Freudo-Marxism
프로이트-마르크스주의
Social theory, from the 1920s on, that sought to combine Freud’s psychoanalysis with Marxism. Its best-known early exponent, Wilhelm Reich, held that sexual repression in capitalist society produced mass neurosis and authoritarianism and that sexual liberation was a condition of social liberation. Without influence in either psychoanalysis or the communist movement at the time, it became, through Erich Fromm and Marcuse, one of the theoretical foundations of the New Left and the 1968 movement.
In depth
It began in the 1920s in Germany and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union the pedagogue Aron Zalkind was the most prominent proponent of Marxist psychoanalysis, the philosopher V. Yurinets and the Freudian Siegfried Bernfeld discussed the subject, and the Bakhtin circle linguist Valentin Voloshinov published Freudianism: A Marxist Critique in 1927. In 1929 Reich’s “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis” appeared in the bilingual German–Russian communist journal Under the Banner of Marxism.
Reich held that purely clinical psychoanalysis contained nothing contrary to Marxism, but he opposed the pessimistic philosophy of culture, built on the death drive, that Freud increasingly developed in the 1920s. He believed psychoanalysis contained a radical critique of society and, like Otto Gross before him, that it would win full recognition only under socialism, which deepened his conflict with Freud. Otto Fenichel, Bernfeld and Erich Fromm were tolerated in the psychoanalytic movement, but Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association at Freud’s instigation in 1934, without an official reason. The basic assumptions of Reich’s Freudo-Marxism were that society suffers from a mass neurosis; that individual neuroses are caused by social oppression through capitalism, work and power, felt above all in sexuality through rules and moral codes that maintain the social order; and that individual sexual liberation is a precondition of social liberation in the revolution.
Fenichel’s 1934 article “Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialistic Psychology”, in Reich’s Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy, can be seen as the end of this line. Fromm, a member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around Reich, took these ideas into the exiled Frankfurt School, writing the social-psychological part of its Studies on Authority and the Family (1936), and with Karen Horney stressed social factors over the libido. Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization (1955), built a vision of a non-repressive society on Freud’s late death-drive theory and called Reich “primitive”. Because Reich revised his writings of this period in the 1940s, his Freudo-Marxism became known around 1968 through unauthorised reprints.
In 1968 students in Paris and Berlin scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police, and students at Nanterre forced the end of sex segregation in the halls of residence; Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett carried his ideas into feminism. Later Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, the Lacanians and Deleuze and Guattari also joined psychoanalysis and Marxism, and Foucault reframed the idea of state sexual repression in terms of biopower.