Marxism and Psychoanalysis

In or against Psychology?

David Pavon-Cuellar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317424451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

The methods developed by Freud and Marx have enabled a range of scholars to critically reflect upon the ideological underpinnings of modern and now postmodern or hypermodern western societies. In this intriguing book, the discipline of psychology itself is screened through the twin dynamics of Marxism and psychoanalysis. David Pavón-Cuéllar asks to what extent the terms, concerns and goals of psychology reflect, in fact, the dominant bourgeois ideology that has allowed it to flourish.

The book charts a gradual psychologization within society and culture dating from the nineteenth century, and examines how the tacit ideals within mainstream psychology – creating good citizens or productive workers – sit uneasily against Marx and Freud's ambitions of revealing fault-lines and contradictions within individualist and consumer-oriented structures.

The positivist aspiration of psychology to become a natural science has been the source of extensive debate, critical voices asserting the social and cultural contexts through which the human mind and behaviour should be understood. This challenging new book provides another voice that, in addressing two of the most influential intellectual traditions of the past 150 years, widens the debate still further to examine the foundations of psychology.

1

MARXIAN PSYCHOLOGIES

Marx as a psychologist

Marx is known as a philosopher, economist, sociologist and political thinker, but not as a psychologist. And it is true that he was not specifically devoted to the systematic study of the human psyche. In Marx’s reflections, the objects of psychology as such were not studied independently of the extra-psychological. But some of these objects were considered in depth and in a consistent and highly original way. This is why we can accept, at least initially, the existence of a Marxian psychology (a distinction is made throughout this book between ‘Marxian’ to designate Marx’s approach and ‘Marxist’ to designate approaches that have been developed by Marx’s followers and are often based in Marxist politics).

Marx’s psychological ideas have been considered by various authors. For instance, Eastman (1927) reduces them to a failed theory incapable of overcoming the dialectic, metaphysical and mystical vices of Hegelian philosophy. Rubinstein (1934) better captures Marx’s distinctive psychology by basing it on the notions of objectifying-subjectifying activity, consciousness as a social relationship, and the real person always presupposed by mental processes. In the Marxian representation of these processes, Lanier (1943) highlights their individual uniqueness and dynamic variability, while Fromm (1961), emphasizing the unchanging and universal, prefers to present an essentialist Marxian psychology that assumes the active-productive predisposition of human nature.

Coe (1978) also takes up Marx’s humanism, but stresses its historicized and contextualized character, while analysing the original way in which Marx considers the role of labour, primary needs and society in a psychological theory that is irreducible to economics, physiology and the partial views of behaviourism, psychoanalysis and Gestalt. With the same conviction that Marx overcomes the shortcomings of other approaches, Robinson (1993) shows how his theory sees the individual as part of the social, thus avoiding adaptationism, the individual/society dualism and the notion of an external social environment. Similarly, Teo (2005) attempts to clearly demarcate Marxian psychological theory by presenting it in opposition to philosophical psychology because of its concern with practice and power, and its focus on the natural, sociocultural and politico-economic nature of the mind in concrete human individuals – and not on the abstract individual.

However, these accounts of Marxian psychology tend to be either too general or very selective and partial. A notable exception is that of Rubinstein, who demonstrates precision and comprehensiveness when showing that ‘Marx provides psychology with a complete system of ideas’ (Rubinstein 1934: 128). This is what we confirm in the present chapter, though, unlike Rubinstein, we will not proceed according to the well-justified assumption that Marxian psychological ideas have ‘internal unity’ and constitute a ‘monolithic whole’ (p. 111). Rather, we will simply deploy the separate ideas and some of their internal connections. Although such connections allow us to conjecture on the possibility of a cohesive structure, the ideas will be kept as dispersed or organized, as attached or detached, as they appear in Marx’s works, with no attempt to integrate them from the first into a conjectural unitary system.

Instead of one single psychological theoretical system, the chapter distinguishes eighteen relatively independent Marxian psychologies. We will review separately each one of them, identifying some ideas that may enrich psychology, but also others that are profoundly incompatible with the very notion of knowledge of the psyche. It is those ideas, which may well explain the absence of an explicit, unitary Marxian psychological system, that will ultimately lead us to reconsider Marx’s attitude toward psychology.

The psychology of material determination

Marx’s psychology forms part of his materialistic reflection on the human subject, a reflection that reacts against the ‘denial of man’ (Marx 1844: 136) as a ‘real and concrete subject’ in the abstract categories of liberal economy and Hegelian philosophy (Marx 1858: 22). Reduced to ideas such as value or spirit, and thus lost in economic and philosophical idealisms, the existential and social materiality of living, working, suffering and struggling subjects was to be recovered by Marxian materialist psychology (cf. Eastman 1927).

Marxian psychology can only be materialistic. Its first premise has to be that the conscious, mental or intellectual is preceded, founded upon and formed by the material, existential and social. In Marx’s words (1859: 4–5), ‘social existence’, the ‘mode of production of material life’, is ‘what determines consciousness’ or the ‘intellectual’ life.

While still only seventeen, Marx (1835: 2) recognized the power of both our ‘physical constitution’, which ‘lets no one scoff at its rights’, and our ‘relations in society’, which are ‘established before we are in a position to determine them’. The social-relational and the physical-corporeal are thus already determinants in this earliest Marxian materialist psychology. Subsequently, thanks to the economic factor, the physical blends with the social.

The mature Marxian psychology focuses on an economic-historical material determination that decides everything in the human psyche (Rubinstein 1934). Marx and Engels (1846: 25–26) conceive the ‘representations, thoughts, spiritual intercourse of men’ as the ‘direct efflux of their material behaviour’ in economy and history. They also consider that ‘all forms of consciousness’ emanate from ‘real social relations’ (pp. 39–40). These ‘relations of production’, in conflict with the ‘productive forces’, also involve ‘contradictions of material life’ that ‘explain’ what happens in ‘consciousness’ (Marx 1859: 5).

The psyche is explained by the contradictory material determination upon which it depends, and from which it emanates. However, beyond any emanation, dependence and explanation, the material determining cause reabsorbs its determined effects through a kind of Spinozist immanent causality that is characteristic of Marx’s dialectics (Montag 1989). Even the ‘spirit’ in general is assimilated into the materiality of the ‘air moving’, of the ‘sound’, of a ‘language’ described as ‘exchange between men’ and as ‘real consciousness’ (Marx & Engels 1846: 31).

Marxian materialist psychology proves ultimately to be monist by dissolving the psyche into language, social relations, productive forces and other determining aspects of material life. This ‘real life’, with all its features, is what becomes ‘conscious’ (Marx & Engels 1846: 26). Our conscious being is our material being, our economic-historical being, which unfolds the psychological. The still young Marx (1844: 151) finds ‘human psychology’ in ‘ordinary material industry’.

Marx’s psychology is so materialistic that it refers to the industrial-material exterior instead of the better-known mental-spiritual interior composed of attention, memory, intelligence, representations, etc. This intelligible interior simply disappears from the sensible scene. Yet, without such an interior, can we still speak of psychology?

Marx (1844: 151) criticizes the ‘psychology’ that we all know: that which ‘proudly disregards’ the industrial-material physical exterior, and thus maintains ‘closed’ the ‘book’ of ‘human psychology open to the senses’. By circumventing this materialistic psychology, we fall into an idealism like that of Hegel, in which material determination is replaced by ideal abstraction, the ‘determining’ is confused with the ‘determined’, ideas are taken for ‘real things’ (Marx 1843b: 322–323).

Philosophical-psychological idealism, according to Marx and Engels (1845: 203), proceeds like psychosis: as a ‘madness’ in which ‘ideas become sensible things’. Like madmen who see hallucinatory embodiments of their delusions, psychologists hallucinate when they perceive sensible cases of their intelligible concepts. Their idealism is madness that makes seeing and hearing hallucinatory manifestations of cognitions, attitudes, disorders and everything else they learn in their theoretical work.

The psychology of dominant material determination

Marx’s critique of idealism is not only theoretical, but also political. Effective social domination is ideologically expressed in the illusory ideal determination which, though illusory, constitutes a necessary moment of domination. Classes also dominate through their ideas. In addition to being abstract knowledge, idealism is also concrete power (Badiou 1976). This power, denounced by the Marxian materialist critique, appears as the material truth of idealist psychological knowledge.

If psychology is idealist because it abstracts the psyche from the concrete material totality of the world and the body, this dualistic abstraction is conceived by Marx as a class manifestation (Yamamoto 1987). The material contradictions – oppressor/oppressed and exploiter/exploited – precede and determine the ideal divisions – mind/body and heaven/earth. In the words of Marx, ‘the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis’ (Marx 1845: 8). The earthly split between classes explains the separation between heaven and earth.

Classism has traditionally been justified by reference to a terrestrial/celestial or corporeal/intellectual dualism. A few individuals favoured by divine grace, genius, intellect or IQ would be the fittest to rule over predominantly earthly-bodily masses made to perform manual labour. In Marxian psychology, however, the already powerful are the ones who possess the material-terrestrial power to gain divine or intellectual favours that are nothing more than ideological – theological or psychological – justifications that facilitate and legitimize their domination.

Dominant/dominated class antagonism favours a mind/body division of labour that traces the mind/body dualistic distinction which, in turn, requires a science of the mind. For this reason, the object of psychology is not just any mind, but the one that comes from the division of labour and class domination. Thus we come to understand that practice and power are inseparable from the mind as conceptualized by Marx (Teo 2005).

It is, therefore, the mind of those who dominate, those who enjoy the privilege of a mind for dominating, that psychologists study. The object of psychology emerges among those rulers who abstract their mental-intellectual activity from the physical-manual work done by those who are ruled and obey them. The slaves end up being reduced to a body that performs the desires, ideas and other mental contents of their masters’ psyche. This is how the empowered psyche comes to differ from the enslaved body and obtains a consistency that justifies the existence of psychology.

Marx would agree that psychology can be considered the science of the psyche of the ruling class. If this science makes sense for everyone, perhaps it is only because ‘the ideas of the ruling class’ become ‘the ruling ideas’ (Marx & Engels 1848: 127–128). But these ideas are merely an ‘ideal expression of the dominant material relationships’ that ‘make one class the ruling class, that is, the ideas of its domination’ (Marx & Engels 1846: 50–51). Psychology could thus become a science of domination and not only a science of the dominant psyche of the ruling class. After all, if this psyche dominates, it will be because it achieves class domination which, being mainly material, will be circumvented by conventional idealistic psychology and emphasized by Marxian materialist psychology.

The psychology of historical material determination

Marxian materialist psychology recognizes classist-dominant weight, but also the historical aspect of the psyche’s material determination. This determination operates through history. The historical background is the horizon of psychological explanation.

Marx sees what is experienced, felt or thought in the present as fundamentally formed by what has happened in the past. For him (1844: 150) even ‘the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world’. The factory of history produces the objects of psychology. These objects arise from a historical plot that intertwines everything that determines them, including economy and society, and productive forces and relations.

In Marxian psychology, the psyche is not only constituted by our links among living contemporaries, but also by how we relate historically to deceased predecessors who are, in a sense, still alive among us and through us. There is a ‘connection’ between ‘different generations of individuals’ (Marx & Engels 1846: 525). Our society is also that of those who died. They are from the past, but remain present. The same principle applies to other aspects of our world. Our circumstances have been ‘inherited from the past’ (Marx 1852: 408). The past is present. It is inhabited and obeyed by us.

When Marx speaks of the determinant material base of the psyche, he is not thinking of a timeless natural soil, but of a historical sedimentation of vestiges of earlier periods. There is here a ‘sum of productive forces’ and ‘social forms of intercourse’ which every individual ‘finds as something given’, and which are ‘the real source of what philosophers have represented as the substance and essence of man’ (Marx & Engels 1846: 41). Similarly, if the objects of psychology give us the impression that they are constitutive of the human being, it is because they are based on a stabilized legacy that has solidified over time, governs us with all the weight of the past, and seems to have been here forever.

Our so-called human nature, as seen by Marx, is somewhat historical, circumstantial (Coe 1978). Yet, if ‘circumstances make men’, it is only ‘just as much as men make circumstances’ (Marx and Engels 1846: 41). Human will is reintroduced into the determining circumstances as they are denatured and conceived as historical circumstances. Not only the present allows us to proactively change what we have inherited from the past, but the past is retroactively transformed when reinterpreted in the present. Thus we may revolutionize history according to our desires and aspirations.

The psyche determines its own historical determination. In the words of Marx (1844: 196), ‘man has his act of origin – history – which, however, is for him a known history’, and hence ‘a conscious self-transcending act of origin’. It is also in this sense that we are those who make our history. But the fact remains that although ‘men make their own history, they do not make it as they please’ (Marx 1852: 408). Our psyche cannot break free from the history that constitutes it. Though we may transform history, we only do so under its determination. It is impossible not to interiorly obey this determination. As Marx (1852: 408) explains, ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. Oppression comes from within ourselves, and we can only liberate ourselves from it by mutilating ourselves, losing ourselves, freeing ourselves from ourselves.

The psychology of economic instincts

Historical determination operates in the psychic interior, but is nonetheless material, and always originates in the exterior. It is outside, in the world, where objects of Marxian psychology arise. Such is the case of an economic instinct in which we discover the trace of the exteriority that causes and forms it.

In Marx’s psychology the objective characteristics of money explain the subjective structure of the prototypical economic instinct, that of hoarding. The insatiable thirst for wealth stems from ‘the contradiction between the quantitative limitation of money and its qualitatively unlimited nature’ (Marx 1867: 91). Money is qualitatively unlimited because it can buy everything, but quantitatively limited because it is never enough to buy everything. This exterior objective contradiction, inherent in money, internally encourages the individual to desire more and more money so as to overcome its quantitative scarcity and realize its qualitative boundlessness.

Marx explains the internal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsment
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: In or against psychology?
• 1 Marxian psychologies
• 2 Marx and Freud
• 3 From psychoanalysis to psychologization
• 4 Psychology and its critique in Marxism
• 5 Marxist psychologies
• 6 Marxism, psychoanalysis and critique of psychology
• 7 Towards a critical metapsychology
• 8 Critique as praxis
• References
• Index