Surplus-Repression

Freud held that civilization rests on the permanent subjugation of the instincts, and that scarcity and the struggle for existence force the pleasure principle to yield to the reality principle. In chapter 1 of Eros and Civilization Marcuse accepted the proposition but read it to mean that “repression is a historical phenomenon”: the subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed not by nature but by man. The view of the struggle for existence as “eternal”, he wrote, is as old as civilization and has always been the most effective rationalization of repression, and Freud’s theory largely partakes of it.

In chapter 2 he introduced two terms to separate the biological from the social vicissitudes of the instincts. “Basic repression” is the modification of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization; surplus-repression is the restrictions necessitated by social domination. Surplus-repression shapes the instincts in accordance with the present “performance principle”, the prevailing form of the reality principle and the principle of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in constant expansion. Here, Marcuse held, Marx and Freud meet: workers perform alienated labour beyond what their own needs require, producing wealth for others, and repress themselves to direct their libido into that work.

Marcuse noted that Freud’s metapsychology does not ask whether the inhibitions are imposed by scarcity or by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity, by the struggle for existence or by the interest in domination. Yet the very progress of civilization under the performance principle had reached a productivity at which the social demands on instinctual energy spent in alienated labour could be considerably reduced. A non-repressive civilization was therefore possible: liberated Eros would not destroy culture but, through the self-sublimation of sexuality, create more lasting work relations and culture, a possibility he saw anticipated in art. In German it is also rendered zusätzliche Unterdrückung, “additional repression”.

In the book’s epilogue, “Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism”, Marcuse named Wilhelm Reich’s earlier writings the most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud. But Reich’s notion of sexual repression remained undifferentiated, he argued, neglecting the historical dynamic of the sex instincts and their fusion with the destructive impulses. Sexual liberation per se thus became for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills; with no essential distinction between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, progress in freedom appeared as a mere release of sexuality. The cultural and interpersonal schools of Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, he held, mutilated the instinct theory and so turned psychoanalytic theory into ideology.

In the Political Preface to the 1966 edition Marcuse granted that it seemed to make no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoyed more sexual liberty than ever before, and replied that this freedom and satisfaction were transforming the earth into hell. The authorities of the affluent society satisfy the sexual and aggressive energy of their subjects, and merchandise that has to be bought is made into an object of the libido. The diagnosis carried on into the “repressive desublimation” of One-Dimensional Man (1964).