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Authors: William Davies
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that careful observation to patterns of relationships might reveal ways in which psychological satisfaction could be improved, with relatively minor changes. In 1916, he laid down these thoughts in a letter to the Austro-Hungarian minister of the interior as follows:
The positive and negative feelings that emerge from every house, between houses, from every factory, and from national and political groups in the community can be explored by means of sociometric analysis. A new order by means of sociometric methods is herewith recommended. 16
What was this âsociometricâ analysis he referred to? And how would it help? Though still undeveloped as a mathematical science, let alone a computational one, âsociometryâ, as Moreno imagined it, laid the groundwork for what later became social network analysis and, consequently, social media. But before this could be developed as a scientific possibility, another part of Morenoâs self-fantasy would have to be mobilized.
He claimed that he was always destined to live in the United States. Advancing the myth of his fatherless, nationless origins, he declared, âI was born a citizen of the world, a sailor moving from sea to sea, from country to country, destined to land one day in New York harbor.â In 1922, he reported a dream in which he was standing on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, in possession of a new device for recording and playing sound. Not content with giving birth to a whole new branch of psychology, the dream indicated to Moreno that he was also destined to invent the record player. With his collaborator, Franz Lornitzo, he set to work onsuch a device over the course of 1924, filing a patent on it in Vienna, resulting in an invitation to Ohio to develop the technology with the General Phonograph Manufacturing Company.
Moreno would be ultimately frustrated by the lack of recognition he would receive for this creation, characteristically refusing to acknowledge that there were multiple similar projects going on simultaneously. Nor were his hosts in Ohio as fawning towards this unlikely inventor as he had assumed they would be. But the invitation to Ohio did nevertheless allow him to realize his vision of himself as a self-parented, nationless American . Besides, New York City â the place that had occupied his dreams and fantasies for the previous decade â pointed towards a new model of society that seemed to chime with Morenoâs assumption about sovereign selves existing in social groups of their own making.
As Morenoâs curt remark to Freud indicated, his problem with psychoanalysis was that it studied individuals as separate from society, without the constraints offered by existing relationships. But what was the alternative? The danger was that the extreme individualism of Freudianism could flip directly into the equally extreme collectivism of Marxism, or else the form of statistical sociology pioneered by Ãmile Durkheim. In Morenoâs eyes, this left Europeans with a bipolar choice, between the enforced collectivity of the socialist state and the unruly egoism of the unconscious self. New York, however, suggested that some sort of third way was possible. Here was a city where individuals lived on top of one another, cooperating in various subtle ways, but without having their individual freedom trammelled in the process. America, Moreno reasoned, was a nation built upon self-forming groups.
The mathematics of friendship
It was in New York that he got his first opportunities to develop the research techniques he had already conceived of as âsociometryâ. He was judicious enough to abandon the talk of individuals as their own personal gods, but other than that, Moreno was intent on building on the insights heâd acquired in the wartime refugee camps and the psychological theories in The Words of the Father . He described the project of sociometry as follows:
It is important to know whether the construction of
The positive and negative feelings that emerge from every house, between houses, from every factory, and from national and political groups in the community can be explored by means of sociometric analysis. A new order by means of sociometric methods is herewith recommended. 16
What was this âsociometricâ analysis he referred to? And how would it help? Though still undeveloped as a mathematical science, let alone a computational one, âsociometryâ, as Moreno imagined it, laid the groundwork for what later became social network analysis and, consequently, social media. But before this could be developed as a scientific possibility, another part of Morenoâs self-fantasy would have to be mobilized.
He claimed that he was always destined to live in the United States. Advancing the myth of his fatherless, nationless origins, he declared, âI was born a citizen of the world, a sailor moving from sea to sea, from country to country, destined to land one day in New York harbor.â In 1922, he reported a dream in which he was standing on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, in possession of a new device for recording and playing sound. Not content with giving birth to a whole new branch of psychology, the dream indicated to Moreno that he was also destined to invent the record player. With his collaborator, Franz Lornitzo, he set to work onsuch a device over the course of 1924, filing a patent on it in Vienna, resulting in an invitation to Ohio to develop the technology with the General Phonograph Manufacturing Company.
Moreno would be ultimately frustrated by the lack of recognition he would receive for this creation, characteristically refusing to acknowledge that there were multiple similar projects going on simultaneously. Nor were his hosts in Ohio as fawning towards this unlikely inventor as he had assumed they would be. But the invitation to Ohio did nevertheless allow him to realize his vision of himself as a self-parented, nationless American . Besides, New York City â the place that had occupied his dreams and fantasies for the previous decade â pointed towards a new model of society that seemed to chime with Morenoâs assumption about sovereign selves existing in social groups of their own making.
As Morenoâs curt remark to Freud indicated, his problem with psychoanalysis was that it studied individuals as separate from society, without the constraints offered by existing relationships. But what was the alternative? The danger was that the extreme individualism of Freudianism could flip directly into the equally extreme collectivism of Marxism, or else the form of statistical sociology pioneered by Ãmile Durkheim. In Morenoâs eyes, this left Europeans with a bipolar choice, between the enforced collectivity of the socialist state and the unruly egoism of the unconscious self. New York, however, suggested that some sort of third way was possible. Here was a city where individuals lived on top of one another, cooperating in various subtle ways, but without having their individual freedom trammelled in the process. America, Moreno reasoned, was a nation built upon self-forming groups.
The mathematics of friendship
It was in New York that he got his first opportunities to develop the research techniques he had already conceived of as âsociometryâ. He was judicious enough to abandon the talk of individuals as their own personal gods, but other than that, Moreno was intent on building on the insights heâd acquired in the wartime refugee camps and the psychological theories in The Words of the Father . He described the project of sociometry as follows:
It is important to know whether the construction of
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