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| Psychoanalysis |
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.jpeg) Sigmund Freud's couch |
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Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both theMarxist philosophy ofKarl Marx and thepsychoanalytic theory ofSigmund Freud. Its history withincontinental philosophy began in the 1920s and '30s and running since throughcritical theory,Lacanian psychoanalysis, andpost-structuralism.
Sigmund Freud critiqued Marxism in his 1932New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, arguing that Marx overemphasizedhistorical determinism and ignored contingent psychological and material factors in shaping society. Freud acknowledged Marxism’s insight into the influence of economic circumstances on human thought and culture, but he did not see history as following inevitable laws.
Freudo-Marxist thought emerged in the 1920s inGermany and theSoviet Union, with theorists likeWilhelm Reich,Erich Fromm, andValentin Voloshinov exploring connections between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich’s work on character and bodily expression influenced laterpsychotherapies, while Fromm incorporated Freudian ideas into a Marxist framework emphasizing personal freedom. TheFrankfurt School further developed these ideas, blending Marx and Freud to analyze social repression, authority, and alienation.
Later developments expanded Freudo-Marxist influence through thinkers likeFrantz Fanon,Louis Althusser,Jacques Lacan,Cornelius Castoriadis, andSlavoj Žižek, who integrated psychoanalysis into Marxist theory in diverse ways.Post-structuralist andpostmodern philosophers, includingFoucault,Derrida, andDeleuze withGuattari, also engaged with both traditions, producing works such asCapitalism and Schizophrenia that critiqued society, ideology, and subjectivity through the lens of psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Sigmund Freud engages with Marxism in his 1932New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in which he hesitantly contests what he sees as theMarxist view of history.
According to Freud, Marx erroneously attributes the trajectory of society to a necessary "natural law or conceptual [dialectical] evolution"; instead, Freud suggests, it can be attributed to contingent factors: "psychological factors, such as the amount of constitutional aggressiveness", "the firmness of the organization within the horde" and "material factors, such as the possession of superior weapons".[1] However, Freud does not completely dismiss Marxism: "The strength of Marxism clearly lies, not in its view of history or its prophecies of the future that are based on it, but in its sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes."[2]
The beginnings of Freudo-Marxist theorizing took place in the 1920s in Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet pedagogistAron Zalkind was the most prominent proponent of Marxist psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union. The Soviet philosopherV. Yurinets and the Freudian analystSiegfried Bernfeld both discussed the topic. The Soviet linguistValentin Voloshinov, a member of theBakhtin circle, began a Marxist critique of psychoanalysis in his 1925 article "Beyond the Social", which he developed more substantially in his 1927 bookFreudianism: A Marxist Critique.[3] In 1929,Wilhelm Reich'sDialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis was published in German and Russian in the bilingual communist theory journalUnter dem Banner des Marxismus, 'Under the Banner of Marxism'. At the end of this line of thought can be consideredOtto Fenichel's 1934 articlePsychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialistic Psychology which appeared in Reich'sZeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie, 'Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy'. One member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around Reich wasErich Fromm, who later brought Freudo-Marxist ideas into the exiledFrankfurt School led byMax Horkheimer andTheodor W. Adorno.
Wilhelm Reich[4][5][6][7] was an Austrian psychoanalyst,[8] a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud, and a radicalpsychiatrist. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notablyCharacter Analysis (1933),The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933),[8] andThe Sexual Revolution (1936).[9] His work on character contributed to the development ofAnna Freud'sThe Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such asbody psychotherapy,Fritz Perls'sGestalt therapy,Alexander Lowen'sbioenergetic analysis, andArthur Janov'sprimal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals: during the1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies ofThe Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.[10]
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| Frankfurt School |
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Major works |
TheFrankfurt School, from theInstitute for Social Research, took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Freud. In the Institute's extensiveStudien über Authorität und Familie (ed.Max Horkheimer, Paris 1936),Erich Fromm authored the social-psychological part. Another new member of the institute wasHerbert Marcuse, who would become famous during the 1950s in the US.
Eros and Civilization is one of Marcuse's best known early works. Written in 1955, it is an attempted dialectical synthesis of Marx and Freud whose title alludes to Freud'sCivilization and its Discontents. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society (which runs rather counter to Freud's conception of society as naturally and necessarily repressive), based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960scountercultural social movements.
In the book, Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology – history seen not as aclass struggle, but fight against repression of our instincts. He argues thatcapitalism (if never named as such) is preventing us from reaching the non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".
Erich Fromm, once a member of theFrankfurt School, left the group at the end of the 1930s. The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his bookThe Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanist,democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the works of Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from mostSoviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings ofclassic liberals. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected bothWestern capitalism andSoviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon ofalienation.
The French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopherFrantz Fanon drew on both psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in his critique ofcolonialism. His seminal works in this area includeBlack Skin, White Masks (1952) andThe Wretched of the Earth (1961).
In his 1965 bookFreud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, the French philosopherPaul Ricœur compared the two (together withFriedrich Nietzsche), characterizing their common method as the "hermeneutics of suspicion".
Jacques Lacan was a philosophically minded French psychoanalyst, whose perspective gained widespread influence in French psychiatry and psychology. Lacan saw himself as loyal to and rescuing Freud's legacy. In his 16thSeminar,D'un Autre à l'autre, Lacan proposes and develops a homology between the Marxist notion ofsurplus value and his own notion ofsurplus-jouissance/objet a.[11] While Lacan was not himself a Marxist, many Marxists (particularlyMaoists) drew on his ideas.
The French Marxist philosopherLouis Althusser is widely known as a theorist ofideology, and his best-known essay isIdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based onGramsci's theory ofhegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of theunconscious andmirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of theself. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable – it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once and for all by theepistemological break (a term borrowed fromGaston Bachelard): this "break" is not a chronologically determined event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no history".
His essayContradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept ofoverdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiplecausality in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept ofhegemony).
Greek-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and social criticCornelius Castoriadis also followed up on the work of Lacan.
The Slovenian philosopherSlavoj Žižek promotes a form of Marxism highly modified byLacanianpsychoanalysis andHegelian philosophy. Žižek contests Althusser's account of ideology, because it misses the role ofsubjectivity.[12]
Major French philosophers associated withpost-structuralism,post-modernism, and/ordeconstruction, includingJean-François Lyotard,Michel Foucault, andJacques Derrida, engaged deeply with both Marxism and psychoanalysis. Most notably,Gilles Deleuze andFélix Guattari collaborated on the theoretical workCapitalism and Schizophrenia in two volumes:Anti-Oedipus (1972) andA Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Wilhelm Reich is again the main pioneer in this field (an excellent, short introduction to his ideas can be found in Maurice Brinton's The Irrational in Politics). In Children of the Future, Reich made numerous suggestions, based on his research and clinical experience, for parents, psychologists, and educators striving to develop libertarian methods of child rearing. (He did not use the term "libertarian," but that is what his methods are.) Hence, in this and the following sections we will summarise Reich's main ideas as well as those of other libertarian psychologists and educators who have been influenced by him, such asA.S. Neill andAlexander Lowen.
{{cite web}}:Missing or empty|url= (help)I will also discuss other left-libertarians who wrote about Reich, as they bear on the general discussion of Reich's ideas...In 1944, Paul Goodman, author ofGrowing Up Absurd,The Empire City, and co-author ofGestalt Therapy, began to discover the work of Wilhelm Reich for his American audience in the tiny libertarian socialist and anarchist milieu.
In the summer of 1950-51, numerous member of the A.C.C. and other interested people held a series of meetings in the Ironworkers' Hall with a view to forming a downtown political society. Here a division developed between a more radical wing (including e.g. Waters and Grahame Harrison) and a more conservative wing (including e.g. Stove and Eric Dowling). The general orientation of these meetings may be judged from the fact that when Harry Hooton proposed "Anarchist" and some of the conservative proposed "Democratic" as the name for the new Society, both were rejected and "Libertarian Society" was adopted as an acceptable title. Likewise then accepted as the motto for this Society - and continued by the later Libertarian society - was the early Marx quotation used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, vis: "Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.
Just as every object carries in it something ofsurplus value, in the same waysurplus enjoying [plus-de-jouir] is what allows the isolation of the o-object [objet a].
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