The Social Implications of Freudian “Revisionism”

Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the intellectual culture of our time, in accordance with the fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. The collapse of the liberalistic era, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to break this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the first World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modern era: the individual. Freud demonstrated constraint, repression,* and renunciation as the stuff from which the “free personality” was made; he recognized the “general unhappiness” of society as the unsurpassable limits of cure and normality. Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory. Later on, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed: the psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as “reactionary”: Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable.

Then, the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum. It might be tempting to speak of a split into a left and right wing. The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich’s e...