Psychoanalysis has had a significant influence on sociology through Parsons, Chodorov, ideas about the unconscious, and critical theory; however, in general, sociology and psychoanalysis have been separate fields (Chancer & Andrews, 2014; Calhoun, 2014). Influential sociologists such as Smelser, Calhoun, and Alexander argue that sociology needs to take psychoanalysis more seriously, especially since Freud can be viewed as a sociological thinker in several of his books (Chancer & Andrews, 2014; Calhoun, 2014; Alexander, 2014; Smelser, 2014).
While there is a willingness to combine psychoanalysis with sociology, actual research in this area is scarce, and even scarcer is research that is practically oriented toward developing alternatives to dominant therapeutic methods. Psychosocial studies primarily revolve around how sociology, particularly Marxist sociology, can be combined with psychodynamic ideas, though psychoanalysis carries the most weight in this context (Frosh, 2014; Woodward, 2015). Psychosocial studies build upon the legacy of the Frankfurt School and poststructuralists in particular. Psychosocial studies are based on the assumption that sociology needs support from the psychodynamic tradition in order to theorize about how society is materialized in the individual and their consciousness (Frost in Webb, 2019). Proponents of this perspective argue that concepts such as agency, power, discourse, emotional labor, social suffering, and symbolic violence are insufficient unless combined with the psychoanalytic tradition, drawing on thinkers such as Bowlby, Klein, and Lacan, to incorporate concepts such as anxiety, resentment, hatred, desire, identification, and attachment. (Frost in Webb, 2019, 118).
A review of articles published in the Journal of Psychosocial Studies reveals that psychoanalysis dominates over sociology. Psychosocial studies share similarities with the sociology of emotion, but they prioritize the psychoanalytic tradition.
One problem with the field is that there is too little research on interactions with clients. Most articles analyze psychotherapy or mental health from various theoretical perspectives, some of which are sociological (e.g., Ipecki, 2026). Two intriguing articles include, first, one that describes the concept of “moral injury” as an alternative to post, traumatic stress disorder, since a central aspect is that war often runs counter to a person’s own moral beliefs (Alford, 2016). Another is an analysis of how CBT is mostly used as a “silver bullet,” where applying CBT to CBT depoliticizes the very life that causes depression. CBT also has a disciplining effect: if something is wrong, the problem lies with you; it further disciplines by offering various strategies for adaptation rather than change. The author views psychoanalysis as a form of resistance to the “politics of speed” (Sayles, 2011).
Another problem is that sociological thinking is not regularly employed; there is even an article arguing that psychotherapy should draw insights from sociology (Schiller & Scheibelhofer, 2026). That article, published in 2026, shows that even a journal that claims to want to combine psychology with sociology is still at the stage of merely arguing for the need for sociology without actually proposing practical exercises, etc.
Some articles lack original empirical data and are very short (e.g., Kellond, 2025). Certain issues of the journal focus more on analyzing society itself and various social phenomena than on therapeutic practice; for example, an issue on Eric Fromm (Funk & Kuhn, 2024). It also includes elements of psychoanalysis that lack a scientific basis, such as dream interpretation (Nicholls, 2017). Psychosocial studies thus face similar problems to those of clinical sociology.