Psychoanalysis and Marxist psychology

2015

This essay presents a balance that hopes to show that despite the impasse between dissimilar discourses, the Freudo-Marxist mission does allow us to salvage its philosophical and practical program so as to continue rethinking the postures that led to the difficult encounter between two discourses: psychoanalysis and Marxism, their theoretical principles and their political consequences. This approach demands the discussion of four moments: 1) the Freudo-Marxist pronouncement; 2) Wilheim Reich’s Sex-Pol mission; 3) Gérard Pommier’s Freudo-Marxism; and 4) its political legacy.

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

CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM, 2017

In what follows, I will try to review the general strategy of the book – which could be otherwise be mistaken for an “encyclopedic” exercise – focusing on three separate moments: (1) the role of psychology: the author’s decision to use the critique of psychology as the criteria of intelligibility of this historical reconstruction, (2) the underlying invariants: the constants which become legible when we take a look at the totality of these variable articulations between Freud and Marx (3) the new possibilities: some of the foreseeable consequences which such newly acquired indifferentiation might open up for those who are, nonetheless, not indifferent to the fate of Marxian and Freudian thinking.

More than three decades after his death, the ideas of Erich Fromm are enjoying something of an intellectual renaissance. Fromm was a German-Jewish psychoanalyst, writer, public intellectual and activist whose life-long concern was with developing an understanding of the relationship between capitalism and mental health, based on his attempt to integrate the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Recent years have seen the publication of no less than three new biographies of Fromm,1 all of which challenge to a greater or lesser degree the very negative view of Fromm that has prevailed on much of the left for several decades, while 2014 saw the publication of two new collections of essays devoted to discussing his ideas.2 His work has been cited approvingly both by popular psychologists such as Oliver James and also by Marxists such as Kevin B Anderson, Michael Löwy and long-standing Socialist Workers Party member Sabby Sagall, who draws heavily on Fromm's concept of social character in his recent study of genocides.3 Fromm's work merits our attention for several reasons. First, unusually for a psychoanalyst, he considered himself to be a Marxist right until the end of his life. While his main interest was in a criticalintegration of the ideas of Marx and Freud, he was clear as to which thinker he saw as the more important. As he wrote in Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud:

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.

Annual Review of Critical Psychology

This article introduces an edition of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology made up of papers originally presented at the Second Conference of Marxism and Psychology held in Morelia, Mexico, from 9-11 August 2012. We begin by introducing Marxism as a resource for critical psychology, one that is uniquely positioned to link the refusal of psychology, which lies at the core of critical work in the discipline, to a broader refusal of social relations and forms of subjectivity under capitalism and the ideological role psychology itself plays in their reproduction. We then sketch a panoramic overview of critical and reconstructive encounters between Marxism and psychology in various contexts around the world ever since Marx's own reflections on the nature of the psyche, serving as a background to the equally diverse encounters with Marxist theory and politics in the articles making up this edition of the Review. Finally, we zone in on the immediate context of the conference itself, giving substance to the idea that a Marxist critical psychology is one that both inspires and is further developed from forms of collective action, which locates its critique of psychology and capitalism not just in theory, but in practices of everyday life that already articulate and live this double refusal.

Theory & Psychology, 2009

This paper addresses the intersection between Marxism and psychology, focusing on `critical' approaches that have emerged in the discipline in the last 15 years. The paper traces the way that elements of Marxism that are diametrically opposed, and in some cases dialectically opposed, to mainstream psychology are evaded, misrepresented or systematically distorted by ostensibly `critical' psychologies in the English-speaking world. Elements of Marxist analysis—the human being as an ensemble of social relations, the materiality of the family, private property and the state, surplus value and cultural capital, alienation and exploitation and ideological mystification—are contrasted with the standard disciplinary notions of the psychological subject, society, utilitarian transparency, unhealthy experience and false beliefs. Specifications of the position of the researcher in Marxism—standpoint, reflexive location, class consciousness, institutional space and social revolution—are...

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:

This article introduces an edition of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology made up of papers originally presented at the Second Conference of Marxism and Psychology held in Morelia, Mexico, from 9-11 August 2012. We begin by introducing Marxism as a resource for critical psychology, one that is uniquely positioned to link the refusal of psychology, which lies at the core of critical work in the discipline, to a broader refusal of social relations and forms of subjectivity under capitalism and the ideological role psychology itself plays in their reproduction. We then sketch a panoramic overview of critical and reconstructive encounters between Marxism and psychology in various contexts around the world ever since Marx's own reflections on the nature of the psyche, serving as a background to the equally diverse encounters with Marxist theory and politics in the articles making up this edition of the Review. Finally, we zone in on the immediate context of the conference itself, giving substance to the idea that a Marxist critical psychology is one that both inspires and is further developed from forms of collective action, which locates its critique of psychology and capitalism not just in theory, but in practices of everyday life that already articulate and live this double refusal.