The Freudo-Marxist Mission

New Ideas in Psychology, 1986

The deceptively trendy title of this book conceals a thoroughly unfashionable topic, the relation between the theories of Freud and Marx. Just mentioning this topic in "progressive" circles today is enough to raise cries of disbelief and groans of boredom. Everyone seems to be satisfied that it is either exhausted, or not worth raising. Those who think the former usually do so because they are content with Frankfurt-style syntheses, or with a Lacanian "reading" of Freud. Those who think the topic not worth raising tend to dismiss Freud -especially if they have been reading Foucault, Donzelot or Caste1 -as merely a social technician.

2014

The ideology of psychotherapy is questioned through critical concepts taken from the Freudo-Marxist tradition. The paper first analyses in detail six determinant ideological processes detected in psychotherapy that three pioneers of Freudo-Marxism criticised in the 1920s: dualistic scission and metaphysical immobilisation (Luria); idealist generalisation and mechanistic determination (Bernfeld); and repressive adaptation and historical decontextualisation (Reich). Following this, it briefly reviews seven paired analogous processes that were denounced by continuators of the Freudo-Marxist tradition: valorative moralisation and the psychologisation of the social (Fenichel); instinctual–rational deprivation and the mechanisation of the subject (Adorno); alienating performance and surplus repression (Marcuse); manipulation and dehumanising alienation (Fromm); abstraction and mythologising (Bleger); authoritarianism and suggestion (Caruso); and depoliticisation and rationalisation (Langer). The argument will show how Freudo-Marxist questionings of these operations – many now forgotten – are still current and can be inspiring and enriching for a modern critique of psychotherapy.

Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 2024

Psychological treatment in general and psychotherapy in particular approaches the individual. In societal conditions that systematically produce physical and psychological suffering, it is therefore necessarily oriented toward adaptation to the demands of these social conditions. Sigmund Freud's concept of the normal, which is not normatively charged, but merely means the ability to function within the existing, emphasizes this. In the 1920s, a small group of psychoanalysts tried to break through this limitation of psychology's focus on adaptation. They were convinced that Freud's psychoanalysis was compatible with Marx's critique of capitalism, and as socialists and communists they sought answers to the question of why the majority of the oppressed did not rebel against their oppression. On the one hand their attempt to combine the critique of capitalism and psychoanalysis proved fruitful: it led to the concept of the authoritarian personality. On the other hand, the attempt to politically lift clinical psychology in political practice came too late to slow down the rise of National Socialism in Germany. This paper will present the attempts of the Marxist psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, as well as Siegfried Bernfeld and Otto Fenichel, in four steps: 1) it shows how the combination of psychoanalysis and Marxist theory led to the question of why the majority of the oppressed did not rebel. 2) it presents the extension of the psychoanalytic concept of character from pathological cases to the normal case as the basis for the development of the authoritarian personality. It shows how this theory focused on the role of sexuality in domination and oppression, offering for the first time a theory of the relationship between gender and capitalism. 3) it will discuss the programmatic point of an abolition of individual psychology through political practice concluded from this, especially by Reich. The article thus aims 4) to recuperate the political core of the work of the Marxist psychoanalysts and to make it possible for a discussion in the light of changed social conditions during a new rise of political authoritarianism 100 years later.

Studies in East European Thought, 1983

It is noteworthy that several recent studies of Freud have attempted to situate his thought within an intellectual context which includes the theoretical work of Karl Marx. Perhaps the most important and well-known of these studies is Paul Ricoeur's book, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. j It is not Ricoeur's intention to provide an in-depth comparative examination of Freud and Marx; in fact, the linkage he draws between these two major thinkers is defined in terms of the specific problem that motivates his study of Freud, namely, the problem of interpretation. Nevertheless, in the opening section of Freud and Philosophy, under the title of 'The Placing of Freud', Ricoeur situates the theoretical outlook of Freud within the company of two other modern thinkers, Marx and Nietzsche. Ricoeur contends that

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2005

Current influential attempts to bring together psychoanalysis and Marxism turn on the question of how to critique and move beyond capitalism without reverting to a utopian notion of communism. Taking this question seriously, the article explores the implications of psychoanalytic categories such as the real, fantasy, jouissance, and the formulae of sexuation, for Marxian economics and politics. Rethinking Marxism in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article aims to formulate a post-phantasmatic relation to the economy of surplus, and from there, to offer a new ethico-political stance around exploitation and communism.

The Platypus Review, 2022

On January 22, 2021, Platypus Affiliated Society members Stefan Hain and Andreas Wintersperger gave the teach-in “Psychoanalyse und Marxismus,” during the second German-speaking Platypus Affiliated Society Conference, the video of which is available at https://youtu.be/sNsU1xVWEsQ. It has been translated into English by Leonie Ettinger and Tamas Vilaghy.

Minnesota Review 32, 1984

The Red Vienna Sourcebook, 2020

s igmund freud wAs more thAn just a researcher and scientist in Vienna. By the 1920s Freud had become a landmark in the Viennese cultural landscape, a celebrity who attracted visitors from beyond Austria's borders. Not only the bourgeois press claimed Freud as an icon. The Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung published Eduard Hitschmann's congratulatory overview of the work of Freud on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. 1 After detailing the trajectory of Freud's life work, Hitschmann categorizes Vienna's famous doctor as a "revolutionary" dedicated to a cultural ideal of life guided by science. Sadly, Hitschmann explains, many of Freud's most important treatments are unavailable to broad swaths of the common people. But he then includes a quote by Freud that portrays the famous psychologist as a defender of the poor and as a proponent of psychological care for the masses:

2018

The political history of psychoanalysis is approached as a movement around psychological ideas and practices not in order to draw a historiography of such movement, but to sketch a historically valuable narrative in regards to certain institutional aspects of psychoanalysis, which show the way through which it has taken political actions within its institutionalization. Based on the psychoanalysts’ political stances and their theories, we outlined some intersections among them, analyzing three authors, Paul Federn, Otto Fenichel, and Ernest Jones, and then analyzing the constitution of the psychoanalytical movement and the Freudian cause propaganda. Our hypothesis is that, despite the different stances and political forces that exist within psychoanalysis, they have converged towards the defense of one cause. Thus, the constitution and expansion of the psychoanalytical movement becomes clearer during its first five decades towards a seeming unification

Contemporary Psychanalysis, 2016