Freudo-Marxism

Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marx with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.

While the movement to integrate socialist and psychoanalytic theory has taken several forms, each arose during the middle of the twentieth century in the hope of answering this question: why did Fascism have mass appeal? The fact of that appeal confounded much of orthodox Marxist thought. The gist of the answer Freudo-Marxists gave to that question is that the masses have internalized their oppression as suppression. The internalization of the upper class in the minds of the lower class is the super-ego, in the same way that crowd psychology, in particular Freud, considered the leader to work as the masses' super-ego.

Freud and Marx in Frankfurt

The Frankfurt School took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1955 work Eros and Civilization).

Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955)

Eros and Civilization is one of the Marcuse's best known early works. Written in 1955, it is an attempted dialectical synthesis of Marx and Freud whose title alludes to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society (which runs rather counter to Freud's conception of society as naturally and necessarily repressive), based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960s countercultural social movements.

In the book, Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology – history seen not as a class struggle, but fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that capitalism (if never named as such) is preventing us from reaching the non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations".

Freud, Marx and humanism

Another member of the Frankfurt School was Erich Fromm.

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanist, democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation.

Althusser's ideology

Louis Althusser is widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once for all by the epistemological break: this "break" is not a chronologically-determined event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no history".

His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept of hegemony).

Commodity and sexual fetishism

Marx's theory of commodity fetishism has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or, as Marxist orthodoxy might see it, 'vulgarized' the original concept. Sigmund Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of sexual fetishism led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually-charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.

Deleuze and Guattari, The Anti-Œdipus (1972)

In The Anti-Œdipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari followed up Reich's problem: "why did the masses desire fascism?", which led them to a critique of Freudo-Marxism. In particular, they criticized the dualism between the social and the psychic (desire) reality, declaring that desire is immediately — without any sublimation needed — social. This, they claimed, was the condition of a micropolitics, a term close to Foucault's "microphysic of power". Deleuze and Guattari also criticized the core-Marxist notion of lack and the Freudian understanding of the desire as simple lack. According to them, the psychic reality (desire) is not an imaginary one. Art, or even use of psychoactive drugs, is not an "escape from reality", as it is often described, because desire and imagination are productive forces, instead of simple representation. They thus spoke of desiring-production.