Psychoanalysis and Marxist psychology

PSYCHOANALYSIS Review

of‘ The Production

AND MARXIST of Desire by Richard Free Press, 1982.

DAVID Department

INGLEBY

of’ Development and Socialisation, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht,

PSYCHOLOGY Lichtman.

IKeIT York:

State Vniversity of Ltrecht, The Netherlands

The deceptively trendy title of this book conceals a thoroughly unfashionable topic, the relation between the theories of Freud and Marx. Just mentioning this topic in “progressive” circles today is enough to raise cries of disbelief and groans of boredom. Everyone seems to be satisfied that it is either exhausted, or not worth raising. Those who think the former usually do so because they are content with Frankfurt-style syntheses, or with a Lacanian “reading” of Freud. Those who think the topic not worth raising tend to dismiss Freud -especially if they have been reading Foucault, Donzelot or Caste1 as merely a social technician. Lichtman returns to this well-worn topic because he is convinced that these are both superficial answers. In doing so, he has proved that it is possible to write an original book on an unoriginal subject. His work is scholarly, inventive and inspiring. It returns us to central themes about human subjectivity and the social order, themes whose suppression accounts for much of the sterility of contemporary psychology and social theory. If the book is also at times incomplete, uncertain and confusing, this also has to do with the fact of this suppression. One can’t have good arguments with oneself. Lichtman is clear that we must take both Freud and Marx seriously. We should not, however, t’y, to “reconcile” them in yet another synthesis. Rather, we should use Marx to crltlcise Freud, and to recast the latter’s theory in a form which could successfully replace the mechanistic psychology with which Marxistn seems to have shackled itself. Unlike Russell Jacoby, he sees “revisionism” as not just acceptable, but unavoidable. Marx may be filled out, but Freud can only be radically revised. What we need is not “Freud0-Marxism”, but a Mnrxist psychology. This book can only be considered the prolegomena to such an enterprise, but it lays a foundation more rigorous and substantial than that on which most earlier efforts were built. In what follows, I’ will attempt to trace the outline of it, though this rapid p&is belies both the eloquence and the detail of Lichtman’s argument. The first chapter treads a familiar path. Why return to Freud and Marx? Because the burning question - not just in Marxist theory, but in the world we inhabit - is M.hy an oppressive and exploitative social order, instead of leading to its own overthro\v, should have come to enjoy the acquiescence of its victims. (Although Lichtman only talks about capitalism, this question can and must be extended to include also those rPgimes which, despite systematically betraying

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their own revolutionary ideals, have come to be identified today tvith Communism.) Marx and Engels, as Baran has put it, “serioush. underestimated the extent to which man’s wants can be influenced and shaped bv the social order within which he is enclosed”. They cannot account for “the tragic division between want and need” in the acquiescent individual. Not only do people fail to want what they need, but they come to want what is dcstmctizv~ of’ their need. Marx vieweh social transformation as “,d process of social historI,“. a11 d considered alienation to be self-negating. But the forces that are to achie\.e this negation remain outside man himself: “The labvs of necessitv have been used to account for the realisation of freedom” (p. 8). Marx does not show how the motive to destroy alienation arises - still less, the moti\.e to embrace it. Reich and the Frankfurt School accepted Freud’s answer to the second question. In doing so, however, they accepted a theory which made alienation the essence of the human condition, and thus they could never predict its negation. The Reich believed, could explain how the nuclear family Oedipus complex, functioned as “a factory for authoritarian ideologies”, and according to Fromm, Freudian principles could explain the drive to “escape from freedom”. Yet Freudian principles also presupposed a human nature which was not only fixed, but fixed in such a form that “freedom” could onl!, be a seductive delusion. Systematic repression was the necessary condition for any human civilisation. Lichtman next discusses the areas of agreement and disagreement between Freud and Marx, identifying their common ground as “the shared comprehension of the illusion of rational thought” (p. 20). Both agree that “appearance is not only different from reality: it is most often the vppositc of reality” (p. 22). More deeply, “The core of both positions is that our own life becomes separated from our control, and in its independent existence, passes through stages that are foreign to our intentions, beyond our understanding, and harmful to OUI interests” (p. 26). Moreover, “For both Freud mlrt hlarx, an inability to comprehend the past condemns one to repeat it. And most significantly, to repeat it from the position of powerlessness through Lvhich it was originally constituted” (p. 29). The alienated and repressed “do not understand their history and so it continues to overwhelm them” (p. 31). When it comes to the negation of alienation. Marx and Freud are also at one in stating that it must be conquered by taking responsibility for it. *Just as the itself in the alienated objectification of its own working class must “recognize labour”, so in psychoanalysis (as Habermas puts it) “the ego of the patient [must] recognize itself in its other, represented by its illness. as in its own alienated self and identify with it” (p. 36). But the paradox in both systems, as they are conventionally interpreted, is that the forces producing alienation are ?lot seen as the product of human agency. In Marxism. they (and their negation) are ascribed to the transcendental subject “History”, and in psychoanalysis to “Nature”. Lichtman now turns to the central disagreements between Freud and Marx, starting with the one which Freud himself was most conscious of: the possibility of a society free from conflict and repression. The idea that “the free development of each” could be the condition for “the free development of all”

and Marxist psychotog\

Psychoanalysis was a11 absurdity part of it equipped

to Freud.

For him, the sacrifice

of freedom

is the price we must pay for belonging the individual

!?Ci:l -

or at least a large

to civilisation

at all. For Freud

with a biologically

determined nature so maladaptivel> lvould be nothing short of development”

anti-social that to permit its “free disastrous. By ignoring this fundamental enabled themselves to claim that Freud

Freudian tenet, hlarcuse and Jacob! did not need revising. In so doing.

him more drastically than anvbod!.. in theory between Freud and Alars are theil

however, they were in fact revising Inseparable from the differences

differences in method. “The Helmholtzian system bvhich so influenced Freud teas a forlri of h’ewtonian physics applied to human beings. It would be absurd to say that this is the only perspective absurd

that

Freud

ever

operating

in Freud’s

system:

it \\ould also be

himself of its influence” (p. 47). This to reify the human mechanistic position leads inevitably to “Freud’s tendency condition, that is, to consider the characteristics of present men and uw1ms1 as the

to insist

freed

immutable

characteristics of all human beings” (p. 48). In contrast, the “the uniqueness of historical periods and the method stresses of historical laws” (p. 31); it allows for emergent properties. It is true that Freud speaks of “transformations of instinct”, but if we follow closely \vhat he meant, these transformations only apply to the aim or object of an instinct,

dialectical specificity

never its source. He refused transformed, that one could ence, when it comes placed an impossible tion”.)

Yet

to accept genuinely

that the very nature of instinct could be learlz to desire something. (In consequ-

to the more obviously “civilised” forms of motivation, he burden on the concepts of “displacement” and “sublima-

as R/Iarx has it, “the

hunger

that

is gratified

different in kind from the hunger that ‘bolts down hungel-, with different objects; it Zs ‘a different hunger’”

with cooked

meat

is

raw meat’. It is mt th SNIP (p. 87). Just as strongly as

Freud rejected the possibility that desire can be socially produced, a blarxist psychology must insist on it: “Human needs are shaped through the process in which The

they are simultaneously task for Marxist

generated

psychology

und released”

is to analyse

(p. 88).

this process

and show how it can

be humanly mastered, and it is this which is to become the central theme of the book - hence its title. In his account of normal development within the nuclear family,

Freud

revealed

the process

of “ simultaneous

generation

and

release”.

But at the same time he obscured it, by ascribing everything to the innate dispositions of the developing subject. Somehow, the revealing aspects of psychoanalysis must be detached from the obscuring ones. This involves reconstructing the “metapsychological” principles on which it is to be based. Later, Lichtman attempts to do this using as a general key the idea that the basic features which Freud ascribes to man’s biological nature are, in fact, the reified products of social processes. This reconstruction, however, must affect the whole of psychoanalysis: “Freud cannot be preser\,ed by dichotomising his system” (p. 103). Before offering his own solution, Lichtman considers two other attempts that have been made to detach the vices from the virtues of psychoanalysis. The first of these we have already mentioned in connection with the Frankfurt School. According to Jacob):, “Psvchoanal~sis as individual therapy necessarily participates wit/h the

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D. Ingleby

realm of social unfreedom, while psychoanalysis as theory is free to transcend and criticize this realm” (p. 103). So, the therapy can be junked, and the theor) preserved. Lichtman’s argument against this “immaculate dissection” of theor! from therapy is, quite simply, that the theory i?l itself is laden with mistaken assertions. In Jacoby, “rhetoric overwhelms logic” in the effort to conjure up from Freud’s writings a figure sympathetic to revolutionary views. Such an effort is doomed to failure, however, by Freud’s belief in the inevitability of conflict between individual and society, and b? his undialectical notion of desire. s Although it is clear from the rest of the book that Lichtman sees theor!, and practice in psychoanalysis as intimately bound up \.vith each other, it is not on these grounds that he attacks the critical theorists’ attempt to prise them apart. Hence he does not dwell on psychoanalysis’ “participation within the realm of unfreedom” as documented for example by Foucault, Donzelot and Castel, and never confronts those referred to in the opening paragraph, who see Freud as merely a social technician. Yet if Foucault, Donzelot and Caste1 have demonstrated anything at all, it is that psychoanalytic theory cannot be made sense of without looking at the history and politics of the social practices which it informs. In this light, its reactionary assumptions do not appear simply as “mistaken”, but as necessary concomitants of the social task it performs. Next, Lichtman considers a different form of dissection: the attempt by certain contemporary analysts to preserve the practice of psychoanalysis while discounting its metapsychology. These advocates of “pure clinical theory” Holt, Rapaport) treat the interpretative insights of (Shafer, George Klein, psychoanalysis as experientially given notions which can be taken over while the metapsychology of Ego, Id and Superego. or “System Cs” and “System UCs”, is left behind as an historical relic. The argument seems to be that psychoanalysis is a response to people in difficulty which can be made part of one’s way of seeing things without requiring any commitment to the basic theoretical model over which Freud spent so many wasted nights. What is taken over is the hermeneutic element of psychoanalysis, without its associated causal postulates; it becomes entirely a system of meanings, rather than causes. Such a view is an attractive antidote to the readings found in most psychology text-books, which locate psychoanalysis as simply one positivistic theory among others. But as Lichtman shows, it is mistaken in three basic ways. First, it is mistaken because there is no such thing as theory-free observation. Anyone who claims to “see” projection or unconscious guilt directly is deceiving themselves as well as us, because nil experience rests on a theoretical framework. Second, the logic of interpretation and of causal explanation cannot be so neatly distinguished as this approach implies. “Reasons” and “meanings” can figure in a causal account, and must if psychoanalysis is to have any predictive value. Third, psychoanalytic interpretations are dependent on (causal) presuppositions in a very particular way, because the interpretations cannot be validated by the experience of the patient - typically. indeed, they are in direct opposition to it. Psychoanalysis can never be purely phenomenological; the “mixed discourse of meanings and forces”, as Ricoeur pointed out at length, is its very essence. (Strangely, Lichtman does not actually refer to Ricoeur’s argument, although he

Psychoanalysis and Marxist psycholog) is mentioned

26.?

in passing elsewhere.)

Lichtman thus concludes that the clinical approach of psychoanalysis must be grounded on a metapsychology. The mistake (made by Freud as well as the “pure clinicians”) is to suppose that it has to be a mechanik one. The theory has to be rewritten within a different paradigm, which is the awesome task Lichtman has set himself. that Lichtman does not review other . It is disappointing, at this juncture, attempts to do just this - notably those of Lacan, Habermas and Lorenzer. Lacan is alluded to briefly later (p. 184), in a remark to the effect that the notion of the unconscious as “structured like a language” is an apt one, but the language in question ought to be seen as a social product rather than as a timeless structure. From this we can perhaps infer Lichtman’s other reactions to Lacan. But, given the extent of the latter’s following on the left and among feminists, a more extensive treatment might have been useful. Again, Habermas (in The Self-Misunderstanding of Psychoanalysis) also attempts to relocate psychoanalysis within a different paradigm (that of “depth hermeneutics”), but this attempt too receives only oblique reference. Lorenzer’s work, which underlies that of Habermas, is virtually unknown outside Germany and Scandinavia, but it surely deserves investigating here. The reason why a discussion of these authors would have been worthwhile is not simply a matter of scholarly completeness, but because it might have helped Lichtman to strengthen his own re-working of’ Freud, a project which it would be foolhardy to undertake on one’s own. By now, of course, the reader is dying to know how Lichtman is going to go about this project, but he postpones it yet again in order to demonstrate how Freud’s suppression of the social dimension in what he observed can be seen at work. For this purpose he singles out the case of Dora. In this case, Freud stressed that he was “obliged to pay as much attention . . . to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients as to the somatic data and the symptoms of the disorder” (p. 136). However, his eye noted these aspects only superficially and in passing. Freud, says Lichtman, “undoubtedly discovered important aspects of the structure of contemporary bourgeois life. Unfortunately, as we shall see, he was unable to comprehend the fundamental meaning of his own insight”. He “could not grasp the significance of his own discovery because his basic social assumptions led him to reify his own insights and to attribute either to biology, physics or universal anthropology what was, in fact, the precipitate of bourgeois social relations” (p. 131). Lichtman re-examines the Dora case in order to show where and how this reductionism comes into play. Three major blind spots are discussed. First, regarding “the social function of self-deception”, Lichtman’s concern is to show that repression can be demonstrated in the Dora case on the social level, and it is this repression, rather than a purely internal defence mechanism, which prevents Dora from grasping the meaning of the experiences she has. “A society permeated by objective f-alse consciousness forces the disturbance of understanding within the individual who is made incapable of grasping his or her own intention” (p. 135). This social interpretation of defence mechanisms - which owes much to the Habermas/ Lorenzer concept of “distorted communication” - is a crucial part of Lichtman’s

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D. Ingleb?

case, and whether we find his argument convincing depends verv much on how successfully we feel he has applied it to Dora. The main thing that is “defended” by these mechanisms is the system of powel relations beween men and women. Dora felt that “she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her tather and his wife”. Subsequently, Freud notes, her father “handed her over to me for and the psychoanalytic treatment’“. Dora is part of a game of pass-the-parcel, name of the game is patriarchy. Yet this game elicits no comment from Freud. Dora’s sordid little story shows that “women are measured by their ability to satisfy men” (p. 145). As competitors, the) “deny each other in time of need and do not hesitate to sacrifice each other to their interests with men” (p. 144). It is the patriarchal system which provides the key to much of Dora’s experience. Her feeling of disgust at Herr K.‘s sexual advances, for example, has to be seen in the light of the meanings these events had for Dora, not in terms of any hysterical “reversal of affect”. “Since the theory of meanings is in fact a theory of censored disguises, it is a theory of political power and ideological distortion. But it does not recognise itself as such” (p. 149). “As meaning in motive points toward society, Freud returns to psychic forces” (p. 15 1). In tracing cognitive distortions to the power relations within the family, Lichtman interprets the Dora case much The as Laing and Esterson interpreted their “families of schizophrenics”. difference is that unlike them, he traces these power relations to their roots outside the family. Second, Lichtman discusses the social meaning of illness as it is illustrated in this case. Here again the key is power: illness and feminine “fragility” generally, become intelligible in terms of the functions they serve for women in upsetting an otherwise unalterable balance of power. The medical profession itself plays an important role in these functions by defining not only the categories and criteria of illness, but the role of the sick person and their caretaker. Hardly to our surprise, we find no grasp in Freud of the ways in which illnesses are socially constituted. Despite his claim to be concerned with the “human and social circumstances” of his patients, he acts -just like any other physician in trying to account for the illness entirely in terms of processes endogenous to Dora. Third, Freud fails to grasp the meaning of the child for its parents, despite eloquently portraying the needs around which this meaning is centred. Within the nuclear family, their capacity for love crippled by the legacy of their own past, the parents quickly fail each other: “Men and women are almost perfectly constructed as unsuitable for each other as measured by the individual expectations for happiness that have originally led them to marriage” (p. 159). So they turn to the child: “The child becomes the receptacle of parental illusion, of hopes and promises that served as the ideological inducement for the marital relationship but that have long since betrayed their mockery” (p. 158). To serve this function, the child’s sexuality is awakened and moulded by the parents, and it is made (in Freud’s words) to “experience intensities of love, hate and jealousy while yet in its infancy”. In Freud’s view, it is the child who takes the parents as the object of its (pre-existing) erotic wishes. But according to Lichtman, the agency is reversed. In making themselves into objects of the child’s desire, the

Psychoanalysis

and Marxist

psyholog~

267

parents actually evoke and define this desire. They tear/l the child a certain kind of love for them (and, it may be noted, a certain kind of hate too). i%ot that there is anything sinister about that in itself; on a dialectical viebv, it is the fundamental process whereby needs are produced. No, the reason \vhy the child’s emotional life becomes stunted and deformed is that these learned desires are systematically thwarted. “The family, in short, as much incites the child to a dependent fantasy of erotic parental identification as it frustrates the satisfaction of this aim-inhibited need” (p. 160). At the same time, the responsibility for these desires is shrugged off onto the child; psychoanalysis, too, locates their origin entirely within him or her. To induce impossible desires in somebody and then frustrate them, while at the same time denying that one is doing any such thing, is the ultimate in exploitation. Casanova, supposedly the antithesis of farnil! values, turns out to be their true exemplar. Notice that - unlike most Marxist critics of Freud - Lichtman accepts virtually all of Freud’s harrowing account of the “normal” child’s emotional development, at the level of surface description. The difference lies entirely in the significance attached to these observations. For Lichtman; the significance is social, whereas, “As meaning in motive points toward society, Freud returns to psychic forces” (p. 151). In Chapter 6, we finally reach Lichtman’s attempt to “translate Freudian categories into their sociai meaning” (p. 174), to “overturn the Freudian paradigm and set it properly on its social foundation” (p. 179). In fact, the outline of his strategy has already been made clear: it is to reinterpret the elements of Freudian metapsychology as the reified products of social processes - “the precipitate of bourgeois social relations”. What has to be developed now is a more systematic statement of how this is to be done. Unfortunately, the final part of the book is by no means as clear as what has led up to it. In part, this unclarity can be traced to the fervor with which Lichtman writes: “I have not attempted to write anything like an objective or dispassionate account of these matters”, he states candidly in the Preface, and in the urgent intensity of his style, the argument sweeps headlong over obstacles like a mountain stream. In part, too, muddles remain in the ideas of this section because they appear to have been the most recently evolved, and the least considered. (Indeed, at two points in the argument Lichtman, as it were, goes off the page, and relegates the problem to “another work”.) Whatever the cause, the effect is to give the reader the feeling at times that rhetoric is overwhelming logic in Lichtman’s own account. To prepare the ground for this reconstruction, Lichtman softens up Freudian theory by pointing out some basic contradictions and conceptual muddles. The characteristics supposedly distinguishing Ego and Id are, to a large extent, properties of both: the Id invokes learned mental processes (notably language), while the Ego, in its defensive activities, comes under the rule of “primary process”. It is of course not very hard to demonstrate the anomalies of Freud’s account, but the point has to be made here as a pre-emptive strike against those who see the edifice as sacrosanct. For the remodelling of the theory indeed has to be drastic. The whole of the madness and destructiveness which Freud located in the human psyche has to be

268

D. Ingleby

relocated in society. An explanation of unconscious processes as “precipitates” of social relations has to be put forward for each and every one of the phenomena Freud documented, and it has to be powerful enough to drive out Freud’s “reified” version. In Lakatos’ term, this is the “hard core” of Lichtman’s research program, and one feels at times that its “protective girdle” is being tied a little too tight. We have already seen how Lichtman uses the Marxist notion of “production of’ needs” to supply a principle to replace that of “instinct”. Central in this argument was the idea that needs can be trunsfowned, in a much stronger sense than Freud envisaged. The argument is that by providing the object of desire and defining its meaning, society “produces the desire”. This ‘way of talking, however, can easily lead to a kind of social reductionism which is just as undialectical as Freud’s psychological variety. In his discussion of the Marxist concept of human nature, Lichtman insists that some conception of pre-existing constraints must be admitted, but in his program, these constraints seem to vanish. Yet the existence of these constraints cannot so easily be lvished away. The fact is that not aq object that society presents can become an object of desire; in other words, some objects are more desirable than others. While Marx argued that the hunger for cooked meat is not the same as the hunger for raw meat, he was not trying to deny that both remain forms of hunger. Although society can construct a hunger for cooked meat, it cannot construct a hunger for stones (though that wouldn’t stop the food industry from trying). In “social constructivist” views of mind, what is all too often juxtaposed to society is a pure tabula 1-uscz. Consider, for example, the “discourse determinism” of the structuralists, or the Meadian idea, advanced by developmentalists such as John Shotter, that in providing a “vocabulary” of intentions for the child, the parents somehow provide the intentions themselves. Such views are not just incorrect, but represent a systematic misuse of words. We need not repeat Freud’s error, in treating that which biologically constrains the social production of needs as logically the same kind of entity as the resulting needs themselves. Better to follow the example of contemporary ethologists, who recast what used to be discussed under the heading of “instinct” as “constraints on learning”. Thus, desires are socially constructed, but they are constructed out of ruw materials which constrain what can be built. The defect of Lichtman’s account is that, in seeking to ascribe the Freudian drives to social processes, he avoids altogether discussing the nature of this biological raw material. Were he to do so, he would be left, I think, with the uncomfortable conclusion that however clumsily he formulated it, Freud might just have been right in his conviction that these constraints seriously impede the construction of a “human nature” capable of ushering in and sustaining true socialism. How strong the impediments are, we will never know until we try. That is why socialism must remain a faith, rather than an empirically grounded conviction - a faith that must be sustained all the more fervently when the empirical evidence for it seems to dry up. As well as trying to give a social account of the drives Freud ascribed to the

Psychoanalysis

and Marxist

psychology

269

psyche, Lichtman attempts to show that the whole panoply of defence mechanisms, and the principle of “primary process” itself, is a social construction. How he intends to go about it is already clear from the discussion of Dora: repression in the individual is the outcome of collectiz~e denial. “Freud failed even to question the possibility that we are made irrational and ‘unconscious’” (p. 187). Thus, the apparently internal, endogenous realm of private madness we have come to call “the unconscious” is in reality the psychological product of an insane realm existing all around us. Enough madness is embodied in the present structure of our social relations to make this Laingian inversion plausible. of course the unconscious is sociall) produced, just as human needs are, and in that sense should not be talked about as though it were “inside” the individual. But is it possible to see all its properties as exclusively social products? That is a much stronger thesis and Lichtman (to me) falls far short of demonstrating it. A crucial point in question concerns the determinants of repression. It is significant that Lichtman sees society as choosing what is or is not to be censored. Repression occurs “when some aspect of ourselves is SOdefilzed that its presence in consciousness is intolerable to us” (p. 178). Again, an inclination becomes unconscious “to the extent that it is defined as ‘censorable”’ (p. 192) (emphasis added in both quotes). One would very much like to believe this, but there is an enormous chasm between this way of looking at repression and the one which Freud has taught us, according to which repression serves intra-psychit needs by keeping out of consciousness anxiety-producing conflicts. Unfortunately, Lichtman (like Habermas) provides us with a very flimsy-looking bridge to get across this chasm. In Chapter 7 (“The Marxist Unconscious”), Lichtman explores further the relation between the Freudian and Marxist views of how reality is defined. There, he correctly points out that the realms of repression and of false consciousness are by no means co-extensive, but elsewhere he seems to be striving for a complete reduction of the former to the latter. Moreover, however large a part society may play in defining what is to be repressed - and it certainly plays an all-important role in the determination of what is “anxiety-producing” - this is not to say that the basic capacity for repression is itself a social construction, i.e. that people have to be taught to deceive themselves. And if Freud is right that the capacity for hallucinatory wish-fulfllment is an innate part of our cognitive equipment, we are left once again with his nagging question: Could a creature with such a fickle grasp of reality ever manage to create a rational society, and be at home in it? To doubt this is not to deny that fantasy could have a p!ace within socialism, or to insist God forbid - that “socialist realism” is the only form of art that the new society can tolerate. But to play down the retrograde consequences of the almost infinite human capacity for self-deception is dangerously optimistic - and singularly inappropriate at a time when more and more parts of the world are coming under the sway of religious and ideological fundamentalisms whose primitive character it is hard to resist calling “psychotic”. A more viable project than this total social reductionism, surely, would be to show how defence mechanisms resulting from the immediate vicissitudes of

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D. Ingleby

socialisation collude with ideologies governing social formations at the “macro” level, without being coterminous with these ideologies. To some extent, the purposes of the psychic economy and the material economy overlap, but the!, remain nevertheless “relatively autonomous” from each other. The concept of “transference” is the key to this intersection of private and public meanings (cf. Reich’s speculations about the role of Oedipal mechanisms in authoritarianism. or ideas about oral fixation and compulsive consumerism, and so on). Lichtman himself provides a good illustration of this sort of interplay in discussing hoI\ myths about the labour market combine with neurotic self-deprecation in the worker who is made redundant, and lead to depression and despair. Hokvever, it is precisely because people experience such failure in terms of a private, familial scenario, rather than a socio-economic one, that neurosis usurps the place of political activism. We have seen how Lichtman tackles the two pillars of Freudian theory, the theory of drives and the theory of defences. Another theme now comes under scrutiny - the theory of “different logics”. Lichtman proposes that much of the “primitive” and “alien” character of the unconscious is due to the fact that the frozen experiences it comprises date mostly from a time when our cognitive structures were still relatively undeveloped. Thus, the indifference of the Id to laws of time, causality and logic is due to the fact that “the repressed self bears in its internment such a degree of temporal competence or incompetence as it had developed up to the point of its dissociation” (p. 197). This primitive mentality is not an archaic inheritance, but simply an early phase in which “on the basis of cognitive considerations alone” the adult capacity for rational thought has not yet had time to develop. But unless Lichtman can amplify this phrase about “cognitive considerations ” into a theory of infantile cognitive development which is both viable and independent of Freud’s, this move does not help him to leave the Freudian view behind. For Freud himself would have agreed completely that the unconscious contains residues of “childish” thought. This did not upset his metapsychology, because on his view of development childhood was a phase in which the Id still held sway. If Lichtman does not provide an alternative account of where this primitive logic comes from, then we are left with precisely the same model as Freud (and the early Piaget). in which cognitive development consists of the gradual imposition of a “reality principle” on an original “autistic” mentality. In short, to combine genetic epistemology with Freudian theory is not really to provide an alternative, because they both share a common root. All this is simply to say that Lichtman has not completely succeeded in his and since he tells us he is still working on it, we program of reconstruction, should hardly expect him to have done so. In Lakatos’ terms, he is entitled to cling on to the hard core of his research program as long as it appears to be progressing, whatever setbacks may be encountered along the way. More serious doubts arise, however, about whether the program by its very nature can be completed, and what the point of doing so would be. Just as the “social constructivist” program in cognitive development tends to undo itself by its own excesses, so Lichtman is in danger of providing, not a dialectical view, but a reductionist one. This is odd, because Lichtman appears to know very well that

Psychoanalysis and hlarsist psychology

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to equate Marxism with extreme environmentalism is a complete misunderstanding of what dialectics IIIPU~S.Marx had more respect for the realm of material possibility, including human biology, than many soi dismt Marxist psychologists. To treat all biological constructs as “reifications” is, in the long run, a self-defeating strategy, for those who attempt to maintain such a position have to run for cover every time a new discovery emerges from the biologists’ laboratories. A notable exception to this “bio-phobia” is the Berlin school of “Critical Psychology”, led by Holzkamp and Osterkamp. They too claim to be developing a “Marxist psychology”, and one feels that Lichtman would ha1.e much to learn from this school, and vice versa. Unfortunately, there are virtualh no links between “Critical Psvchology” and the American intellectual community. This brings us back to our opening remarks about the lack of a context within which arguments such as Lichtman’s can be developed. It is possible to criticize this book heavily on the grounds of its ungainly and repetitive structure, its excesses, and its occasional tendency to substitute heat for light. Yet to see all these as limitations of the author would be to commit precisely the kind of’ reification he is trying to combat. Following Vygotsky, we should consider instead the inadequacies of his “zone of proximal development”. For all these defects are symptoms of the fact that the debate about these questions has a hard struggle just to keep alive, hampered as it is not only by the hostility of the Right but the scorn of the fashionable Left. Lichtman is the more to be admired for having achieved, in such isolation, as much as he has. To take his ideas further, however, must be a collective enterprise. The book demonstrates that the topic of Freud and hlarx, so far from being exhausted, has never been properl! tackled. It would be an achievement in itself if, by demonstrating this, Lichtman could help to call into being an intellectual community capable of doing it justice.