Freud’s theory is in no way revolutionary. Though it certainly contains what can be called rebellious or oppositional tendencies, in the total context of Freud’s system these radical elements are suspended, canceled or totally engulfed by contrary considerations. Freud’s metapsychology is a conjunction of psychophysical dualism, Neo-Kantian vitalism, neurological determinism, entropic and cyclical biophysics, positivistic quantification, and hydraulic energy circuits. His politics combines Enlightenment rationality and a critique of excessive sexual restraint on the one hand with a conviction of the necessity of repression, a reactionary fear of the majority, an insistence on the need for elite authority, and a profound cynicism regarding the possibility of fundamental human transformation on the other. His view of human nature is marked by compassion for suffering and despair at the prospect of its elimination, by a mechanistic perspective on which he erected a view of human intentionality that extended the realm of symbolic meaning and purpose far beyond their previous limits. His work displays a wide sensitivity to culture and an extreme narrowness in interpretation, egoistic reductionism and a pervasive scarcity mentality culminating in
philosophical antirationalism that resonates through Schoppenhaur and the least progressive contributions of Nietzsche. His overall view of civilization weaves together a critique of hypocrisy, bourgeois exhaustion at self-denying sublimation, the nobility of the self-sacrifice of superiors, a profound ahistoricism, and a reification of the prevailing capitalist claim of a necessary contradiction between the individual and society. As J. M. Brohm noted:
Freud’s work develops in fact out of the end of the era of bourgeois revolutions, at the moment when the bourgeoisie has long since lost every revolutionary calling. His work consequently combines in a dialectical manner the rationalist materialism of the era of bourgeois revolutions (the progressive and critical materialism of a bourgeois revolutionary idology which calls its objects by their names) with the ideology of the imperialist period, the period of ideological and theoretical disintegration. 1
The term “dialectical” is inappropriate and the passage is too simple, but it nevertheless captures a contradiction that permeated all of Freud’s contributions.
What is most important about the Freudian contradiction is that within its combination of progressive and conservative elements are embodied concepts that are indispensable to a Marxist understanding of social domination and transcendence. As we shall see, Freud provided critical components of a theory of alienation and false consciousness. But his own understanding of these factors was often reified, and consequently a perspective that intends both to learn from Freud and transcend his deficiencies must demystify Freud’s contribution in the process of incorporating its insights. The fundamental question I am concerned with at this stage of analysis is the manner in which this demystification is to be accomplished.
I argued earlier that the works of Freud and Marx bore striking resemblances as well as irreducible contradictions. It would greatly simplify the task of understanding the relationship of their theories if we could split the works of Freud and Marx into component “parts” and proceed to line up the similarities and differences. Then we could characterize the notions of science, atheism, self-determination, and rationality as the points of identity and the concepts of social class, revolution, instinct, repetition, and human self-transformation as the points of difference. Insofar as Marxism absorbs what is progressive in the world view of the bourgeoisie we would have explained the convergence between Marx and Freud, and insofar as Marxism rejects the necessary alienation and mystification of bourgeois domination we would have grounded their incompatibility.
There is some validity in this approach; the difficulty is that the aspects of a theoretical system are not “parts” which retain their separable meanings when removed from their place in a larger configuration.
They are not like bricks in a wall or patches in a quilt. The notions of “rationality,” “science," and “self-determination” have different meanings in the totality of the systems of Marx and Freud and a less mechanistic procedure must be utilized to adequately grasp their relationship. I intend to retain the notions of convergence and disparity, of course, but I reject the possibility of laying one set of concepts over the other and tracing their contours. Instead, I adopt the view that theories embody (however indirectly) the tendencies of the social classes and specialized cadres that propound and defend them, and these tendencies may move in similar directions when viewed from a limited vantage point, but along very different paths when sighted from a more inclusive location.
Just as the original humanism of the capitalist Enlightenment flourished through its onslaught upon the backwardness of a clerical aristocracy languishing in the lengthening shadows of its feudal structure, so Freud’s attack upon the reactionary medical mysticism and sexual duplicity of his age also grew upon that which it destroyed and replaced. But as the bourgeoisie came eventually to the point at which it would have either to reject its class privilege for the sake of its ideals, or refashion its ideals to justify its privilege, so Freud too came upon the limits of a therapeutic humanism grounded in the underlying assumptions of late capitalism. Like Weber, Freud found the culture of capitalism deficient. And like Weber, unable or unwilling to commit himself to the only critique that could move beyond this aversion—that is, to socialism—Freud was condemned to a narrowing circle of theoretical abstraction and practical despair. Like all condemnations that do not comprehend the roots of the evil they deplore, Freud absorbed in his critique vital elements of the system he rejected. His uncritical acceptance of the postulates of capitalism are never so obvious as when he is involved in a “universal” analysis of culture or a specific characterization of primitive society. And without a way open before him, Freud could only follow the path of similar antibourgeois critiques into a reactionary ahistorical mysticism. Helmholtz’s materialism gave way to Nietzsche’s eternal occurrence, and the explorations of an earlier scientific coalition were slowly extinguished by fantasies of primal murder and cosmological manichaeism. The furthest reach of Freud’s amelioristic ambition, which is simultaneously the limit of his vision, is well stated by Philip Rieff as
a better balancing of profit and loss among the emotions. His is the iron law
of analysis: culture develops at the expense of the instincts; and neither
revolution nor religion can save man the eternal wear of conflict. 2
Those who have wished to maintain allegiance to Freud have either taken over the system as a whole or attempted to isolate its virtues from its defects. The most prevalent form of this immaculate dissection is that
which divides Freud’s metapsychology from his clinical perspective. But it is not possible to say immediately which of these dimensions is preserved or eliminated, for it depends entirely upon who is performing the operation. In the current revisions of psychoanalytic theory by its practitioners, it is the metapsychology that is the anachronism and clinical practice the saving remnant. In the writings of various Neo-Marxists, particularly Marcuse and Jacoby, however, the evaluation is reversed. For the latter, therapy is of necessity adjustment to a corrupt society while the transcendent concepts of Freud’s metatheory provide a perspective from which contemporary capitalist culture can be comprehended and condemned.
It is not surprising that analysts should wish to amputate Freud’s metapsychology. There are several factors relevant to this decision. First, metaphysics is clearly out of favor. This is an age of idealistic positivism, and analysts are more likely to ground their theories in Wittgenstein, phenomenology, and information theory than Helmholtz and Haeckel. It generally takes analysts a decade or two to integrate the prevailing philosophical tradition, which, like an exploding star, has ceased to exist by the time its outline is discernible.
Second, it is quite clear that earlier hopes for psychoanalytic practice have proved grandiose. Rates of cure through psychoanalysis, on available empirical evidence, are no higher than elsewhere, and remain considerably more expensive. It is not merely that analysts are threatened economically on occasion by increased competition from the variety of quick-cure franchise operations that have arisen like mushrooms in the shade of disintegrating social shadows. The intellectual prestige of psychoanalysis has been challenged with a growing realization that its theory of human existence has lost its once dominant power, while its clinical practice serves less adequately for a diminishing portion of the population.
Finally, Freud’s metapsychology resonates with a universe of scarcity, deprivation, and painful repetition that is incompatible with contemporary American attitudes toward immediate gratification and perennial progress. Freud’s roots in traditional European culture—not merely its works of art, but its values of hierarchy, conflictual resignation, and privileged sublimation—do not flourish readily in the surburban version of the analytic alliance.
It is more difficult to account for the Marxist dichotomization of Freud carried out by writers like Marcuse and Jacoby. A theory deriving so explicitly from the .tradition of “internal relations” would seem an
unlikely source for the view that Freud’s work can be split into halves, one to be saved and the other discarded. Marx’s acerbic condemnation ol Proudhon s misunderstanding of the dialectic should serve as a warning at this point:
For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides—one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm.
I he problem to be solved: to keep the good side while eliminating the bad....
What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad. 3
Nevertheless, Russell Jacoby’s judgment, following Marcuse, is clear: "Psychoanalysis as individual therapy necessarily participates within the realm of social unfreedom, while psychoanalysis as theory is free to transcend and criticize this realm.” 4 How a theory could be so asceptically conceived should give us pause to wonder.
I have already explored (Chapter 1) some of the factors that drew critical theory to Freud: I shall simply recall here that Marxism had ignored perversions of the subjective realm while psychoanalysis spoke to these disfigurations. The absence of a radical Marxist alternative that might account for the pathologies of Stalin and Hitler led critical theory back into a nostalgic recreation of the virtues of bourgeois culture and its theory.
The greatness of Freud consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality. 5
Freud saw a dark reality that Marxism had all too often ignored. But Freud did not reveal the structure of this reality. His vision reified what it observed, a fact which Jacoby, following critical theory, seems unable to concede.
The work of this chapter is devoted to showing that Freud cannot be preserved by dichotomizing his system. In criticizing both the Freudian and Marxist versions of this effort, I intend to lay the groundwork for a theory that will permit the incorporation of Freud into a Marxist perspective, both in its theoretical and its therapeutic dimensions.
The alleged duality of Freud’s theory and practice to which Jacoby alludes is aligned with another postulated duality, which Jacoby terms the “two logics.” It is Jacoby’s contention that Marxists have recently
attempted to compensate for a previous disregard of subjective phenomena by harmonizing Marx and Freud.
This manner of posing the problem suggests that the task is to make agreeable the incompatibility by a round-table discussion that tables the contradictions. A harmonious synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis presupposes that society is without the antagonisms that are its essence [emphasis added ]. 6
Instead of “synchronizing” contradictions, or bifurcating them, “critical theory seeks to articulate them; the task is not to homogenize the insolubles, hut, as it were, to culture the differences.” 7 If Jacoby, following critical theory, wishes to culture the differences between Marx and Freud, it is crucial that these differences be articulated. I he contents of the theories are never specified, however. Instead, the theoretical antagonism between the views is misleadingly reduced to a reflection of social antagonisms. In this move two separate categories are conflated, and Jacoby is spared the problem of analyzing the theoretical differences in question.
A harmonious synthesis between Marx and Freud presupposes nothing, least of all a harmonious society, for the simple reason that such a harmonious synthesis of theories is absolutely impossible. An alleged antagonism between Freudian and Marxist theory is a wholly different issue than the antagonism between individuals in capitalist society. Critical theory continually falls into this confusion; however, no social change can alter the antagonism between the theories of Marx and Freud because the theories disagree as to whether such a change is possible, and would offer conflicting interpretations if the resolution actually appeared to occur.
To culture the differences entails pursuing two different logics simultaneously, the logic of society and the logic of the psyche. . . . The various efforts to interpret Marx and Freud have been plagued by reductionism; the inability to retain the tension between the individual and society, psychology and political economy . 8
Once again rhetoric overwhelms analysis. First, what is meant by “two logics”? This is hardly a trivial question, for everything depends on precisely how separable the individual and society in tact are. If the term “two” simply indicates that the concepts “individual” and “society” are different from each other, no harm is done: but nothing is gained. If the term means something significant, however, and is taken to indicate that each logic is intelligible in separation from the other, the account is profoundly mistaken. If the term is taken to be different from both of these possibilities, it is certainly never made clear what it does intend.
Difficulties are further compounded by the fact that Jacoby has himself previously claimed'that Freud “unearthed the objective roots of the
private subject—its social content.” 9 But if Freud did in fact undo the “primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society,"'" what becomes the fate of the alleged “two logics” and the tension between psychology and political economy? Again, if psychologism (the reduction of social concepts to individual and psychological concepts) remains false in all its forms” 11 society must have properties that cannot be deduced from the characteristics of its individual members. But this is precisely what Freud denied. Freud never could have shown the social roots of the individual because it violated his basic conception of the relationship between society and its individual members: “For sociology, which deals with the behavior of man in society, can be nothing other than applied psychology. Strictly speaking, indeed, there are only two sciences—psychology, pure and applied, and natural science. 12 For Freud, the individual is basic and society a derivation. It is not possible to cite freud in behalf of the two logics for he espouses only one—psychology.
Therefore, despite Jacoby’s endorsement of Adorno’s assertion that "psychoanalysis and historical materialism must co-exist,” 13 the position must be rejected. For on the interpretation psychoanalysis itself offers of the relationship between the individual and society the fundamental distinction between them is reduced to the very different duality between pure and applied psychology: that is, between pure individual psychology and applied individual psychology. Psychoanalysis and Marxism cannot coexist unless psychoanalysis is radically reinterpreted, a task Jacoby does not attempt.
In its concern to authenticate the individual against the ravages of totalitarian society, critical theory mistakenly concluded that a “logic of the individual psyche" is required. Now, it is one thing to wish to protect the individual against mass domination. It is a wholly different matter to equate this desire with a theory based on the “logic of the individual psyche.” For if the phrase is taken nontrivially to indicate that there are actual properties of individuals that can be understood independently of the social structure the view is significantly misleading. The notions of “individual” and “society” are dialectically related; that is, while not identical neither are they separable. We cannot begin to understand either without immediately referring to the other. The smallest intelligible unit of explanation is the social individual. It is true that the individual brings to social existence a system of abstract structures and general tendencies. But these are in turn specified through concrete social arrangements that are themselves constituted out of the network of determinate human beings who compose them. Although human nature possesses abstract limitations and potentialities, even these cannot be specified outside of their social manifestation. Therefore, a defense of “the individual psyche” against its social reduction is a defense of every form of
social system that has ever existed. For each of them is grounded in its individual members and would be unintelligible without them.
On the plane of theoretical understanding, then, the individual and society cannot be in opposition. Ol course, a given society can be so structured that some set of individuals opposes another, or even so that all individuals but one oppose a single member. These are not, however, antagonisms between society and the asocial individual but between some social individuals and others. We could find Jacoby’s account intelligible only if the notion of a determinate asocial individual were plausible. Such a perspective is fundamental to Freud and is rejected by Marx, for whom the tension between the individual and society is grounded in the contradictions within a given sociohistorical structure. Fo conceptualize the relationship between Freud and Marx through the motif of the two logics is to deny the Marxist perspective in the very process of adjudicating the dispute in question. In fact, what is most curious about Jacoby’s account is that he himself approvingly cites the following passage from Marx:
[The] private interest is already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society. ... It is the interest of private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all [emphasis added]. 14
And yet, the clear meaning of this passage—that the realm of the private is socially constituted in its form and content—is not merely ignored by Jacoby but negated.
Logically speaking, since neither the individual nor society can exist without each other, we must conclude that they are specified out of a single logic. Nor is it intelligible to assign priority to either. Adorno leads us astray when he asserts that
we have never doubted the primacy of objective factors over psychological.. . . We say socio-psychology as a subjective mediation of an objective social system; without its mechanism the subject would not be able to be held on the leash. 15
The reference to the leash is illuminating because it serves to remind us of the fusion of political and theoretical categories. In reality, however, objective factors cannot have priority over psychological factors for the simple reason that objective factors are themselves simultaneously psychological. What are the objective factors in any case if not the network of “sociopsychological” individuals who constitute the socioeconomic structure? Jacoby’s approving citation of Reich and Fromm only compounds the error:
Between the two terminal points—the economic structure of society at one end, the ideological superstructure at the other... psychoanalysis sees a number ot intermediate stages.
[psychoanalysis] can show in what manner particular economic conditions influence the psychic apparatus of men and produce particular ideological results; it can provide information on the “how” of the dependence of ideological facts on particular configurations . 16
But psychology cannot be assigned this task of elucidating “intermediate stages or the causal influences of economic structures on the psychic apparatus tor the basic reason that economic structures are themselves sociopsychological categories. Neither Reich nor Fromm ever overcame the basic duality of individual and society which is the persistent mystifying heritage of psychoanalysis. They could do no more than ameliorate as best they could the dichotomy between individual and social, psychological and economic, which they were never able to transcend.
It is now necessary to return to the first of Jacoby’s dichotomies—that between Freud’s theory and practice. The argument here is that psychoanalytic theory transcends the capitalist order that subverts its therapy. To credit this position we need to believe that the same capitalist society whose ubiquitous corruption of every other aspect of social existence is minutely traced by critical theory and reiterated by Jacoby reigns itself in at the border of psychoanalytic theory. The position is not plausible a priori; nor does Jacoby offer any argument on its behalf. Instead, the basic theory-practice duality is elaborated through a presentation that adds further confusion to the original error.
Freud’s subversiveness is derived from his concepts and not from his stated political opinions. This disjuntion is absolutely crucial to recognize: the disjunction between the political, social, and truth content of concepts and the political-social outlook of those using the concepts. They are not identical: they often stand in contradiction [emphasis added ]. 17
This passage, whose importance Jacoby himself underscores, is remarkably unclear. Concepts are distinguished from political outlook: neither is defined, however, and the obvious rejoinder that political outlooks are themselves comprised of concepts is not addressed. The concepts in question are perhaps those of “repression, sexuality, unconscious, Oedipal complex, and infantile sexuality,” which Jacoby takes to be “the fundamental core of Freudian theory .” 18 Not only does Jacoby fail to show how the concepts are subversive, but his “disjunction,” which at one pole identifies the political, social, and truth content of these concepts, is further obfuscating. The traditional "genetic fallacy,” which distinguished between the origin and validity of a theory, was at least
clear. But Jacoby’s analysis appears to identify these two features and set them together in opposition to the outlook of its user.
Have we any way of discovering Freud’s outlook independently of examining the social and political content of his theory? What is the purported ground of his radicalism?
Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between the private and public, the individual and society; he unearthed the objective roots of the private subject—its social content . 19
From this Jacoby concludes that if Freud was “conservative in his immediate disregard of society, his concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist .” 20 If this account were true of Freud (which it is not), it would suffer the reductio ad absurclum of immediately reconstituting every conservative from Plato through Durkheim and beyond, as radical. Conservatism agrees with Marxism that the individual cannot be understood except as intrinsically social. Therefore, even if we can bracket the fact that Freud’s “immediate disregard of society”—which Jacoby acknowledges as conservative—is clearly part of the “political, social, and truth content” of his concepts, we cannot fail to realize that had Freud in fact discovered the social in the individual, this would not support Jacoby’s claim of radicalism. Freud’s actual “accomplishment” consisted in replacing a wholly superficial, optimistic bourgeois illusion regarding individual autonomy with a more sophisticated, pessimistic version of the same theory. Jacoby succumbs to Freud’s mystification on this point; it is important to get the issue clear.