Structural and Unconscious Implications of the Dyad and Triad: An Essay in Theoretical Integration; Durkheim, Simmel, Freud

It is well established in sociological literature^ that the classical sociologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were addressing a common general problem of urbanisation and industrialisation. In the theories of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, traditional and rational legal authority, feudalism and capitalism, mechanical and organic solidarity, Tonnies, Weber, Marx and Durkheim offered theories of pre-modern and modern types of social order, and, perhaps less convincingly, causal explanations of the transition from the one to the other. These pairs of polar concepts have been received in sociology as basic classifications, embodying well-established uniformities in the phenomena. It is characteristic of the discipline that they should all have continued to survive to be learnt by students as alternative models of similar phenomena, rather than suffering the fate of the pioneer works of the mature natural sciences—of being unified into a single 'authorized' textbook model. Simmel's work has many of the same preoccupations as that of his contemporaries. Differentiation, the emergence of role-segmentation and individuality are central themes in Simmel's work whidi echo the accounts of 'modernity' of the above authors. But interest in Simmel has been less than in the other founding writers in this subject, especially Weber and Durkheim, and has been somewhat partial. In the argument between 'conflict' and 'consensus' theorists, the modem version of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft debate, Simmel has been incorporated into 'confiia' theory,^ while his contribution to understanding the total institutional architecture of simple and complex societies has been overlooked. The primary interest of Simmel's 'formal sociology' was in the relationship between social structure and social interaction. "̂ This work constituted a successful attempt, at the microsociological level of social atoms and molecules, to discover funda-