Freudo-Marxism


Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. It has a rich history within continental philosophy, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and running through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.

Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud

Both Marx and Freud were Jewish atheists who developed distinctive critiques of religion. In his 1965 book , the French philosopher Paul Ricœur compared the two, characterizing their common method as the "hermeneutics of suspicion".
Certain philosophers have revised Marx's concept of commodity fetishism in the light of Freud's concept of sexual fetishism, theorizing a sexually charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.
Freud remained prolific up until his death in 1939. Civilization and Its Discontents, one of his most influential works, was published in 1930.

Emergence

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 label=none. 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 Reich's label=none. One member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around 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 Freud, and a radical psychiatrist. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and The Sexual Revolution. His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 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.

Critical theory

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 Freud. In the Institute's extensive Studien über Authorität und Familie, 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.

Herbert Marcuse

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, 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 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

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 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.

Frantz Fanon

The French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon drew on both psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in his critique of colonialism. His seminal works in this area include Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

Lacanianism

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. He inspired new cross-fertilisation of Freudian and Marxist ideas.

Louis Althusser

The French Marxist philosopher 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 : 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".
in 2008
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.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Greek-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and social critic Cornelius Castoriadis also followed up on the work of Lacan.

Slavoj 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.

Post-structuralism

Major French philosophers associated with post-structuralism, post-modernism, and/or deconstruction, including Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, engaged deeply with both Marxism and psychoanalysis. Most notably, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari collaborated on the theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia in two volumes: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

Major works