Harold Lasswell imported Freudian drives into political science while suppressing death-drive concepts

Evidence

Psychoanalytic theory had great impact on western European and North American social science during the middle part of the twentieth century. Behind the 1930s introjection of Freudianism by many students of politics looms the father figure of Harold Lasswell (1930, 1935), who popularized use of Freudian notions of unconscious erotic drives (but typically suppressing the thanatotic), of defense mechanisms that adaptively channel the expression of these drives, and of Freud’s psychosexual developmental notions of how oral, anal, and phallic frustrations of early childhood shape the id, ego, and superego aspects of personality. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 332

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth noting that Lasswell suppressed the thanatotic while importing the erotic — a selective uptake worth chasing in what it did to the field’s assumptions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 332
• XREF: connects to: Psychology-socialism debates shaped Horkheimer’s turn to Freudian theory — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 317