The Drive of Capital
Freudo-Marxism’s Dialectical Materialism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.44.1.06Keywords:
Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, Marxism, psychoanalysis, driveAbstract
Especially during the brief post-revolutionary period before the rise of Stalinism, certain thinkers in the Soviet milieu offered some attention-worthy reflections regarding Freud’s body of work. In particular, Luria and Vygotsky put forward thoughtful Marxism-informed assessments of the metapsychology and methodology of psychoanalysis. And strong cross-resonances are audible between these Soviet thinkers’ reflections and the early stages of Western Marxism’s rapprochement with Freud, starting in texts by Reich and Fenichel and continuing with the Frankfurt School, of whose members Marcuse arguably furnishes the most sophisticated and sustained engagement with analysis. In this essay, I argue that Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse share in common a fundamentally correct insight according to which the theory of drive (Trieb) is a load-bearing pillar for any psychoanalytic Marxism. Moreover, not only is the Freudian metapsychological concept of drive applicable to and productive of Marxism and its form(s) of materialism—echoing Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom, I contend, here and elsewhere, that Marx’s mature critique of political economy already anticipates the later analytic idea of Trieb. In fact, I would go so far as to credit Marx with (also) being the inventor of the analytic drive (albeit avant la lettre).
Downloads
References
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Continuum, 1973.
Althusser, Louis. “Freud and Lacan.” In Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, 7–32. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Althusser, Louis. “The Discovery of Dr. Freud.” In Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, 85–105. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Althusser, Louis. “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” In The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, edited by François Matheron, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, 33–84. London: Verso, 2003.
Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt, 2003.
Deborin, A. M. “Spinoza’s World-View.” In Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, edited and translated by George L. Kline, 90–119. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
Engels, Friedrich. “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” In Dialectics of Nature, translated and edited by Clemens Dutt, 279–96. New York: International, 1940.
Fenichel, Otto. “Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialist Psychology.” Edited by Suzette H. Annin and Hanna Fenichel. Translated by Olga Barsis. American Imago 24, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 290–311.
Freud, Sigmund. “An Autobiographical Study (1925 [1924]).” In An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis, and Other Works, 1925–1926, edited by James Strachey, 3–74. Vol. 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, 1920–1922, edited by James Strachey, 3–64. Vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]).” In The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, 1927–1931, edited by James Strachey, 57–145. Vol. 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1974.
Freud, Sigmund. “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939 [1934–38]).” In Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, and Other Works, 1937–1939, edited by James Strachey, 3–137. Vol. 23 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Freud, Sigmund. “Papers on Metapsychology [1915].” In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, 1914–1916, edited by James Strachey, 105–215. Vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.” In Werke aus den Jahren 1925–1931, edited by Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, Wilhelm Hoffer, Ernst Kris, and Otto Isakower, 419–506. Vol. 14 of Gesammelte Werke. London: Imago, 1948.
Freud, Sigmund. “A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis (1924 [1923]).” In The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 1923–1925, edited by James Strachey, 190–209. Vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alana Tyson. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74.
Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).” In A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works, 1901–1905, edited by James Strachey, 125–245. Vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
Jacoby, Russell. Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.
Jacoby, Russell. The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Johnston, Adrian. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Johnston, Adrian. “A Blast from the Future: Freud, Lacan, Marcuse, and Snapping the Threads of the Past.” In Umbr(a): Utopia, edited by Ryan Anthony Hatch, 65–82. Buffalo: Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008.
Johnston, Adrian. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
Johnston, Adrian. Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
Kaplan-Solms, Karen, and Mark Solms. Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology. London: Karnac, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. “Radiophonie.” In Autres écrits, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, 403–47. Paris: Seuil, 2001.
Lacan, Jacques. “Science and Truth.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, 726–45. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge; Encore, 1972–1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 20. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Lacan, Jacques. “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964–1965.” Unpublished typescript, session of December 9, 1964. PDF document.
Lacan, Jacques. “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, 1965–1966.” Unpublished typescript, session of April 20, 1966. PDF document.
Lacan, Jacques. D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 18. Paris: Seuil, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques. “Television.” In Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, edited by Joan Copjec, 1–46. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Lukács, Georg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 83–222. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Luppol, I. K. “The Historical Significance of Spinoza’s Philosophy.” In Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, edited and translated by George L. Kline, 162–76. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
Luria, Alexander. “The Problem of the Cultural Behaviour of the Child.” In The Vygotsky Reader, edited by René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, translated by René van de Veer and Theresa Prout, 46–56. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Luria, Alexander. “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology.” Soviet Psychology 16, no. 2 (1977): 7–45. http://doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-040516027.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.
Marcuse, Herbert. “New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism.” In Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, 86–121. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Marcuse, Herbert. “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics.” In Heideggerian Marxism, edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit, 122–50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three. Translated by David Fernbach. New York: Penguin, 1981.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1973.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).” In Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 279–400. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Miller, Martin A. Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Ollman, Bertell. “The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich: The Social Function of Sexual Repression.” In The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin, edited by Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, 197–224. New York: Basic Books, 1972.
Reich, Wilhelm. “Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union.” In Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934, edited by Lee Baxandall, translated by Anna Bostock, Tom DuBose, and Lee Baxandall, 75–88. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Reich, Wilhelm. Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis. London: Socialist Reproduction, 1972.
Robinson, Paul A. The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Solms, Mark, and Oliver Turnbull. The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. New York: Other Press, 2002.
Therborn, Göran. “The Frankfurt School.” In Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, edited by New Left Review, 83–139. London: Verso, 1977.
Vigotsky, Lev. “Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions.” In Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman, 52–57. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Vigotsky, Lev. “The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child.” In The Vigotsky Reader, edited by René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, translated by René van de Veer and Theresa Prout, 57–72. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Vigotsky, Lev. “Problems of Method.” In Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman, 58–75. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Vigotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Edited and translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962.
Vigotsky, Lev, and Alexander Luria. “Introduction to the Russian Translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Vygotsky Reader, edited by René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, translated by René van de Veer and Theresa Prout, 10–18. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 ZRC-SAZU
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
