Introduction

Zygmunt Bauman was famously eclectic. Reading his work, one encounters clear and hidden influences from a wide range of writers, not just sociologists, but philosophers, theologians, and novelists. This chapter discusses one of those influences: Sigmund Freud.1 The inverse relation between how frequently Bauman mentioned Freud and how often he is discussed in the secondary literature is initially puzzling. It is perhaps less so when we recognize, as I show in this chapter, that while these influences from Freud were deep and profound, they were also somewhat “un-Freudian.” Bauman used Freud's insights to enrich his sociology, but in a way that decouples him from psychology. The chapter begins by discussing the ways that Bauman uses Freud. Then we will assess this use, most notably the detachment of Freud from psychology and Bauman's metaphorical use of concepts (a frequent part of his sociology, see Jacobsen and Marshman 2008). Here, I will suggest that we can see Bauman as a “Freudian without psychology” and will relate this to how Freud's late sociological writings have been discussed. Bauman's use of Freud highlights, reflecting an earlier point from Keith Tester (2007), a general humanist trend in his sociology focused upon the human attempt to produce a meaningful world.

The most notable discussion of Freud's influence on Bauman to date occurred in a special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Psycholog y, which contained an article by Bauman on Freud and a number of responses (see, among these, Beilharz 2009; Tester 2009). These responses tended to focus on the empirical accuracy of Bauman's argument concerning the reality and pleasure principles in liquid modernity rather than assessing Bauman's use of Freud more generally. We can also find a rare link between the two in Riccardo Mazzeo's introduction to Bauman and Agostino Portera's Education and Intercultural Identity where Bauman is called a “Freudian,” at least in the context of social psychology (Mazzeo 2021, 11). Beyond this, any mentions of the two together are en passant and tend to fall into three categories: