Psychology and sociology are two disciplines in the social sciences whose practitioners are likely to produce different images of human adaptive behavior. This study will compare and contrast the sociological ideas in Peter l. Berger's Invitation to Sociology and the psychological ideas in Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. The ideas of these two disciplines will be shown to both oppose and complement each other. For example, the ideas of Sigmund Freud, representing psychology, and the ideas of Max Weber, representing sociology, clash in terms of their depiction of the ways human beings adapt. On the other hand, the ideas of cognitive psychology complement the ideas of sociologist Emile Durkheim Weber with respect to the reality of the world in which human adaptive behavior takes place.
Stanley Bailis argues that the interrelating of different social sciences can be either useful or counter-productive. His essay, he says
has two main purposes: to indicate how the ad hoc use of different disciplines has led American Studies to the point of incoherency; and to describe an integrative conception of the social sciences which may help to reduce their contribution to this problem (Bailis, N.D., 202).
In other words, two social sciences can be brought together either to confuse or clarify the subject at hand. The problem for those in different realms of social science is to find a way to "amalgamate factors which the disciplines divide" (Bailis, N.D., 202).
As Bruner writes, Freud believes that human beings are ruled by their irrational or unconscious impulses, but he "makes unreason wily and even witty in its ways (rather than merely loutish and brutal)" (Bruner, 1986, 49). In other words, the unreason or irrationality of the unconscious or subconscious can be used by the effective psychoanalyst to discover the traumas of the client in order to help that client learn to adapt successfully to society and to the prob...