Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for
philosophies that have been informed by or
have attempted to synthesize the works of
Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of
Sigmund Freud.
== Early Freudo-Marxism ==
The beginnings of Freudo-Marxist theorizing
took place in the 1920s in Germany and the
Soviet Union.
The Soviet philosopher V. Yurinets and the
Freudian analyst Siegfried Bernfeld both discussed
the topic.
The Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov, a
member of the Bakhtin circle, began a Marxist
critique of psychoanalysis in his 1925 article
"Beyond the Social", which he developed more
substantially in his 1927 book Freudianism:
A Marxist Critique.
In 1929, Wilhelm Reich’s Dialectical Materialism
and Psychoanalysis was published in German
and Russian in the bilingual communist theory
journal Unter dem Banner des Marxismus.
At the end of this line of thought can be
considered Otto Fenichel's 1934 article Psychoanalysis
as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialistic
Psychology which appeared in Wilhelm Reich's
Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und
Sexualökonomie (Journal for Political Psychology
and Sex-Economy).
One member of the Berlin group of Marxist
psychoanalysts around Wilhelm Reich was Erich
Fromm, who later brought Freudo-Marxist ideas
into the exiled Frankfurt School led by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
=== Wilhelm Reich ===
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst,
a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts
after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical
figures in the history of psychiatry.
He was the author of several influential books
and essays, most notably Character Analysis
(1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933),
and The Sexual Revolution (1936).
His work on character contributed to the development
of Anna Freud's The 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 as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's
Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic
analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.
His writing influenced generations of intellectuals:
during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris
and Berlin, students scrawled his name on
walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology
of Fascism at the police.
== The Frankfurt School ==
The Frankfurt School, from the Institute 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
Sigmund Freud.
In the Institute's extensive Studien über
Authorität und Familie (ed.
Max Horkheimer, Paris 1936), Erich Fromm authored
the social-psychological part.
Another new member of the institute was Herbert
Marcuse, who would become famous during the
1950s in the US.
=== Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955)
===
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's Civilization 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 1960s countercultural social movements.
In the book, Marcuse writes about the social
meaning of biology – history seen not as
a class struggle, but fight against repression
of our instincts.
He argues that capitalism (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".
=== Fromm and The Sane Society ===
Erich Fromm, once a member of the Frankfurt
School, left the group at the end of the 1930s.
The culmination of Fromm's social and political
philosophy was his book The Sane Society,
published in 1955, which argued in favor of
humanist, democratic socialism.
Building primarily upon the works of Karl
Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal
of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet
Marxism, and more frequently found in the
writings of classic liberals.
Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western
capitalism and Soviet communism, which he
saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social
structures that resulted in a virtually universal
modern phenomenon of alienation.
== Lacan and Marxism ==
Jacques Lacan was a philosophically sophisticated
French psychoanalyst, whose perspective came
to predominate in French psychiatry and psychology.
Lacan saw himself as loyal to and rescuing
Freud's legacy.
Lacan's influence has created a new cross-fertilisation
of Freudian and Marxist ideas.
=== Althusser ===
Louis Althusser is widely known as a theorist
of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward
an Investigation.
The essay establishes the concept of ideology,
also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony.
Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined
entirely by political forces, ideology draws
on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious
and mirror-phase respectively, and describes
the structures and systems that allow us to
meaningfully have a concept of the self.
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 for all
by the epistemological break (a term borrowed
from Gaston 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 essay Contradiction and Overdetermination
borrows the concept of overdetermination from
psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea
of "contradiction" with a more complex model
of multiple causality in political situations
(an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept
of hegemony).
=== Žižek ===
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has
developed since the late 1980s a line of thought
which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian
philosophy and Marxism.
Althusser is also among his references.
His The Sublime Object of Ideology deals with
the original Freudo-Marxist perspective.
== Commodity and sexual fetishism ==
Marx's theory of commodity fetishism has proven
fertile material for work by other theorists
since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or,
as Marxist orthodoxy might see it, 'vulgarized'
the original concept.
Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of
sexual fetishism led to new interpretations
of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually
charged relationships between a person and
a manufactured object.
== See also ==
Authoritarian personality
Crowd psychology
Repressive desublimation
=== Related thinkers ===
Cornelius Castoriadis
Gilles Deleuze
Félix Guattari
Lacanian movement
Ernst Simmel
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Wilhelm Reich, Dialectical Materialism and
Psychoanalysis, in Lee Baxandall ed., Sex-Pol;
Essays, 1929-1934 (New York, 1972).
Otto Fenichel, Psychoanalysis as the nucleus
of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology.
In: American Imago, 1967 Winter; 24(4): 290-311
Palmier, J.M. (1969) Wilhelm Reich: Essai
sur la Naissance du Freudo-Marxisme, Paris.
== External links ==
Otto Fenichel: Die Psychoanalyse als Keim
einer zukünftigen dialektisch-materialistischen
Psychologie (German original)
David Pavon Cuellar: Marxisme lacanien (French
original)
Roger Kimball: The Marriage of Marx and Freud
