Elias, Freud, and the Human Science

Abstract

Through a common prism effect, in French sociology, and no doubt that of other countries too, Norbert Elias is too often seen as having simply taken further the work of Max Weber,² and the importance of the work of Sigmund Freud in the genesis, formulation, and realization of Elias’s intellectual project is fairly generally underestimated. Elias noted this self-evidence in The Civilizing Process (2000): “It scarcely needs to be said, but is perhaps worth emphasizing explicitly, how much this study owes to the discoveries of Freud and the psychoanalytical school. The connections are obvious to anyone acquainted with psychoanalytical writings, and it did not seem necessary to point them out in particular instances, especially because this could not have been done without lengthy qualifications” (527). It is in no way anecdotal to note, as Hans-Peter Waldhoff (2007) does, that “the founder of psychoanalysis was one of the first persons to whom Elias sent a copy of The Civilizing Process, for which Freud briefly thanked him in a postcard sent from Vienna to London shortly before his own emigration on 3 January 1938,” and that “Elias treasured this postcard for the rest of his life” (329). Elias was deeply attached to what Freud had achieved, and quite naturally thought of him as his ideal reader when his work was published.

This text is an abridged version of my afterword to a collection of previously unpublished texts by Norbert Elias (2010a).