Socio-Psycho-Cultural Criticism

Socio-Psycho-Cultural Criticism is a kind of cultural criticism that uses both devices,psychoanalysis and sociology, to critique current, and past, social happenings and relations. When applying psychoanalysis to sociology, we must not assume that the psyche and the individual are responsible for actions where the answers of sociological factors such as economics, technical, or politics are sufficient answers. However, psychoanalysts must push the idea that there is no “society” which exists in and of itself, that society is made up of human beings who have feelings and should be the subject of sociological studies. As well, there is no difference in an “individual” or “mass” psyche. In other words, there are not two minds inside an individual, but only one where the same mechanisms and laws apply whether the individual is seen simply as individual or as a part of society. Yet, at the same time, it is important to investigate how much the individual psyche affects the ways in which the society develops.
Yet, when applying sociology to psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysts must realize while it is important to put out that an individual is just that, they must also not underestimate the extent to which an individual in reality only exists as a socialized person. This starts when a child is born and when they are connected to their families.
However, it is important to question to what extent a family is itself a product of a particular social system and how socially conditioned changes within the family might elicit an individual change in the human, individual, psyche.
This, then, leads us to the principle proble, the connection between psychoanalysis and sociology is one which is reciprocal, often leaving it impossible to define a social or individual problem through one lens or one persepective. This means that we have to use both methods of critique when looking at the individual and the society.
