this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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What's up with Freud? (hexbear.net)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Looking for a general Marxist view on Freud.

At first glance, to me everything relating to Freud sounds like pseudoscientific, idealist garbage ... everything that Marx's scientific socialism should be opposed to in principle. Nevertheless there was a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School, who thought the ideas of Freud and Marx could be married to some extent.

So,

  1. What was Freud about?
  2. Was Freud full of shit?
  3. Is Marxism compatible with psychoanalysis?
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My take is that some of the big ideas are interesting when applied at a societal level. Can you diagnose a person with a mental illness based on their id? No. Can you use the concept of one's perception of external social drivers as a means to describe why we haven't overthrown capitalism? Possibly. The idea that societal evolution comes about from how subjective individuals (ego) understand the society around them (id) and then materially act to mediate that (superego) is nonsense clinical practice, but an interesting dialectal approach to how people interact with society.

This is essentially how Zizek and Fisher did political philosophy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

dialectical approach

Again I haven’t read Freud so I’m really just talking.

If Freud’s psychoanalysis is dialectical it seems more in an idealist or Hegelian sense, the chief defect of that kind of dialectics being that it actually reaffirms the ideas/categories it poses. The Hegelian approach therefore proves its own categories while pretending to critique them.

It seems that Freud starts out with these concepts of ego/id, and many others beside, without motivating them from a genuine material basis. It would be like if Marx started in Capital with the value category, instead of discovering it through the analysis of the commodity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

essentially, yeah. it's much more in that camp. i think it's metaphorically a useful dialectic but little more. i want to be very clear that i don't think i would say that freud's psychoanalysis is dialectical. just this particular way that he tried to reason about the human psyche. i haven't read much freud himself, but it seems to me that he was totally unable to apply these ideas to anything materially going on with society or an individual without introducing his insane personal cultural baggage from being a european male. i moreso wanted to answer your question about why marxists talk about freud.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Appreciate ya, thanks for the response