The Introduction of Psychoanalysis — Critical Theory

The music for the day was Maurice Ravel’s (rah-VEL; /ʁavɛl/) La Valse (lah VAHLSS; /la vals/), an ironic, Straussian waltz: Vienna’s dance, played until it comes apart.

Recapitulation: the formative years, 1930–1940

Critical theory took shape in its formative decade under terrible conditions. From 1933 the Nazis purged and killed communists and leftists generally, and the members of the Frankfurt School had to find landing places abroad. Most of them would have preferred to stay in Germany, and exile, to places like bustling New York, was deeply disorienting. The young theory needed new definitions as it grew, and it began to draw on new resources: culture, high culture and its sociology, the sociology of literature and of taste, bourgeois culture as a whole, and psychoanalysis. Its themes in these years are psychoanalysis, sociology, the family, authoritarianism and fascism; the aesthetic dimension (Benjamin (BEN-yah-meen; /ˈbɛnjamiːn/), Adorno, Löwenthal (LUR-ven-tahl; /ˈløːvn̩taːl/)); and an emerging philosophy of history (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/)). It is out of this that Horkheimer and Adorno will produce their bombshell of a new dialectic, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Today: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and Marxism look like opposites. In critical theory they enter a happy and fruitful marriage.

Marxism and psychoanalysis

The conflict

For the communist movement, psychoanalysis was bourgeois reaction: a therapy for the middle classes, individualist through and through. Soviet psychology went another way entirely, toward a materialist psychology, Pavlovian behaviorism, in which human beings are bundles of conditioned reactions and can be molded at will.

Debates in the West

Freud himself is ambiguous. Read one way, he is the “manly” conservative, a champion of authority and restriction. Read another way, he is a critic of Victorian morality and its sexual and social norms. Was he a liberator, or an authoritarian? He is both an ally and a critic of bourgeois repression, and critical theory produced several interpretations of him (quotation 1, Horkheimer’s 1931 program again, which already named the “psychical development of individuals” as one of the three things a social philosophy must connect).

Why psychoanalysis at all?

Given the communist condemnation of psychoanalysis as individualist and bourgeois, why would a neo-Marxist want it? Because critical theory holds that nothing in bourgeois society is total falsehood. Bourgeois society, culture and ideology contain emancipatory, valuable, even desirable elements. One of them is a hermeneutics of suspicion: a way of reading that treats what appears on the surface as the symptom of something hidden. Freud reads the symptom for the repressed desire; Marx reads ideology (justice, morality and the rest) for the class interest beneath it. The two suspicions can be joined, in the service of class consciousness and class struggle. Freudian psychoanalysis, with its attention to symptoms, against Pavlovian behaviorism, with its attention only to material conditions: and Lukács’s (LOO-kahch; /ˈlukaːtʃ/) theory of reification helps explain why the second is so tempting.

And there was an urgent question for psychoanalysis to answer. Why would people adapt themselves to unfreedom? Why do we bend to authority and willingly submit to what harms us? In 1932 the Nazis won the largest share of the vote, and much of it came from working people. Why are broke boys defending capitalism? Are they enamored of irrational authority? Do they crave domination by tyrants? One answer: they identify with the authority, see themselves as cogs in the autocrat’s machine, and believe the greater good is worth it. To go further, we need Freud.

Some introductory themes in psychoanalysis

The discovery of the unconscious

Freud trained in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière (sahl-peh-tree-AIR; /salpɛtʁijɛʁ/), who had turned the attention of psychiatry to the nervous illnesses: neuroses, hysteria and the rest. The patients were usually members of the bourgeoisie, and often women, and hysteria was what doctors sought to treat. What caused it? Why were these people so unhappy, so ill, so evidently suffering?

Freud’s early case studies suggested that neurotic symptoms are surface manifestations of deep psychic distress; obvious now, not then. There is a conscious life and an unconscious life, and the unconscious is the realm of desire and instinctual drive. Freud then generalized: this is true of everyone, healthy or ill. Dreams and slips of the tongue are the unconscious breaking through (you mean to say one thing and say your mother). Speaking becomes the vehicle by which desire shows itself, and that is the foundation of an analytic, talking psychology: talking as the cure.

Freud’s metapsychology: a “hydraulic” theory of the mind

The self, for Freud, is made of three agencies, which in his German are simply das Es (dahss ESS; /das ɛs/), das Ich (dahss IKH; /das ɪç/) and das Über-Ich (dahss EW-ber-ikh; /das ˈyːbɐʔɪç/), “the It,” “the I,” and “the Over-I,” which English translators made into Latin:

the ego: agency, governed by the reality principle;
the id: libido, governed by the pleasure principle, representing the desires of the self;
the super-ego: authority, or conscience, standing above both id and ego.

The mind wants stability among these warring faculties. When the pressure becomes intolerable, it shows itself in symptoms, and the therapeutic cure is a release of that imbalance. We are not born whole: we become ourselves through a sophisticated play of forces, through social growth.

The socialization of desire

Infantile sexuality begins with the infinite satisfaction of mother and baby, and that satisfaction is interrupted by the male figure of authority. This is the Oedipus complex. It is resolved when the child identifies with the father, to overcome the threat he poses, and then introjects and internalizes the father as the super-ego. Out of that resolution emerges the moral adult. The mature individual is desire that has been structured and internalized.

You can already see what this offers critical theory: an account of why people go toward authority. (And a question it leaves open: what of the case where the mother is the authority, so that the mother is the super-ego?)

Freud’s social theory is both conservative and critical-emancipatory. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he introduced a second drive alongside libido: aggression, the death drive. Is human happiness even possible, then? In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (dahss OON-beh-hah-gen in dair kool-TOOR; /das ˈʊnbəhaːɡn̩ ɪn deːɐ̯ kʊlˈtuːɐ̯/), the “unease” or “malaise” in culture) the answer is grim. Repression is necessary if we are to live together, because the death drive craves violence. We are violent, irrational creatures kept in check by the super-ego, and unconscious guilt is what drives our neurosis and depression.

Erich Fromm (1900–1980)

Life

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 into an orthodox Jewish household, and had left religion behind by 1926. He took a doctorate in sociology at Heidelberg with Alfred Weber, Max Weber’s brother, and was licensed to practice psychoanalysis in Berlin in 1926. He joined the Institute in 1930, moved to New York in 1934, and taught at Columbia, at Bennington, and at the New School, a haven for left-wing intellectuals in the war years. He grew distant from the Institute, and by 1939 they had parted ways. Fromm turned away from the Oedipus complex and toward a humanistic socialism, and his later work, like The Art of Loving (1956), is less Freudian and more about love.

Fromm began the Institute’s first social-psychological study, The Situation of the Working Class in Past and Present, in 1929: a survey asking, among other things, how far German workers really held the left-wing views they professed. He followed it with “Politics and Psychoanalysis” (1931) and with today’s reading, “Methods and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932); later came Escape from Freedom (1941), The Art of Loving (1956) and Marx’s Concept of Man (1961).

Fromm’s essay reconciles historical materialism with social psychology, in five steps.

A conflict? Historical materialism is the theory with which psychoanalysis has both the greatest affinity and the greatest differences: one sees consciousness as the expression of social existence, the other as determined by instinctual drives. (Quotation 2.)
No real conflict. For Freud the object of psychology is always socialized man, and environment and living conditions play a decisive role in psychic development. (Quotation 3.) Oedipalization is precisely the socialization of desire.
Psychoanalysis as the mediating key. Analytic social psychology has its place within historical materialism, because it studies a factor that mediates between the economic base and the formation of ideologies, and so lets us understand the ideological superstructure. (Quotation 4.)
Ideologies as vehicles of desire. Ideologies are the products of wishes, drives, interests and needs, rationalized. The drives are biological in origin, but their quantity and content are shaped by one’s socio-economic situation, one’s class. Marx says that people produce their ideologies; psychoanalysis can describe empirically how: the economic situation is transformed into ideology by way of the drives. (Quotation 5.) Authoritarian ideology, on this view, is a fantastic capturing of a (false) satisfaction of desire: a fantasy.
Against ahistorical drives. Libido itself is historically specific. Every society has its own libidinal structure, as it has its own economic, social, political and cultural structure; it is the product of socio-economic conditions acting on the drives, and it is the medium through which the economy shapes the mind. (Quotation 6.) Desire and instinct are historical, dependent on material and economic conditions. (Freud had said as much already.)

So Fromm proposed psychoanalysis as the necessary bridge between socioeconomic conditions and human psychology. It follows that the symbolic life Freud studies is not a fixed set of ahistorical symbols (the cigars and the rest); symbols are constantly being created and re-created. There is no universal symbolic archive, no set of eternal archetypes. Carl Jung broke with Freud over just this, and Jung’s later accommodations with the Nazi regime did not help the case for archetypes. Society has its own libidinal structure, and the combined effect of its economic, social, political and cultural structures falls on the ideological superstructure.

If that is right, a different society would make a different psychology. A proposed society could be designed to be the channel for a particular psychology, and that is a reason to study human psychology at all. Next time Fromm’s ideas go to work, in the Institute’s studies of authority and the family.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation: critical theory in the formative years: thematic elaborations, 1930–1940

psychoanalysis, sociology, family, authoritarianism, fascism
the aesthetic dimension (Benjamin, Adorno, Löwenthal)
an emerging philosophy of history (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer)

II. The integration of psychoanalysis

A. Background on the conflict between Marxism and psychoanalysis
- the communist critique of psychoanalysis as bourgeois reaction
- Soviet psychology as Pavlovian behaviorism
B. Debates over psychoanalysis in the West
- Freud as both an ally and critic of bourgeois repression
- interpretative variations of psychoanalysis in critical theory [quote 1]
- why appeal to psychoanalysis at all?

III. Some introductory themes in psychoanalysis

A. The discovery of the unconscious
- neurotic symptoms and unconscious desires
- dreams, slips, and the analytic talking cure
B. Freud’s metapsychology: a “hydraulic” theory of the mind
- ego, id, super-ego
- ego: reality principle (agency); id: pleasure principle (libido); super-ego (authority or “conscience”)
- the therapeutic cure: a release of imbalance or intolerable psychic pressure
C. The socialization of desire
- infantile sexuality
- the Oedipus complex
- the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the emergence of the moral adult
D. Freud’s social theory
- conservative and critical-emancipatory
- the introduction of a second drive: libido and aggression, e.g., Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
- Freud’s late writings on anthropology and history, e.g., Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

IV. Erich Fromm’s career: the Institute and afterward

A. Biographical notes (1900–1980)
- born 1900 in Frankfurt into Jewish orthodox household; abandons religion by 1926
- doctorate in sociology, University of Heidelberg with Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother)
- receives license to practice psychoanalysis in Berlin, 1926
- joins Institute, 1930; move to New York 1934; teaches at Columbia, Bennington, New School
- growing distance from Institute; parting of ways by ’39; turn toward humanistic socialism
B. Fromm on social psychology
- The Situation of the Working Class in Past and Present: social-psychology study (begun in 1929)
- “Politics and Psychoanalysis” (1931)
- “Methods and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932)
- Escape from Freedom (1941); The Art of Loving (1956); Marx’s Concept of Man (1961)

V. Fromm’s “Methods and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932)

a conflict between Marxism and psychoanalysis? [quote 2]
Freud’s model of human socialization obviates any real conflict [quote 3]
psychoanalysis as the explanatory key: mediating between materiality and ideology [quote 4]
we adhere to ideologies as the vehicles of desires, wish-fulfillments, and fantasies [quote 5]
against ahistorical drives: libido itself is a historically specific formation [quote 6]
putting psychoanalysis to work in social psychology (next lecture)

On the back: (1) Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy…” (1931); (2)–(6) Fromm, “Methods and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932).