Socialization, Language, and Scenic Understanding. Alfred Lorenzer's Contribution to a Psycho-Societal Methodology

»Sozialisation, Sprache und szenisches Verstehen. Alfred Lorenzers Beitrag
zu einer psychosozialen Methodologie«. The article is a guided tour to Alfred
Lorenzer's proposal for an "in-depth hermeneutic" cultural analysis methodology
which was launched in an environment with an almost complete split between
social sciences and psychology/psychoanalysis. It presents the background in his
materialist socialization theory, which combines a social reinterpretation of the
core insights in classical psychoanalysis – the unconscious, the drives – with a
theory of language acquisition. His methodology is based on a transformation of
the "scenic understanding" from a clinical to a text interpretation, which seeks to
understand collective unconscious meaning in text, and is presented with an illustration
of the interpretation procedure from social research. Then follows a brief
systematic account of key concepts and ideas – interaction forms, engrams, experience,
symbolization, language game, utopian imagination – with an outlook to
the social theory connections to the Frankfurt School. The practical interpretation
procedure in a Lorenzer-based psycho-societal research is briefly summarized,
emphasizing the role of the researcher subjects in discovering socially unconscious
meaning in social interaction. Finally an outlook to contemporary epistemological
issues is given. Lorenzer's approach to theorize and research the subject
as a socially produced entity appears as a psycho-societal alternative to mainstream
social constructivism.