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MARX & FREUD ON SOCIETY & INDIVIDUAL.
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Describes & compares socialist's & psychoanalyst's views on human nature, history, individual & social reality & transformation, alienation & anxiety, consciousness.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Describes & compares socialist's & psychoanalyst's views on human nature, history, individual & social reality & transformation, alienation & anxiety, consciousness.
Paper Introduction:
The purpose of this research is to examine selected works of Marx and Freud on various issues relating to their assessment of the human condition in the modern period, i.e., the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the implications flowing therefrom for the postmodern and current period. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the context in which the thought of Marx and Freud achieved preeminence in western culture, and then to discuss the views of each with reference to certain fundamental questions that their analyses of culture raise.
The history of western culture in the twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the work of Marx and Freud. It is perhaps not too much to say that, taken together, Marx's analysis of culture and society as fundamentally social processes that imply
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Any objection to his view is answered with the assertion thatthe source of the objection is bourgeois, or more exactly, "bourgeois clap-trap."[ii] He develops the ideas that lead to such a characterization ofthe reality of the world in detail in the Manifesto: "You are horrified atour intending to do away with private property. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. I can at least listen without indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural endeavor and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate.[xxi] It seems problematic how the tensions between death and Eros can bereconciled in Freud's thought, if both tendencies are running parallel inhuman and social experience, and if, as Freud argues, they seem always onthe verge of turning back on each other and on themselves. The difficulty is that the inward and outward components of thatpursuit are both connected and at odds with each other, even if they arenot really polar opposites. But in the case of both Freud and Marx, thesocial organization and the experience of the individual within thatorganization are held to be the consequence of human enterprise, humanconsciousness, hence perforce human creativity. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible, In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. Freud asserts that the artist, which is to say theindividual with a gift for abstracting from the neurosis of reality to findsatisfactory means of coping with it, who can give expression to theintensity of instinct can escape the component or experience of neurosis.But there is no guarantee: "If there is persistent rebellion against thereal world and if this precious gift [artistic insight] is absent orinsufficient, it is almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to thesources of the phantasies, will follow the path of regression, and willrevive infantile wishes and end in neurosis."[xviii] This can be read as Freud's way of urging the individual as a memberof society to find a way to adjust to whatever social structure is inplace. [iii]Ibid., 486. For Freud, the death instinct (of both individualsand society) manifests in conditions where the stakes of neurosis have beendramatically raised to the level of institutional reality. 2nd ed. Nor should we forget that the satisfactionof the individual's happiness cannot be erased from among the aims of ourcivilization."[xiii] Freud seems very much aware of historical processes that are soimportant to Marx. Butanalyzed in terms of social structure, the real dynamic that is beingdiscussed by Freud with reference to sexuality as all-encompassing is apersistent dialectical tension between one thing and its antithesis, theconfrontation between the two resulting in the world (i.e., socialstructure) as we find it, and the world as we find or experience it issuffused with neurosis, dislocation, morbidity, which manifest asinstinctual processes that are visited on personal structure. Norton & Company,1978) 487. [vii]Ibid., 76. In this, Marx agrees, to the degree he deplores the bourgeoisie as theinstrument of religion and religion as the instrument of the bourgeoisie,all to the preservation of capital and property and the oppression of theproletariat, which he says must end. It could also be said that Marx adoptsthe attitude of a man of faith, though his faith is in his view of theinevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat and not in anotherworldly Christian God. 149-2 .__________."Manifesto of the Communist Party." The Marx-Engels Reader. The Marxistand Freudian views of human creativity find resonance in the modern period.First, they are both secular, and they appear to have anticipated thesecular nature of the modern social organization. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethicswill, I fancy, preach in vain."[viii] In other words, the attractions ofimmortality are outweighed by the safety of self-interested aggression thatcan be realized and satisfied in everyday experience. Freud goes so far as to connect what could be called the life's bloodof civilized social structure to a death instinct that is very much afunction of personal, and specifically psychosexual structure. Itmay be more accurate to say that it provides a variant perspective. [xi]Ibid., 6 . Secondly there is his belief in aggressive energy, directedoutward, that may not seem specifically erotic in form but reallyconstitutes what could be called a "perversion" of Eros. It is the division that is to beabolished, hence the class that is to be abolished; and when such divisionsand classes disappear, integration of all individuals without distinctionwith the community of the whole, plus transformation of the structuralreality of that community, is inevitable: The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. The history of western culture in the twentieth century cannot beunderstood apart from the work of Marx and Freud. [v]Ibid., 479. It is only the manifestation insocial terms of something altogether personal to the individuals comprisingthe social structure. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.[xvi] Freud sees the tendency toward destruction not as a fundamental but asubsidiary concept, specifically subsidiary to sexuality, which is forFreud the fundamental mechanism of analysis of the human condition. To the contrary, Marx insists that (industrial) machines haveaggravated the class struggle, claiming that they contribute to the loss of"charm" a worker's craft might hold for him.[v] This assertion of intrinsiccharm for craft and labor (but not for, say, a fancy car) and an insistencethat the whole of society must be transformed to preserve that charm, aremade with the confident assurance only a nineteenth-century bourgeois(!)intellectual and acquainted with the working class as only a factor ofanalysis could possess. Such a defense would be, for Marx, intolerable. Freud elaborates a social hypothesis in terms of individual humanpsychology, principally individual human sexual psychology, that surfacesrepeatedly in his work. But of course as a matter offact, the prevailing social structure may be every bit as neurotic orpoised for destruction, as Freud very well knows and indeed argues. It is perhaps not toomuch to say that, taken together, Marx's analysis of culture and society asfundamentally social processes that imply certain social necessities andimperatives, and Freud's analysis of personality and culture as mutuallyinterpenetrating and mutually determining processes, constitute an accountof the whole of human experience. At thispoint the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a betterafter-life. [xiv]Freud, Civilization, 77-8. In that sense, the personality that the modernworld has created from Marx's perspective is a highly structured one, whichrelies on and perpetuates social control. Thisleads to the well-known premise that sexuality, and specifically sexualitythat inhabits human nature from infancy onward, is the decisive component,whether as mediator or agitator, of the human psychology. Thatis, the death instinct surrounds, protects, and also torments theindividual, while the erotic instinct (Eros), which becomes the vehicle ofindividual extension into and connection with the world. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. What is importantabout the second idea is that it can be projected onto the world at large(i.e., onto the social environment), as the "narcissistic enjoyment" thatsatisfactory outcomes to the projection of aggression onto the world mayexcite. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. In Freud's work, any moral claims thatbecome manifest have to be set beside the close description of the actualconditions of human experience and an assumption that the description soaccurately conveys the problems associated with human psychology thatanalysis of the description implies the character that solutions to theproblems might assume. Tucker. Norton & Company, 1978. Freud acknowledges thetension, noting that "civilized standards make life too difficulty for themajority of human organizations,"[xii] on one hand, and that on the other,"We ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect what wasoriginally animal in our nature. [ix]Marx, "Ideology," 173-4. [xx]Ibid., 197. JamesStrachey (New York: W.W. Tucker. But really thisis the difference between the ideological argument of Marx, which isfundamentally social in temperament, and the psychoanalytical argument ofFreud, which is intensely and profoundly personal. [xii]Ibid., 6 . This is not possible without the community. [xiii]Ibid., 61. New York: W.W. Robert C. Leave aside the social anarchy implicit in a dictatorship ofthe proletariat, the emergence of an elite (acquisitive) rulingrevolutionary cadre where Marxist revolution appeared on the ground inhistory, or the discrediting the Marxist thought in postrevolutionaryEurope. Tucker (New York: W.W. [x]Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. It can be compared toMarx's view of alienation as the primary feature of human experience in thedominant capitalist social structure. But in your existingsociety, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of thepopulation; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence inthe hands of those nine-tenths."[iii] To the assertion that abolition ofprivate property would carry with it the abolition of individuality, heanswers that the individuality in question refers to "the bourgeois, themiddle-class owner of property." Now this analysis can be said to discounttotally the emotional appeal that property might have for a proletariatwhose economic fortunes might improve (say) from generation to generation.To that extent, Marx's description of the world and of the content ofindividual human experience in that world can be said to be eitherincomplete or partial However, it can be accounted for not as complete tothe extent, as appears to have been the case, it constituted a response tothe observed reality of conditions for the proletariat in the bourgeoiscountries of European culture. The extension ofaggressiveness outward, and "strongly alloyed with erotism,"[xv] ispalpable. But it is difficult to see howsuch an enterprise can be pursued if it cannot also be shown thatacquisitive tendencies are not fundamental features of individual humanconsciousness, which surely precedes the social structure that Marx makesso much of. When the enterprise is civilizationand culture building, individual sexual energies are sublimated, such that"the energy of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remainsready for use--the unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replacedby one that is higher, and perhaps no longer sexual."[xi] When theenterprise of culture building fails or is perverted, that represents afailure of psychological sublimation. Ironically, this manifestation of successful projection ofindividual preference onto the social environment implies a danger for thatenvironment. Rather, the projection of aggression, which isitself an aspect of an instinct for self-preservation, is in part theresult of the feeling that is produced because of the anxiety connectedwith the impulse toward self-destruction. As he comments: I have endeavoured to guard myself against the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection. Translated by James Strachey. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. The purpose of this research is to examine selected works of Marx andFreud on various issues relating to their assessment of the human conditionin the modern period, i.e., the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, and the implications flowing therefrom for the postmodern andcurrent period. [xvii]Freud, Five Lectures, 49. . Implicit in this description are individual and societal economic andsocial problems--poverty, urban malaise, the specter of mass unemploymenton one hand and intolerable conditions of employment on the other--thatMarx traces to capitalism. Norton & Company, 1978) 16 . JamesStrachey (New York: W.W. Usually, this cleavage "automatically comes to nothing"[ix]owing to the very existence of distinct ruling and ruled classes; thisleads to the imperative of abolition of class system as fundamental to thetransformation of individual human experience. Only radical transformation, which is very muchto say the outright destruction of the society as it is known, can addressits errors. BibliographyFreud, Sigmund. New York: W.W. But whereas Marx urges an economicand historical interpretation of what is primary about human experience,Freud urges a psychological and psychosexual interpretation, so embeddedinto human consciousness that it both eludes and overtakes historical time.To develop his view, Freud deals with a range of concerns of everyday humansocial action in terms of intensely, increasingly personal consciousness.Thus for example he says that neurosis can also be produced if the societyor culture in which man operates obliges him to forgo self-preservation andembrace ethics, which militate against self-preservation, in the service ofthe culture. [iv]Ibid., 488. . The views of Marx and Freud intersect incertain ways, although the emphasis of argument in each case is different.Marx's emphasis is on culture, or more exactly society, while Freud'sultimate emphasis is on human psychology and the social and culturalrealities that derive from its reality; however, they each makephilosophical claims for their treatments of the vicissitudes of humanexperience. It is thetension, or in fact the contradiction, between the impulse for stableexperience and the impulse to escape the trap of such experience that isFreud's emphasis. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. However, as Freud describes it, the experience ofalienation is not merely a social problem. That structured personality iscaused by the very existence of private property, and it is also the chiefantagonist of the prevailing social system (capitalism) in his view. In the case of Marx, there is also a moral claim at work, forthe cumulative effect of his writing is a call for transformation of therealities of human experience. But Freud sees the inherent contradiction in rejecting thepsychology of aggressive self-preservation: "'Natural ethics,' as it iscalled," says Freud, "has nothing to offer here except the narcissisticsatisfaction of being able to think oneself better than other. This helps lay the foundation for theargument for or advocacy of the coming "supremacy of the proletariat."[iv] Is the argument valid? For Marx, the experience is more psychologicallyfundamental precisely because it is social and not personal: alienation ofthe individual from both self and society. Robert C. . New York: W.W. constitutes thegreatest impediment to civilization . [vi]Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. The confrontation of an unbearable fact of basic humanexperience, one's own interest in fundamental competition with theinterests of all others, leads to the experience of alienation, in the verycenter of the social environment, and in the very center of individuallife. Meanwhile, there is also a humanimpulse for life--extension and self-preservation that is enacted by meansof love, sexuality, reproduction, or in Freudian terms, by means of thelibido (and the self-interested ego) projected both into the world ingeneral and onto the love/sex/erotic object in particular. [viii]Ibid., 1 9. As he says, "the inclination to aggression is an original,self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and . [xxii]Ibid., 36. Marx is the acknowledged watershed theorist of modernsociety, and he locates its personality very much in economic terms.Although the implications of Marxism were great for political and economic(i.e., elite) history, the importance to Marx to social and cultural (notto say popular) history seems almost more relevant for the current period.For it was to the masses of society as well as to the bosses that are oftenthe subject matter of history that Marx principally (and passionately)addressed his commentary. It almost seemslike a built-in contradiction to Freud's discussion of social structure orculture as such that he positions the death instinct against the lifeinstinct and the tendency to organize social experience coherently. "The German Ideology." The Marx-Engels Reader. In thisregard, Freud uses the term "pathology of cultural communities," as ifanticipating such death-obsessed societies as Nazi Germany. Edited by Robert C. . Norton & Company, 1961) 25. . Marx declaresbourgeois and ruling-class culpability in the consequences to theproletariat of the stratification of society according to the division oflabor, owing to the self-possessed strength of the higher classes asagainst the difficulty that the proletariat has of even thinking of itselfas a class or as a body of humanity that could experience itself associally oppressed. His wholepoint is that the dominant structure of civilization, which is defined bycapitalism, at one point called "taking,"[xix] is itself perverted, andfurther, that the very determining power of capitalism fosters a specifickind of individual and social experience that, because of classdistinctions and division of labor, is on an antagonistic collision coursethat can never be resolved. First there is hisinsistence that the aggressive desire for destruction can be directedinward. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding.[xiv] So much for the manner in which the personal connects with the social.Freud now proceeds to focus on the content of personal psychology. A similarpoint is made elsewhere by Freud when he cites a "dictum in generalpathology . Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work ofEros is precisely this." But trouble arises for the combination or unity ofindividuals in an organized society when Eros, which is the positive aspectof sexuality, is put in the service of an individual agenda, which isconnected with aggression, which in turn is a destructive aspect ofsexuality. Both Freud and Marx urge away of thinking and creating that point in the direction of both societyand experience transformed. Whereas Marx focuses on the alienation of theindividual from his social being, owing to the fact of private property asthe principal organizational factor of society, Freud suggests thatindividual anxiety, and by implication social reality, has a component ofself-destruction or inward preoccupation on one hand, and an aggressivecomponent or outward projection on the other. Norton & Company, 1978. Norton & Company, 1961.__________. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. To thisextent, whereas Marx is dealing with historical processes that visitintense, real-world consequences upon the great mass of humanity, Freud isdealing with primordial processes that do not so much visit themselves onhumanity as form the very boundaries of human consciousness. In other words, it can be read as a defense of whatever prevailingsocial structure happens to be in place and bearing the name ofcivilization. Freuddemonstrates processes of human consciousness that overtake institutionalauthority of this kind, essentially declaring that it is humanconsciousness and creativity that determine institutions, not the other wayaround. New York: W.W. . The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. [xvi]Ibid., 82. Marxist ideology holds thatthere is a constant struggle, particularly manifested in the interclassstruggle, between the individual and the society in which he findshimself. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. Norton & Company, 1961.Marx, Karl. Meanwhile, the story of theindividual's life is told and experienced according to what Freud calls thepleasure principle[vi] and what could be also called the pursuit ofhappiness. Freud's insight in this connection is twofold. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. 469-5 .----------------------- Notes [i]Karl Marx, "The German Ideology," The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed.,ed. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. Meanwhile, when the tendencies ofcivilization are too hard to take, the retreat from what has been beyondsexuality tends to take place in sexual terms, enacted as an impulse towardself-preservation even as the implications for the destruction of bothmental health and civilized organization emerge. Civilization and Its Discontents. Norton, 1961) 5 . The overriding point, however, is thatsocial conflicts or alienation that are created when labor serves theinterest of private property are the core of all social problemsexperienced by the individual human organism, or by the collectivecomprising individuals who are essentially without power in society."Division of labour," he writes, "implies the contradiction between theinterest of the separate individual family and the communal interest of allindividuals who have intercourse with one another."[i] The contradiction isin the form of a dialectical confrontation of one feature of experiencewith its antithesis. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.[xx] Against this analysis of fundamental experience as primarily socialand not personal, Freud's apparent view that the individual ought rather tomake the best of things seems simplistic. Theanalysis is in highly charged terms of economic theory: labor, capital,alienation, worker, bourgeois. Edited by Robert C. To be sure, theaggression itself may be neurotic, but that is a matter apart. [xxi]Freud, Civilization, 11 -11. Translated by James Strachey. In particular, they donot rely on what Freud refers to as God's "inscrutable decrees,"[xxii]which are really an encoded insistence on the authority of religiousinstitutions in determining how human beings ought to experience thedifficulties associated with the reality of human experience. . . But in both Freud andMarx, there is evidence of an argument for human creativity that is meantto overcome (in Marx's view) the oppression of history by means of privateproperty as the organizing social principle and (in Freud's view) thepositive and negative sexual energies of human consciousness. that every developmental process carries with it the seedof a pathological disposition, in so far as that process may be inhibited,delayed, or may run its course incompletely."[xvii] He makes a connectionbetween the manifestation of social structure as the outcome of instinctualprocesses of personal structure, while also making the point that thesocial structure as manifest, however neurotic its underpinnings, can alsorepresent a point of departure such that the individual's retreat from real-world social experience into instinctual, personal experience, which isitself neurotic. [ii]Karl Marx, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" The Marx-EngelsReader, 2nd ed., ed. In this view, the fundamental fact of modern society (hence ofhuman experience, occurring as it does in modern society) is the positionof the laboring class in relationship to other classes. Freud concludes that besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. [xix]Marx, "German," 196. This does not argue against the validity of theanalysis of the gross inequalities and injustice of society organizedaround the division of labor; it does question the inevitability of theconclusions about revolutionary social structure drawn from that analysis. The personality that the modern world has created is of interest toboth Marx and Freud. Further, heasserts that Eros, to the degree it functions because of a wish forphysical self-gratification, is in part an extension of the aggressivecomponent of the preoccupation with death. Reference has been made to Marx's discountingof the emotional appeal of private property to the proletariat. Tucker (New York: W.W. In thisregard, Freud acknowledges that there is controversy over whether hisinsisting on the sexual provenance of social and processes is valid.[x]However, he does insist that the impulses toward both the building anddestruction of civilization are sexual. Well, ofcourse Marx seems to be arguing precisely that the proletariat and everyoneelse should entirely rethink and reject the concept of private property;his whole philosophy turns on this advocacy. This general assessment of the work of Marx andFreud in respect of the human condition in the modern period can besubstantiated with reference to key writings of theirs. Marx cites the"cleavage" in the working class that can be manifest as hostility at somestage in history in which that class recognizes the reality of socialdivisions. "Neurosis," saysFreud, "was regarded as the outcome of a struggle between the interest ofself-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which theego had been victorious but at the price of severe sufferings andrenunciations."[vii] This argues that neurosis and not pleasure is the story of humanexperience, as well as the story of social structure. It is legitimate to say that Marx nevertheless fails to answerconvincingly the working-class tendency to seek identity, not with itselfas the foundation of a new community but rather with the property andvalues of the middle class rather than to protest against their economiclot. Does Marx's social analysis invalidate Freud's psychosexual one? [xv]Ibid., 79. Marx's solution to antagonism, collision, andalienation is complete integration and identification with the socialcommunity, but not in the traditional way, wherein the individual isdistinguished and set apart from the community of the whole, to the degreehe finds (and knows) where (i.e., in what class) he is to be placed in thatcommunity (via the division of labor). The plan of the research will be to set forth in generalterms the context in which the thought of Marx and Freud achievedpreeminence in western culture, and then to discuss the views of each withreference to certain fundamental questions that their analyses of cultureraise. [xviii]Ibid., 56. . [which] is a process in theservice of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, andafter that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity,the unity of mankind.
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