marxist psychologists

[A.R.Amistad]

Anyone know of some good Marxist Psychologists whose writings they could recommend? I've read some Erich Fromm, but are there others, possibly better ones that I should read. Any help would be appreciated.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

There's Wilhelm Reich. He was a Marxist for a time when he did his best work. "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" is interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

Géza Róheim was a Hungarian Freudian Marxist.He had a critique of Carl Jung.

"Live Against Death" by Norman Brown, is fascinating. Brown was a Marxist but not a professional psychologist. He has a mixture of Freud and Marx and attempts a "psychoanalytic interpretation of history". A must read, IMHO.

RD Laing was on the left, I think more of an anarchist. His famous book is "The Politics of Experience".

The French psychologist Lacan was a Maoist of some sort. He's been influential but his writing is supposed to be pretty much impenetrable. I tried to read him once, didn't get to far.

I believe Slavoj Zizek started out as a psychotherapist and trained under Lacan.

The Soviets may have developed a form of neo-Pavlovianism. Don't know much about this though.

[Dean]

Anyone know of some good Marxist Psychologists whose writings they could recommend? I've read some Erich Fromm, but are there others, possibly better ones that I should read. Any help would be appreciated.

What have you read by Fromm? If you haven't read Escape From Freedom or The Sane Society I recommend those.

[A.R.Amistad]

What have you read by Fromm? If you haven't read Escape From Freedom or The Sane Society I recommend those.

I've read "escape from freedom" and I liked it a lot. I know what Rosa is going to say, but what is the Marxist view on Freud. It seems like a lot of Marxist Psychologists drew from Freud as well.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

As far as I know, there isn't a single Marxist view of Freud. Marx and Freud looked at different aspects of humanity. Marx analyzed history as class struggle and the dynamics and contradiction inherent within capitalism. His early work does have psychological implications. Freud analyzed the individual human psyche.The two levels are different but are obviously linked.

Freud was frowned upon under Stalinism. Trotsky liked Freud. The Frankfurt School thinkers combined elements of Freud and Marx.Class oppression has psychological and psychosexual ramifications.

Wilhelm Reich was a member of Freud's Vienna Circle for a while. He wrote about how sexual repression and the bourgoiuse patriarchal family contributed to uphold authoritarian social structures.

Marcuse's idea of "repressive desublimation" borrows from Freud I think.


BTW you may be interested in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. He's not quite a Marxist, he comes from a liberation theology background, but he is quite interesting.

The Marxist educator Peter McClaren is supposed to be interesting, although I haven't read any of his stuff.His website seems a bit self promoting. The right is trying to do a Finkelstein on him and drive him out of academia.

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/pages/mclaren/

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/pages/mclaren/body4.html

[Coggeh]

Most interesting Marxist psychologist i think would have to be Lev Vygotsky, his work on child psychology has huge influence on the teaching he mostly specialised in the cognitive and language development of children but also set about a scope of understanding the correct developmental capacity of children and how its affected by their environments(See the Zone of proximal development), taking a true marxist approach to teaching and understanding as opposed to many other theorists who suppose the nature affect on children to be stronger than the nurture one. Most education systems follow the Vygotskyian method of teaching young children rather than the Piaget method.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/index.htm

[A.R.Amistad]

Trotsky liked Freud.

I've heard this a lot. I tried to find out about it on MIA but couldn't find any of Trotsky's works talking about him. Could someone link me to where Trotsky discussed Freud?

[Blackscare]

Frantz Fanon comes to mind, check out "The Wretched of the Earth".

It examines the psychology of colonialism.

He was from Martinique, and he wound up playing a role in the Algerian war for independence.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/WretchedOfTheEarth.JPG