The Social Implications of Freudian “Revisionism”

The following article forms an epilogue to a book that is to appear this fall under the imprint of Beacon Press. Tentatively entitled EROS AND CIVILIZATION. Mr. Marcuse’s book deals with some of the social, political and cultural implications of Freudian theory. It should be stressed that, in the context of Mr. ‘Marcuse’s book, the article printed below follows upon a full development of his own views. Erich Fromm will reply to Mr. Marcuse’s controversial article in our next issue.

—The Editors

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 earlier writings. In his Einbruch der Sexualnioral (1931) , Wilhelm Reich emphasized the extent to which sexual repression was enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation, and the extent to which these interests were in turn re-enforced by sexual repression. However, Reich’s notion of sexual repression remains undifferentiated, the historical dynamic of the sex instincts and of their fusion with the destructive impulses is neglected (Reich rejects Freud’s hypothesis of the Death Instinct and the whole depth dimension revealed in Freud’s late metapsychology) . Consequently, sexual liberation per se becomes for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills. The problem of sublimation is minimized; no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of ...