Marxism and Psychology

[Vargha Poralli]

Is there any research done relating Marxism and Psychology ? I find that field really fascinating especially Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Considering that fact Freud lived in the turbulent period in history I wonder how his theories like Odepian complex,Sexualism and sexual drive,Unconscious mind which which had dropped and shaken the conservative society of that time were taken by Marxists at that time ? I wonder is there any Marxist analysis or research by a Marxist in this subject on this field ? ANY information on this subject will be greatly appericiated.

IMO this field is more or less important for Marxism as equal as economics since it focuses solely on the general behaviour of the Individual who is the Basic building block of the society(Communist,Capitalist etc).

[More Fire for the People]

I suggest you check out the Frankfurt school, especially Herbert_Marcuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse) [the father of Freudo-Marxism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism)].

The Frankfurt School at marxists.org (http://marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/index.htm).

[chimx]

yes, read the book Eros and Civilzation

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Of course, anything based on Freud is idealist speculation with little other than a fertile imagination to back it up.

I'd steer clear of such fables if I were you.

[bezdomni]

Freud was mostly full of shit, as Rosa correctly asserts.

Evolutionary psychology is pretty hot. [and consistent with Marxism].

[More Fire for the People]

Evolutionary psychology is the cornerstone of pop-racism.

[bezdomni]

Originally posted by Hopscotch [email protected] 01, 2007 09:59 pm
Evolutionary psychology is the cornerstone of pop-racism.
Only because they don't understand it.

Evolution in general is the cornerstone of pop-racism, but because they (being racists) completely bastardize it.

[Janus]

Is there any research done relating Marxism and Psychology?
Marxism and Psychology archive (http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/index.htm)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

CPA as was, I am glad we agree on Freud, but I have to say that evolutionary psychology is not much better, and if anything, worse.

It is of course based on fanciful 'thought experiments' and a dubious set of extrapolations from some rather dodgy ideas culled from game theory -- and thus thoroughly bourgeois and individualistic for all that.

[Vargha Poralli]

Freud full of shit ??? :unsure: . But as far as i have read his theories are completely revolutionary(in that field anyway). How his views are shit ? Could you provide any sources about about freud debunked ?

And what is Pop-Racism ?

Thankyou for the resources i ll look in to them.

[Janus]

How his views are shit ? Could you provide any sources about about freud debunked ?
His theories can't be truly debunked because there was never any empiricism behind them. However, there are few psychologists these days (except for the neo-Freudians) who still accept them. The current psychological society has pretty much moved beyond it and towards empirical studies in order to become part of the scientific community.

However, after Anna Freud's death when Sigmund's diary was released, it was revealed that he actually slept through a lot of his patient's therapy sessions. :o

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by [email protected] 02, 2007 10:16 am

How his views are shit ? Could you provide any sources about about freud debunked ?
His theories can't be truly debunked because there was never any empiricism behind them. However, there are few psychologists these days (except for the neo-Freudians) who still accept them. The current psychological society has pretty much moved beyond it and towards empirical studies in order to become part of the scientific community.

However, after Anna Freud's death when Sigmund's diary was released, it was revealed that he actually slept through a lot of his patient's therapy sessions. :o
OMG sleeping with patients :o :wacko: .With or without their consent ?
Any way how his theories were intially took by the ultra conservative society of those day ? I have read that Nazis burnt almost hell a number of works by him,his followers and various others in that field ?how about conservative puritanism societies like Britain,France and Stalin's USSR ?

[Brownfist]

I think that people need to differentiate between psychoanalysis and pscychology. However, both systems of thought definitely radical when they were developed, but also extreemly conservative. There has been a great deal of work done on "madness" by academics engaged in disability studies that demonstrates that both psychoanalysis and psychology was particularly exploitative of the people that marxists would support and defend, like the working class, racial groups and women. There definitely has been an influence of psychoanalysis on marxism, like Marcuse and Althusser, however, there has been an equally important anti-psychaitry movement that has been supported and fueled by the Marxist movement as well. I think that the same way we support prison abolition movements, we need to also support the anti-psychaitry movement. I would recommend that people look at the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

GRaM:


But as far as i have read his theories are completely revolutionary(in that field anyway). How his views are shit ? Could you provide any sources about about freud debunked ?

He copied his theory of the unconsious off earlier theorists (such as Leibniz, and later Pierre Janet), but invented the evidence; made up his theory of infant sexuality, and cajoled his 'clients' into believing all sorts of twisted things about themselves.

And that is just for starters.

Check this out:

http://www.richardwebster.net/freudwrong.html

And this:


Psychoanalytic Mythology

By Allen Esterson

During the last decades of the twentieth century researchers showed that much of the received history of psychoanalysis consisted of stories that were largely mythological. Perhaps the most enduring of all these myths is that Freud postulated his seduction theory as a result of hearing frequent reports from his female patients that they had been sexually abused in childhood. In this article I want to focus on this story, one that for most of the twentieth century was taken as historical fact, and is still widely believed to be so.

According to the traditional account, in the 1890s most of Freud’s female patients told him that they had been sexually abused in early childhood, usually by their father. How the story continues depends on whether it is based on received history or on the revised version embraced by many feminists and popularised by Jeffrey Masson. In the orthodox version we are told that within a short time Freud came to realise that many of the reports he was hearing were not authentic, that the women were fantasizing, and that this led to his epoch-making discovery of infantile incestuous fantasies. But according to the feminist account, it was the staunch opposition of colleagues outraged by his claims of widespread childhood sexual abuse that led Freud to abandon the theory. Previously a sympathetic listener, Freud now betrayed the women who had had the courage to reveal their terrible experiences of abuse.

Whichever version you choose to believe, both make dramatic stories, and each has its strong adherents. The basic elements are the same, but the interpretation of them is very different. I suspect that most people rely on their gut feeling and opt for Masson and the suppression of the truth about the widespread sexual abuse of girls at that time. But it’s time for a reality check.

The articles that Freud published in the 1890s, and his correspondence with his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, tell a very different story. Putting it briefly, Freud’s patients in the mid-1890s did not tell him that they had been sexually abused in early childhood. In contrast to what he was to assert in his later accounts, at the time he wrote that they assured him "emphatically of their unbelief" in the preconceived infantile sexual traumas that he insisted they had experienced.


The essential features of the episode can be outlined as follows. During the early 1890s Freud had become convinced that repressed memories of sexual ideas or experiences, not necessarily from childhood, lay at the root of the symptoms of patients he had diagnosed as hysterics. Then in October 1895, on the basis of a speculative notion, he alighted on a theory that he was convinced had solved once and for all the problem of the causes of the psychoneuroses. Hysterical symptoms were invariably caused by unconscious memories of sexual molestations in infancy.

Using his newly developed analytic technique for uncovering unconscious ideas in the minds of his patients, he immediately set about showing that he was right. Although he had not previously reported any instances of his having uncovered sexual abuse in infancy, within four months of announcing the new theory to Fliess he completed two papers in which he claimed that with every one of thirteen "hysterical" patients, plus some obsessionals, he had been able "trace back" to infantile experiences of sexual abuse. A few months later he delivered a lecture, "The Aetiology of Hysteria", in which he gave a more detailed exposition of his theory, claiming confirmation for eighteen patients diagnosed as hysterics.

How did he manage to access deeply repressed experiences of this nature with all his patients in such a short time? Although he claimed that he had induced patients to "reproduce" the infantile experiences (what he meant by "reproductions" is open to a wide range of interpretations), it is evident that he typically arrived at his clinical findings by the decoding of symptoms, and the analytic interpretation of patients’ ideas produced under the influence of the "pressure" procedure he was using at that time. He explained that patients’ symptoms correspond to the "sensory content of the infantile scenes" of sexual abuse that he had inferred to lie at their root. His analytic procedure, he wrote, was analogous to that of forensic physician who can arrive at the cause of an injury "even if he has to do without any information from the injured person".

This is exemplified by the case of a patient who had a facial tic and eczema around the mouth. On the basis of these symptoms Freud analytically inferred that she had in infancy been forced to engage in fellatio. "I thrust the explanation at her", he told Fliess. And when she expressed her disbelief he "threatened to send her away" if she persisted in her scepticism. Of course for Freud a rejection of his inference was evidence of the patient’s "resistance", providing further confirmation that his analytic reconstruction was valid.

For reasons impossible to deal with in a short space, within two years of announcing publicly his solution to the aetiology of the neuroses Freud lost faith in it. But instead of this leading him to question the reliability of his newly developed technique for reconstructing unconscious memories, he sought to explain his claimed findings as patients’ unconscious fantasies. This necessitated some retrospective emendation of the original claims to make the new theory minimally plausible. In fact the story went through a number of stages before finally arriving at the familiar version in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1933): "In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father." (Incidentally, no one seemed to think it odd that it was only in this short period that "almost all" his female patients should have reported early childhood sexual abuse.)

It is important to appreciate that the traditional accounts give no idea that the putative "fantasies" were unconscious ideas or memories in the patients’ minds that Freud believed he had uncovered (i.e., reconstructed) by his analytic technique of interpretation. (Freud’s use of the word Phantasie is translated as ‘phantasy’ by James Strachey in the Hogarth Standard Edition, but usually as ‘fantasy’ elsewhere in the literature, giving readers the misleading impression that Freud was generally referring to conscious ideas that patients reported to him.)

There are a considerable number of anomalies in Freud’s retrospective accounts of the episode, too many to be dealt with here. One of these is that originally he had claimed that the "infantile traumas" he had uncovered could be described "without exception" as "grave sexual injuries". How putative ‘memories’ of experiences that he had described as "brutal" and "absolutely appalling" could plausibly turn out to be unconscious fantasies of "seduction" that had the purpose (according to his first explanation) of "fending off" patients’ disturbing memories of infantile masturbation, Freud made no attempt to explain. The same objection applies to his later story that the putative "seduction fantasies" were projections of patients’ Oedipal desires. In any case, he was in no position to know whether his analytic reconstructions represented repressed memories of actual events, or patients’ unconscious fantasies -- or indeed, as was actually the case, imaginative scenarios originating in his own mind.

A little known fact is that, in accord with his theoretical requirements, Freud claimed in 1896 that for each of his six obsessional patients he had uncovered repressed memories not only of passive infantile sexual abuse scenes, but also of active sexual experiences at a slightly older age. Nothing was heard again of these remarkable clinical ‘findings’, and Freud made no attempt to explain how his later unconscious fantasy theory could possibly account for them.

The above arguments, of course, refute Jeffrey Masson’s version of events as well as the received psychoanalytic story, though his case lacks cogency for other reasons. He suggested in The Assault on Truth that Freud’s motive for abandoning the seduction theory was in part an attempt to ingratiate himself with his colleagues, who supposedly were outraged by his clinical claims. This thesis is undermined by the fact that Masson’s account of the ostracizing of Freud by his colleagues is entirely erroneous. But it is also invalidated by the fact that Freud did not reveal his abandonment of the seduction theory to his colleagues for some seven years after he had privately renounced it. (Masson erroneously stated that "the critical period for Freud’s change of heart about the seduction hypothesis" was "during the years 1900-1903". This vague dating effectively closes most of the gap between the abandonment of the theory and Freud’s public announcement of his change of view, and tallies with Masson’s thesis, but Freud’s letters to Fliess show clearly that he had completely given up the theory by the end of 1898.)

That the traditional story of the seduction theory episode is false in all its essentials is especially important in recent times, when it has been drawn into the debate about the repression of memories of childhood abuse that are supposedly ‘recovered’ some decades later. People need to get the historical facts straight before Freud’s supposed early clinical experiences are erroneously cited to support the arguments of one side or the other. More generally, as Cioffi has emphasized, an accurate account of the transition from the seduction theory to its successor fantasy theory calls into question the reasoning which Freud was to employ for the rest of his career to reconstruct infantile fantasy life and the contents of the unconscious.

References

Cioffi, F. (1998 [1974]). "Was Freud a liar?" In Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, pp. 199-204.
Esterson, A. (1993). Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud, Chicago: Open Court.
Esterson, A. (1998). "Jeffrey Masson and Freud’s Seduction Theory: a New Fable Based on Old Myths." History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1), pp. 1-21.
Esterson, A. (2001). "The Mythologizing of Psychoanalytic History: Deception and Self-deception in Freud’s Accounts of the Seduction Theory Episode." History of Psychiatry, xii, pp. 329-352.
Esterson, A. (2002). "The Myth of Freud’s Ostracism by the Medical Community in 1896-1905." History of Psychology, 5 (2), pp. 115-134.
Freud, S. (1953-1974). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by J. Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press.
Israëls, H. and Schatzman, M. (1993). "The Seduction Theory." History of Psychiatry, iv, pp. 23-59.
Masson, J. M. (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Masson, J. M. (ed. and trans.) (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scharnberg, M. (1993). The Non-Authentic Nature of Freud’s Observations: Vol. 1. The Seduction Theory. Uppsala Studies in Education, No 47 and 48. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Schimek, J.G. (1987). "Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical review." Journal of the American Pyschoanalytic Association, 35, pp. 937-965.

From here:

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10

This site contains several more essays debunking Freud.

[Vargha Poralli]

Thanks for the links Rosa. I will look in to them.

[bezdomni]

CPA as was, I am glad we agree on Freud, but I have to say that evolutionary psychology is not much better, and if anything, worse.

It is of course based on fanciful 'thought experiments' and a dubious set of extrapolations from some rather dodgy ideas culled from game theory -- and thus thoroughly bourgeois and individualistic for all that.

For some reason I had biological explanations for psychology confused with evolutionary explanations.

I am of the persuasion that psychological "phenomena" occur for biological reasons (which are, to some extent, evolutionary), and not purely evolutionary ones.

[Dimentio]

Lysenko would disagree ^^

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

CPA as was:


I am of the persuasion that psychological "phenomena" occur for biological reasons (which are, to some extent, evolutionary), and not purely evolutionary ones.

Well, this is far too vague to do anything with.

I sugget you quit while you are behind.

[Janus]

OMG sleeping with patients.With or without their consent ?
He slept through his patient's therapy sessions as in he didn't listen to the patient while s/he was talking.


Any way how his theories were intially took by the ultra conservative society of those day ?
They were certainly very controversial in their day but it was mainly only because of the time that they came out during the sexual repression of the Victorian Age that they gained any type of acceptance.

I have read that Nazis burnt almost hell a number of works by him,his followers and various others in that field?
Well, that may have also been done cause Freud was a Jew (he had to flee when the Nazis came to power)

how about conservative puritanism societies like Britain,France and Stalin's USSR ?
Well, the important thing is that Freud's studies spawned a lot of further studies into psychology and really got the field going.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Janus:


Well, the important thing is that Freud's studies spawned a lot of further studies into psychology and really got the field going.

Correct, but in completely the wrong direction...

[Janus]

Correct, but in completely the wrong direction...
Yes, originally, but look at how far psychology has come since Freud's time. Even modern science started off on some pseudoscientific settings with alchemy.

[Brownfist]

I think the problem with this discussion is that it still presupposes a psychic ordering which I think is completely fallacious. Thus, arguing the scientific/anti-scientific nature of psychology and psychoanalysis still articulates the authenticity of the psyche- science claim to truth. I think that there has been numerous works done which demonstrate the oppressive nature and history of any kind of psyche-science, which for me means that the role of Marxists or Anarchists should be the opposition of the psyche-system at large.

[Janus]

Thus, arguing the scientific/anti-scientific nature of psychology and psychoanalysis still articulates the authenticity of the psyche- science claim to truth
I don't think anyone here is trying to refute psychology based on the mostly refuted psychoanalytical point of view. That would simply be illogical as you said rather I think much of the controversy stems from the fact that we still have yet to understand/ fully study the brain and certain aspects of human behavior due to the lack of advanced technology,etc.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Janus:


Yes, originally, but look at how far psychology has come since Freud's time. Even modern science started off on some pseudoscientific settings with alchemy.

And look how much further it would have gone had Freud topped himself in 1890.

Alchemy was at least empirically-based; Fraud, er, sorry, Freud just made stuff up.

[Brownfist]

Actually Janus, I am actually saying that I as a marxist am anti-psychiatry. This is not due to some criticism of psychiatry/psychology predicated on psychoanalysis, rather, that psychiatry and psychology as a field are faux sciences. I think we need to recognize that psychiatry/psychology till the 1960's/70's identified homosexuality as a psychological disorder, till today transsexuality is still considered a psychological disorder.

I am actually arguing that Marxists today should be against psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the same way we are against prisons and capitalism. Furthermore, we should realize the linkages between the psyche- sciences, capitalism and the resulting alienation.

[Vargha Poralli]

Brownfist

Can you provide any research works(Marxist) about pschyriatry and psychology ?

Can you substantiate the difference between them and Psychoanalysis ?

[Brownfist]

Hello Com. G. Ram,
I will have to look for the materials on marxism and psychology, especially from an anti-psychiatry perspective because much of the theory that has been written on it has been written from a "post-structuralist" marxist theoretical perspective. I mean the main theorist that I appreciate is Felix Guattari. His work is very difficult to understand but is available in India. In particular I would suggest that you read the two volumes that he wrote with Gilles Deleuze entitled, "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

The difference between psychoanalysis and psychology has to do with scientific questions of presuppositions, examination and methodology. The psychoanalytic approach is largely predicated on a constructivist arguement that situated neurosis and psychosis are caused due to conflicts within the psyche at different stages of mental and physical development. Thus, through a series of different methodologies the psychoanalyst attempts to help the analysand reconcile these mental conflicts. Psychology however, argues that the disorder is caused due to chemical and synaptic imbalances in the brain, thus requiring medication.

It has been argued by many that although the methodologies and conclusions that are drawn from these fields is different, that the pathological model employed by both school is deeply flawed due to epistemological mis-assumptions and are both oppressive systems. In recent years there has been a plethora of historical information and gathered that actually demonstrates the means by which psycho- sciences have been used to oppress and suppress largely the working class, the dispossessed, peoples with different sexualities, racialized and gendered people, and often people on the left like communists.