This paper addresses issues of continuity and discontinuity regarding the role of the socio-cultural in psychoanalysis. Starting with Freud and Fromm’s ideas on social change, the author discussed a dynamics whereby psychoanalytic culture gradually encouraged a process of delinking the psyche from the social. This disengagement from the socio-cultural has encouraged dissociative mechanisms and social narcissism. Using a case study the author shows the importance of recapturing formulations that stress an analytic >Social Third.<