sphere which was not at all uniform in its essential properties
Elias argued that an underlying atomism and methodological individualism
underlies the model of causality which is misapplied in the social science.
Quantitative methods can be deemed to be critical to issues of validity only
on the principle that the entities being treated as aggregates are uniform. His
view, closer to the biological sciences, is that social structures have emergent
holistic properties, larger than the sum of their parts, and that valid
explanations have to take account of their particularities. This is much closer
to the assumptions made in much historical explanation, as welll as, one
might add, to explanations in the psychoanalytical field. Elias developed a
concept of what he called ‘figuration’, 4 which I think has relevance to all three
disciplines of history, sociology and psychoanalysis as a mode of
understanding the centrality both of holistic patterning and structure, and
process, to all of them.
The first chapter of The Court Society, ‘Sociology and Historiography’, sets
out Elias’s position on this issue. He criticised most historical writing, as being
excessively descriptive, too much shaped by the value-orientations of
historians in each generation, and too much dominated by the idea that
explanations of historical particulars can sufficiently be found in the role of
individuals and their agency. ‘In historiography’, he writes, ‘there is certainly a
continuous growth of particular knowledge, but there is no continuity of growth
sociology in a social democratic mode to the project of ‘social reconstruction’. Elias remained
left-of-centre in his political outlook, but sought to maintain a clear separation between the
work of understanding and explanation and moral commitments other than the commitment
to the goal of objective understanding, which was a moral commitment in itself.
4 Those influenced by Elias defined a field of ‘figurational sociology’ inspired by him.
5
on the plane of a unifying framework’. (op cit. P 9. ). He is equally critical of
versions of sociology, in particular the structural-functionalist theories of
Talcott Parsons, which were dominant in the field during much of Elias’s
career, whose determinism of structures leaves an unbridgeable gulf between
societies and individuals. Weber’s concept of ‘ideal types’, finding typical
patterns of social organisation, comes nearer in Elias’s view to a successful
synthesis between sociology and historiography. The limitation of this method,
he argues, is its extensive nature, its classification of so many historical
instances under the same concept as to lead to an undue abstractness and
over-generalisation. Weber’s ideal types, in Elias’s view, became overly
stretched by the sheer volume of the instances and differences which they
sought to encompass. Elias recommends an intensive method of
investigation5 which can identify the detailed patterns of interaction which
occur within a typical pattern of organisation, and in particular can enable
social scientists to clarify the scope for actions and choices for individuals
located in different positions within such a structure. It is this intensive
method of investigation of what he calls a ‘figuration’ (configuration is a
more familiar term, perhaps) that Elias recommends as the essential work of
sociology, and probably in his view of historiography too.
Elias argues that confusions of historical and sociological method have arisen
through a failure to recognise and distinguish between three distinct levels of
social process. One of these is ‘biological evolution’, which has established
certain enduring patterns and capacities in human beings, a geneticallyendowed ground from which social development has proceeded. The
second is ‘social development’, which has proceeded at a much more rapid
pace than evolutionary development. Enormous changes in social
configurations have taken place over what is in evolutionary terms the
extremely short period of ten thousand years or so. The third is ‘history’, by
which he means the actions and changes with occur within the life-span and
Elias’s distinction between extensive and intensive methods of research is parallel to that
made by Rom Harré in his advocacy of methodological realism in the sciences. Harré
unfavourably contrasts the aggregative, atomistic and individualistic perspectives of
mainstream psychology, with approaches based on an understanding of human behaviour as
essentially relational and rule-governed.
5
6
memory of an individual or a generation, but which are nevertheless subject
to the constraints, which are often barely visible to social actors, of a particular
social development or ‘figuration’. Elias argues that historians tend to identify
with, and focus on, the perspective of individual actors, failing to recognise
how individuals’ freedom of action (even if they are powerful monarchs like
Louis IV) is always constrained by the larger configuration of dependencies
in which they are located. Such configurations persist while many
generations of individuals (like individual kings or even dynasties in Court
Society) successively pass through them within their life spans. Elias’s idea
that different temporalities of change needed to be recognised in historical
and sociological study has parallels in the work of the historians of the French
Annales School, and in Althusser’s work which in this respect were influenced
by this.
Elias’s view of historical and sociological method, and his insistence on
differentiating between the understanding of individuals’s freedom of action,
and the structure of relationships which shapes this, has a bearing on the
possible role of psychoanalytical explanation in history. In particular, it
suggests that psychoanalysis might be relevant not only to understanding the
motivations and behaviour of individual historical actors (assuming we know
enough about their biographies to make such imputations convincing) but
also to understanding the unconscious states of mind engendered at a
‘group’ or ‘social level.’ As we will see, Elias’s own engagement with
psychoanalytical modes of explanation is primarily at the level of the group or
typified individual, and not in the form of the biographical analysis of historical
individuals, or ‘psycho-biography’. It seems likely that this differentiation
between the ‘group based’ and ‘individually-based’ application of
psychoanalytical ideas to historical materials is a fundamental one, and that
the failure sufficiently to recognise it has been a limitation of previous work in
psychoanalytical history.
Psychoanalysis in Elias’s Work
7
The links between Elias and psychoanalysis are very close, both
biographically and in the development of Elias’s intellectual work, from its
earliest days. He was an associate of S.J. Foulkes, who like him fled to
England from Frankfurt (he was formerly Fuchs before his exile) and was his
collaborator in the original development of Group Analysis in England in the
1930s and 1940s. He had a personal analysis, although with which analyst I
do not yet know. Elias’s methodological insistence that study must be
‘intensive’, and engage with particular details of experience, is reflected
presumably in his own form of engagement with psychoanalysis, which was
as an analysand and group therapist, and not only as a reader of Freud’s
work. It seems that the experience of Group Analysis, in its earliest days,
must have been important in enabling Elias to grasp the possible relevance of
psychoanalytic explanations to changes occurring at a social level. It is
possible that in developing the practice of Group Analysis, with S.J. Foulkes,
Elias was able to observe in microcosm some of the psycho-social processes
of the inhibitions of instinctual impulse, and the development of a capacity for
self-reflection, which he interpreted as fundamental in his account of the
larger historical ‘civilising process’ which was the subject of his major work.
Zigmunt Bauman, in a 1979 review article (1979) reviewing four books by and
about Elias at the point when his reputation was growing, perceptively noted
that The Civilising Process is in effect the embodiment of the thesis of Freud’s
Civilisation and its Discontents as a historical narrative (or perhaps we should
say as a narrative of historical sociology.) Bauman pointed out that Elias
undertook the documentary field work for his major works soon after the 1929
publication of Freud’s book. The thesis of The Civilising Process is that the
development of modern ways of life, culture, and social character depended
above all on the inhibition of instinctual drives and impulses, through the
internalisation of moral and aesthetic restraints, and through the emergence
of forms of symbolic expression that can be equated with Freud’s idea of
sublimation. Thus repression and sublimation are for Elias the keys to the
understanding of social and cultural development in the West.
8
Among the primary historical materials on which Elias drew in developing his
thesis were books written during the Renaissance, for example by Erasmus,
Castigione and Della Casa, to instruct elite circles on prescribed ways of
behaving in public. (The title given to the first volume of The Civilising
Process in its 1978 publication in England was The History of Manners,
though this sub-title, which seemed to some to trivialise Elias’s argument, has
been dropped from later editions.). Elias notes how numerous widelycirculated books of etiquette instruct their readers in how to restrain their
instinctual and bodily impulses. He discusses the use of knives and forks,
nose-blowing, spitting, behaviour in the bedroom, attitudes towards the
relations between men and women, and changes in tolerated aggressiveness.
His argument is that the prescriptions set out in these manuals of acceptable
behaviour reveal as their negative a preceding and prevailing state of affairs,
in which little self-restraint and decorum was observed in performance of
these functions.
In the pre-civilised state of warrior societies in which the baronial castle was
the dominant institution, delight was found, he says, in extreme manifestations
of violence, both in battle and in the treatment of deviants and criminals.
Women could be taken at will by stronger men, unless protected by their kin.
Meals and feasts were uncouth affairs, with people snatching at meat with
their hands, throwing unwanted pieces on the floor, spitting and discharging
phlegm at will. Urination and defecation could and did take place anywhere. 6
Elias develops a complex thesis to describe and explain the transformations
that took place in these modes of behaviour, and in the mentalities that went
with them. Key to this process was the growth of power by centralised
6
Shakespeare perhaps imagines this archaic state of affairs when he has Goneril reprove
King Lear for the behaviour of his followers in her castle:
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires;
Men so disorder’s, so debosh’d , and bold,
That this our court, infected with their manners,
Shows like a riotous inn: epicurism and lust
Make it more like a tavern or a brothel
Than a grac’d palace. (King Lear, I. 4, 237-243)
9
monarchies, at the expense of the territorial and warrior aristocracy within
their domains. Elias described the accretion of power by monarchs as having
been accomplished by their encouragement of the growth of trade and cities,
with the rise of the bourgeoisie functioning as a balance to the power of the
territorial aristocracy. Growing tax revenues based on bourgeois trade
allowed the monarchs to maintain armed forces larger than those of any of
their subjects, and to use them to suppress threats to their power. Elias
grasps through this analysis the interdependence between different modalities
and sources of power, and the consequences of their changing balance over
time. He also understood, in relation to Court Society, how powerful actors
could enhance their own power through their control over and manipulation of
different power-resources, as the monarchy did in its balancing of the
territorial aristocrats against the mercantile bourgeoisie. He also understood
how this different figures exercised effects on personality structures, and on
cultures. 7
What is original in The Civilising Process and its prequel, The Court Society,
is Elias’s investigation of the consequences of the limitation of everyday
violence for the mentalities and everyday forms of life, first of the aristocracy,
and then by downward percolation to bourgeois and eventually other social
strata.
One of Elias’s dispute with Marxists was his view that power-sources were various, and
could not be reduced to the overriding effects of the mode and relations of production. Indeed
his developmental thesis seems to have been that the control of violence by states was the
precondition for the rise of mercantile society, and thus capitalism. In his discussions of
different power resources, and their combination in different ‘figurations’, Elias anticipated the
theoretical ideas of modern Weberian sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann.
(Giddens was in fact a student at Leicester in Elias’s last years, but does not discuss his
work.) The Althusserian and Gramscian developments in Marxism, influential in the 1970s,
represented an attempt from within Marxism to take account of the greater complexity of
forms of power - economical, political cultural – than classical Marxism had recognised.
7
Elias makes use, in the 1930s, of the concept of habitus, to describe implicit cultural rules of
behaviour, which became salient in sociology only in the 1970s and later in Bourdieu’s work.
(Bourdieu however was generous about Elias’s contribution.) We can further see an affinity
between Foucault’s historical investigations of changing mentalities, as effects of different
power regimes, and Elias’s interest in the relations between patterns of social domination and
subjectivity, though while Elias drew on Freud’s ideas, in developing his argument, Foucault,
and Deleuze, have sought to reverse the terms of Freud’s argument, seeing the penetration
of inner desires by cultures of regulation, sometimes masquerading as individual liberation,
not their repression by overly oppressive social morality, as the key problem. Deleuze and
Guattari’s most influential work (1984), preface by Foucault, is called Anti-Oedipus. But I
suppose Deleuze proposes another kind of figurational approach.
10
Elias’s thesis is that more extensive chains of dependency brought the
necessity for complex perceptions and discriminations of motive, and for the
deliberate calculation of what behaviours might be productive in what contexts
of relationship. The self, in Elias’s view, becomes more complex, and
develops an inner reflective capacity, as the relations and dependencies in
which it is embedded become more differentiated.
A central argument of The Court Society was that Louis IV’s requirement that
nobles must spend a large amount of time at his court was a means of
controlling and disciplining them. Elias describes the development of
elaborate codes of deference and respect, due at each level of a subtlydefined and ever-changing status hierarchy. Those who wished to flourish
within such an environment were required to develop a keen sensitivity to
signals of respect and disrespect, and the ability to calculate how to display
and present themselves in public in order to gain favour. He also noted the
emergence of a conception of private space, initially at the highest levels of
the social hierarchy, and the scope for intimacy and for the more delicate
understanding of feelings, which this made possible. It is in the ‘intensive’
study of The Court Society that Elias developed the understanding of the
consequences of inhibited instinctual impulses which then became the larger
theory of social transformation of The Civilising Process, a few years later.
Elias is essentially describing transformations in the modalities of power, from
a situation in which resort to violence was ubiquitous, to one in which it
receded somewhat into the background, though remaining an ever-present
resource which could on occasion be deployed against rivals or to discipline
subordinates.
Commentators on Elias’s work have drawn attention to similarities between
his discussions of the figurations of court society, Goffman’s work on the
performances of self in everyday settings, and Veblen’s analysis of the
functions of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in demonstrating status and power. .
11
The psychoanalytic dimension of Elias’s analysis lies in his understanding of
the internalisation of moral restraint which was essential to this ‘civilising
process‘. He is describing an historical process of the repression of
instinctual impulses, such that their inhibition comes to seem natural and
automatic. As an example of the depth and extent of this process of inhibition,
consider changing modes of sexual behaviour, from contexts in which young
men and women could not be trusted to be with one another without
supervision, to that of the contemporary environment in which high degrees of
sexual provocation and stimulation are expected to be combined with, most of
the time, and except in conditions of culturally-constructed licence, the
inhibition of actual sexual activity. It seems likely that differences in these
modes of inhibition are one source of cultural and moral division between the
individualised west, and segments of Islamic society today. Even within a
generation, in Europe, changes in these modalities have been quite evident,
for example in the degree to which women could expect routinely to be
physically hassled in public places, for example in the south of Italy.
On the positive side, in the Freudian sphere of sublimation, Elias argued that
the inhibition of impulses and the necessity to develop an inner mental space
in which reflection on them could take place, led to the differentiation of
mental life, including the spheres of science and the arts. Elias argued that
the essence of a scientific approach lay in the necessity for the subject’s own
desires and preferences to be separated from his work of understanding. His
view of ‘the civilising process’ as the inhibition of instinctual impulse thus
informs the ideal of an understanding free of subjective values and preference
which he proposes for the social sciences and tries to embody in his own
work.8 We can see some affinity between this perspective and the idea that
psychoanalysts should bring to their interactions with patients an attentive
stance free from personal interest or preconception.
Bauman in his 1979 review article argues against Elias’s excessive stress on objectivity and
value-freedom, pointing out that one can hardly separate Elias’s own perspective, for example
in his study The Established and the Outsiders, from his own experience as a marginal
citizen, in this respect similar in situation and pespective to other sociological theorists of
marginality such as Simmel and Schutz.
8
12
The analysis of the development of sports which Elias undertook with Eric
Dunning (Elias and Dunning 1986) was an extension of the ‘civilising process’
model to a major field of contemporary life. Modern sports, such as football,
athletics, boxing and wrestling, give a public symbolic expression both to the
desire vicariously to discharge impulses of aggression and violence, and to
inhibit and confine them to a more or less symbolic form. They note the
declining levels of actual violence to be found in modern sports, compared
with their earlier forms. The extent to which deliberate long-term injury is
permitted to be inflicted is severely constrained in the rules of modern
sports.9 In some sports, such as Rugby Union football, the detailed and
specific regulation of permitted levels of violence now has an important role in
the symbolism of the game itself. Skilled rugby players are required to
remember and internalise very complicated rules about what forms of physical
aggression, in what passages of the game, are and are not permitted.
Instead of, as with most games, waiting for offences to be committed, and
then punishing them, rugby referees give loud advice and warnings to the
players about what they may and not do, presumably on the basis that the
rules and situations are too complicated for players to be able to do this by
themselves. Referees, as the external agents of inhibition, thus have a
central role in the symbolic performances of many modern sports. (Indeed, in
soccer, referees are almost like pantomime villains, there, as the
embodiments of authority, to be ridiculed and abused. Yet they clearly have a
9
Shakespeare again reminds us of the earlier era and of the moment at which a gentler
sensibility emerged, as a courtier tells Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It about a wrestler
whom Orlando is soon going to challenge. It is a sad story of an old man with three sons:
LE BEAU The eldest of the three wrestled with Charles the Duke’s wrestler, which Charles in
a moment threw him and broke three of his ribs, that there’s little hope of life in him. So he
served the second, and so the third. Yonder they lie, the poor man their father making such a
pitiful dole for them that all the beholders take his part in weeping.
ROSALIND Alas!
TOUCHSTONE What is the sport monsieur, that the ladies have lost?
LE BEAU Why this that I speak of.
TOUCHSTONE Thus men grow wiser every day. It is the first time I heard breaking of ribs
was sport for ladies.
As You Like It I, 2 115-129
13
crucial role in the psychic and moral economy of the game.) A sport such as
motor racing, one of whose main sources of excitement must be the
anticipation that racing cars will crash and disintegrate at high speed, has
imposed regulations on the design of cars, and the conduct of races, such
that ‘safety cars’ emerge to slow things down in the event of emergencies,
and drivers are so well packaged in their cockpits that they mostly escape
serious injuries when crashes do occur. Elias’s and Dunning’s thesis goes a
long way to explaining the extraordinary salience of sport in modern culture,
among all social classes, since it provides graphic and immediately accessible
symbolisations of many instinctual impulses - violence, (mainly) homoerotic
sexuality, rivalry, group identification - but within a context in which they are
relatively inhibited, and indeed in which the necessity to and the modes of
inhibiting them is also subject to public display and exploration.
Elias’s theory of the civilising process was developed at a time when the
Nazis had just risen to power, and had driven him from Germany. His study
of the growth of civilisation was as perhaps a surprising juxtaposition of topic
and context, the contrary of the intellectual response of his Frankfurt School
contemporaries to the same situation. While Elias was studying the
development of civility in the early modern period, Adorno and Horkheimer
were preoccupied with understanding the collapse of civilised life that
surrounded them in the twentieth century. It seems likely that Elias,
in his early years in England, was continuing, largely in isolation, the project
he had formulated earlier, during the Weimar years which like many others
he had probably experienced as a hopeful period. However, he did not
believe that ‘civilisation’ was an irreversible process of improvement, and in
his later work explored, with new-found colleagues, the reverse development,
the conditions of societal regression or ‘decivilisation’.
One study in which the issues of ‘decivilisation’ were explored in the
‘intensive’ way which Elias preferred was ‘The Established and the Outsiders:
a Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems’, (Elias and Scotson 1965).
This was a study of a small community, fictitiously called ‘Winston Parva’,
which was experiencing rather severe group conflicts. The authors identified
14
three major groups in this community. There was a small middle class, and
two working class groups, the latter two being largely identical in their
demographic and occupational make-up. The difference was that one group
had been long-established in the community, and the other had recently
settled there. The ‘outsider’ group was defined by the established group as
inferior, deviant, shiftless, etc. , represented as members of the ‘nonrespectable’ working class in contrast to the ‘respectable’ working class status
of the established group. The researchers found there was no factual basis
for the distinction between these communities. However, as a social definition
of the reality it had powerful effects. Subject to this stigmatisation, and
without the long-established social ties which joined the members of the
established group, the ‘outsider’ group remain atomised, and tended to
internalise the version of itself held by its ‘established’ neighbours. Urban
legend and gossip gave credence to the stereotypes of inadequacy held of
the’outsiders’ by the ‘insider’ group. Members of the small middle class
segment, which in other circumstances might have been resented for their
relative privilege, were regarded by the established working class group as an
assets to the status of the neighbourhood, and co-opted as virtual allies in
the stigmatisation of the newcomers. We might say, using psychoanalytical
concepts developed post-Freud, that powerful unconscious projections were
being made by the ‘insider’ group towards the ‘outsiders’, and that these had
real effects on the identities of those projected into. One can see how Elias’s
involvement in the development of Group Psychoanalysis, with Foulkes, may
have contributed to his understanding of these social dynamics. A richer and
more differentiated psychoanalytical lexicon would allow more complex
descriptions to be formulated of these and similar dynamics, but nevertheless
consistent with Elias’s original purpose.
Elias’s explanation, in The Civilising Process, of the transformation of
instinctual impulses into more differentiated emotional and mental capacities,
lay in a theory of complex social dependencies. His argument was that as the
chain of dependencies in society grew, for example through trade, an
extended division of labour, and communication, so more complex forms of
perception and discrimination grew also. This argument is quite close to that
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of Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society, which argued that individuality
depended on the emergence of complex forms of social relation in which
individuals became emancipated from subordination to the immediate
collectivities to which they belonged. Similarly a court society, in which
individuals were confronted with an elaborate social hierarchy in which they
were required to compete for status and position, was a more complex system
of dependencies than the household of a local baron or warlord. The
regression which Elias and Scotson observed to have taken place in ‘Winston
Parva’ was the consequence of a reduction of complexity of social
relationships, to a polarised state in which what mattered most was
membership of one of two rival groups. (In Durkheimian terms, this was a
regression to ‘mechanical solidarity’, in which group membership is based on
the idea that members share a uniform identity.) The outsider group found
itself in a still worse condition, since the disrespect heaped on it inhibited the
formation of group ties within its number, and thus further reduced the scope
of dependencies. We can see the force of this model description if we apply it
to other situations of group conflict, of a sectarian or ethnic nature, especially
where these involve violence.
Elias’s argument, concerning the conditions for both ‘civilisation’ and
‘decivilisation’ has been memorably extended to the analysis of racial
divisions in the United States, in articles by Eric Dunning, Elias’s close
colleague (Dunning recently described Elias to me in a seminar as ‘his second
father’) and Loic Wacquant, a colleague of the late Pierre Bourdieu.
Dunning’s argument, in ‘Black-white relations in the United States,’ (written in
1979, published in Loyal and Quilley 2004)
provides a comparative typology
of three successive ‘figurations’ of black-white relations. These are plantation
slavery, the system of post-abolition colour castes, and the urban ghetto,
emerging when Afro-Americans migrated to northern cities. In the condition of
plantation slavery, ties between slaves were deliberately broken by separating
slaves from different ethnic and language groups, so that communication
within plantations was made difficult. They were subject to intense physical
coercion, and allowed little autonomy. Some internalisation of the conception
of passivity and incapacity projected into them was unavoidable. The colour
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caste system of ‘Jim Crow’, allowed some greater autonomy, since some
more complex division of labour emerged within the black population, though
with severe limitations enforced by violence on how much mobility was
allowed. The black ghettoes of the northern cities were another stage in this
evolution, since in Dunning’s view this more concentrated settlement involved
more complex and extensive chains of inter-dependency, through wage
labour and the sanctions it made possible, the possibility of riot as a power
resource, the emergence of a consumer market among African Americans,
and the development of an internal social hierarchy in which a black
bourgeoisie emerged. However this emergent black middle class was
constrained by the exclusionary pressure of white racism to continue to
identify with and advance the claims of the larger black population.
Loic Wacquant’s article ‘Decivilising and demonising’, first written in 1991, (in
Loyal and Quilley 2004) gives an account of later developments in this field in
the United States. He analyses, through some of Elias’s key concepts, the
‘transition from the mid-century ‘communal ghetto’ to the contemporary
‘hyperghetto’, in terms of three master processes: the depacification of
everyday life, social de-differentiation leading to the organisational
deserfication, and informalisation of the economy. ‘ Each of these processes
is set off ‘by the collapse of public institutions, and by the ongoing
replacements of the ‘social safety net’ of welfare by the ‘dragnet’ of police,
courts and prisons.’ In this abandoned situation, violence becomes endemic,
social interdependencies become narrowed to the minimal ties of kinship and
locality needed to ensure physical security and material survival. Wacquant
holds this process of ‘decivilisation’, in Elias’s term, to be due to the
abandonment by the state of responsibility for the well-being of its working
class and especially black citizens, and its resort to punitive and coercive
strategies to contain them. Wacquant’s article attacks the dominant neoconservative analysis of the situation, which was essentially one of ‘blaming
the victim’ through the theory of the dangerous underclass’, arguing that its
demonisation of the poor further contributed to the disorganising processes
let loose by dis-investment in public resources and by de-industralisation. Its
projection of fear and hatred into disadvantaged communities have a similar
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role in this context to that described by Elias and Scotson in their more
parochial community study.
Wacqant argues that his analysis is relevant to
the peripheral ghettos of European cities as well to those of the United States.
His article reminds one that little has been heard, during the celebrations of
the significance of Barack Obama’s election as president, of the continuing
crisis of black American working class communities (with more young black
men in prison than in university) nor is it yet clear how Obama’s
Administration is going to address these problems.
Implications and Conclusions
What implications can we draw from Elias’s work, in regard to the project of a
psychoanalytical history, and what developments might it lead to. . Let me
suggest a number.

The first point of note is the idea that psychoanalytical dimensions
enter historical explanation at the level of group behaviour and group
processes, as well as, and perhaps more than, at the level of individual
motivation and action. This is exclusively the dimension on which Elias
and indeed those influenced by him have focused.

The second is to recognise the force of Elias’s analysis of a certain
directional process in historical development, towards what we can see
as a more regulated and inhibited social order, with many
consequences for mentalities and forms of life. Freud’s thesis in
Civilisation and its Discontents has an unexpectedly fruitful
explanatory role, in explaining the development of social repression,
and the sublimation of repressed impulses and desires, when
conjoined with intensive historical investigation.

The third is to note that his argument has also been fruitful when
applied to processes of ‘decivilisation’, that is when the figurational
movement defined as enlarged chains of social dependencies,
complexity and differentiation, is forced for some reason into reverse. It
seems to me that in explaining these situations, Elias and those
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influenced by him may be implicitly deploying some psychoanalytical
ideas – of splitting, paranoid-schizoid organisation, projective
identification – which derive from a post-Freudian psychoanalytic
climate.

The fourth is to identify a different and more modern historical
problematic, as, for example, both Bauman and Marcuse have done,
and to ask how psychoanalytic theories can help us to understand this.
This is the problemic of lessened social repression, arising from the
emergence of consumer societies in which the social machine operates
to provoke and stimulate desire, not to restrain it in the cause of social
hierarchy or the process of capital accumulation. Different views have
been taken of this process. Ernest Gellner, writing very positively
about Freud late in his life, in 1995, describes Freud as the prophet of
a more liberated, tolerant and enjoyment filled society. Marcuse writes
on the contrary of ‘repressive sublimation’, and of a dystopia of
commodity fetishism. Bauman writes of a movement from a
hierarchical and authoritarian world, strong on ‘security and
permanence, but weak on freedom, that Freud did much to undermine,
and a current world of impermance, liquidity and insecurity, in which
continuity and what some would call containment is lacking for the
exercise of satisfying lives. It seems that a different, post-Freudian,
even post-Kleinian psychoanalytic lexicon, might be needed to chart
the shape of this world.

Finally, a lesson one should draw from Elias is that generalisation is
only to a limited degree possible. It is no good looking to Elias for a
general formula. Social and historical entities do not come in uniform
shapes and sizes, any more than personalities do, for clinicians. There
is no subsitute, on this view, whether in historical, sociological or
psychoanalytical work, from the intensive investigation of particulars,
and the slow discovery, in face of experience, of which
psychoanalytical or other theoretical concepts, can best give meaning
to them.
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The subject-matter of the human sciences, in other words, is irreducibly
particular in its nature. Nevertheless, recurring patterns of ‘figurations’ are
necessary and possible resources for understanding the differences and
processes we encounter.
References
Dunning, E. (2004) ‘Aspects of the figurational dynamics of racial
stratification: a conceptual discussion and developmental analysis of blackwhite relations in the United States. In Loyal and Quilley, op cit.
Elias, N. (1983) The Court Society Oxford: Blackwell (revised edition
University of Dublin Press (2006)
Elias, N. (2000) The Civilising Process, (revised edition). Oxford: Blackwell
Elias, N. and Dunning, E. (1986) Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in
the Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. and Scotson, J. (1965) The Established and the Outsiders: A
Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems London: Frank Cass.
Gellner, E.(1995) ‘Freud;s Social Contract’, in Anthropology and Politics:
Revolutions in the Sacred Grove. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goudsblom, J. and Mennell S. (eds) (1998 The Norbert Elias Reader,.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Loyal, S. and Quilley, S. (eds.) (2004) The Sociology of Norbert Elias.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wacquant, L.(2004) ‘Decivilising and demonising: the remaking of the black
American ghetto’. In Loyal and Quilley op cit.
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