This lecture, entitled Psychoanalysis and Socialism: A Tale of Two Developments,” was delivered on October 13, 2010 at University College London. It was the inaugural Freud Lecture for the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL. The event was chaired by Juliet Mitchell
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SOCIALISM
After the First World War, in the 1920s, Freudian psychoanalysis was approached by many reformers and revolutionaries in the Marxist tradition who hoped to find in its theory and practice a psychological foundation for their visions of the socialist future. A “Freud-Marx synthesis” was also an ideal for the Democratic Socialists among the younger psychoanalysts trained by Freud and his first followers. After the Second World War, a second version of that “Marx-Freud” synthetic ideal began slowly to emerge, while both psychoanalysis and socialism were under-going profound changes. Now, with those post-war developments having continued for four decades –with both psychoanalysis and socialism having developed further—a third version of the “Freud-Marx synthesis” could emerge. But it would need a fresh articulation and a major updating, as the times have changed and are a changin’ rather quickly. In this lecture, I want to contribute to that articulating and updating project, setting my remarks against the backdrop of the after-Marx and after-Freud developmental stories. My hope is to gesture toward the principles of what I call “therapeutic politics.”
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Throughout the European tradition, political thinkers who have hoped to guide their visions of ideal political arrangements with a theory of human nature have generally gone down one or the other of two broad theoretical roads. One road, well mapped by Plato and remapped in the Enlightenment by Hobbes, assumes humans are born with something disruptive inside them that is ignorant or wild or bad or rebellious or patricidal; some original bent toward violence and sinfulness. This disruptive element needs containing or controlling by those who recognize it so that humans can live together in harmony or at least stability. Humans need to be dominated, ruled–strongly. Those who have traveled the second road, as Aristotle did and as Rousseau did in the Enlightenment, believe that humans are born sociable and desirous of community; they assemble in gradually larger and larger communities, becoming more harmonious, but often relapsing, particularly when they defeat themselves with their hubris, their immoderation. They need to be helped to understand what they may be contributing when they fail to free themselves from external obstacles or to attain their desire. Let me call these two theories, for short, the control theory and the therapeutic theory.
Neither Marx nor Freud, the two most influential theorists of human nature in the 20th century, were purely of the “men are born unfit for living together and need to be ruled” or the “men are born sociable but are vulnerable to failure” type. Neither of the control type nor the therapeutic type. Or, to put the matter differently, both Marx and Freud were full of contradictions, and exerted contradictory influences, providing their followers with justifications for all kinds of splits and factions, and all kinds of control practices as well as therapeutic practices. (In no modern intellectual tradition outside of the Marxian and the Freudian traditions is there anything like the factionalism that both of these traditions are famous for.)
The problem Freud’s socialist followers had with him was that he started out Aristotlean and socially therapeutic and ended up a strong government Platonist of a very Hobbesian sort. To Wilhelm Reich, Siegfried Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel (and his so-called “Children’s Seminar” associates in Berlin), to Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School, and even to the not-very-Marxist members of the neo-Freudian group led by Karen Horney and the anthropological cultural-Freudian group at Columbia University, Freud was a theorist whose early work was perfectly suitable to the therapeutic ideal of sexual liberation. The political Freudians took sexual liberation as either the catalyst for broader social liberation or the first consequence of such a liberation. Freud once identified himself in a letter to Jung as a “liberator of youth,” and the Youth Movement and Marxist young of the 1920s —even the women among them– embraced him as such. Their therapist.
Freud, did, however, think that sexual restraint, although productive of “modern nervous illness” (as he had said in 1905) was, in some form, necessary. But in the 1920s, he had nothing published to say on this topic, and left it to those around him who were involved in child development studies, education, and child guidance. He was supportive of work done, especially, by August Aichhorn, once a school teacher, who was not only an analyst but the socialist Viennese government’s supervisor of youth guidance clinics; by Seigfried Bernfeld, a socialist Zionist who wrote on his educational work in Kinderheim Baumgarten (1921) and Sysiphos (1925); Willi Hoffer, who wrote on creative play in education; and of course by his own daughter Anna, who was trained as a schoolteacher and ran several progressive children‘s centers and schools, one with her companion Dorothy Burlingham. While others were concerned with the “Marx-Freud synthesis” in theory, these developmentalists and educationalists were synthesizers in practice –and thus harbingers of the kind of synthesis that actually came about after the Second World War
In the realm of theory, Freud battled with Wilhelm Reich, who earned Freud’s critique as he left the Democratic Socialist camp and became a Communist, and as he propounded an instinctual drive theory that was much too crudely biologistic for Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents is the book of their quarrel. In it, Freud emphasized the dangers posed to human living-together by the aggressive instinct –rooted in the death instinct—that he thought humans are born with, and that he thought Reich ignored. In a very Hobbesian passage, Freud wrote:
…men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at most defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
In Civilization and Its Disconents it is everywhere clear that aggression is the most dangerous instinct, which must be strongly contained. Meanwhile, confusingly, the sexual instinct and the ego instincts of survival, together called the life instincts or eros, have become more Aristotlean than they were in the Three Essays: they have become more given to sociability. They bind men into groups and groups into larger and larger formations –in the Aristotlean manner. Freud even wondered if eros might directly cure by love the disruptions of aggression, rooted in thanatos. But he ended his text ends on a skeptical and ambivalent note (1930, pp. 69):
…civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and all against each, opposes this programme of civilization.
Any socialist Freudian reading this passage in 1930 would have felt it as a conundrum. Although Freud had been speculating about the eros/thanatos contrast for nearly a decade, he had never said what he said in this passage: that civilization is in the service of eros, it is eros’s therapy for taming aggression. In all of Freud’s earlier socio-political works the “programme of civilization” had ruled over libido, repressing it, reigning it in, inducing neurosis with its control. Now eros and its programme of civilization must try to therapy aggression –or, perhaps it would be better to say control aggression.
Nonetheless, Freud was so convinced of the power of aggression that he found all theorists—not just Wilhelm Reich– who believed in innate sociability to be hopelessly naieve and Rousseauistically idealistic. So Freud said this about the naive followers of Marx with their “idealistic mis-conception of human nature” (90):
According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbor; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbor; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor…[A]bolishing private property [would only] deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but [it would] in no way alter the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor [would it] alter anything in its nature. Aggressiveness is not created by property…(60)
So, a social therapy that eliminated private property would do no good, Freud thought, because aggression only uses –or misuses– property, property does not create aggression. Before civilization, among “primitive” people with little property, aggression reigned, as it reigns among children in the nursery. Freud even implied that aggression is somehow more fundamental than eros or the life instincts: it “forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child).” (This last remark would, I think, be recognized by most readers then and now as an instance of wishful thinking and as clear evidence that people —even the pioneer theorist of unconscious wishes, Sigmund Freud–theorize according to their wishes.)
When Freud offered his redefinition of eros as a constructive, binding force in Civilization and Its Discontent, the sexual liberationists could claim that Freud had come back to their camp and was once again their therapist, their visionary. But, of course, to make Freud become again a therapeutic Aristotlean theorist of inborn eros-driven sociability, it was necessary to jettison Freud’s theory of the death drive, thanatos. So, just before and then again after the Second World War, Reich railed against the death drive theory while he developed his own fundamentalist sexual instinctual drive theory. Otto Fenichel wrote a sophisticated, meticulous critique of the death instinct. Erich Fromm in The Sane Society, and later Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization –each in his own way—rejected the death drive. It can even be said generally that any Freudian who wanted –or who now wants — to be a socialist must dispense with the death instinct in it Freudian formulation You cannot assume that human beings will, come liberation from repressive social arrangements, and come therapy for their self-defeating ways, be destined for a more peaceful and harmonious and just world, while you at the same time assume there must be a strong state to control the “hostility of each against all and all against each” (this was Freud’s rendering of homo homini lupus, man is to man a wolf, the aphorism dear to Hobbes). But, on the other hand, if you do not think aggression is instinctual, you do need to need to work out a different understanding of it.
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When these intra-Freudian and “Marx-Freud synthesis” debates continued after the Second World War, they took very different forms, and they also had variants in different national contexts. But it can be said generally that post-War socialism in western Europe was centrally concerned with social security –the so-called welfare state—and with the security that might come from a united Europe, Europe beyond the nation-state. The focus was on therapeutically supporting sociability and on building larger unities, making treaties to weigh against the tendency of societies to self-defeat. Socialism –especially in western Europe–became more about therapy than about control and total economic planning.
There was an especially stark contrast between this situation in western Europe and the situation in America where what little socialist theorizing there had been in pre-War period, particularly during the New Deal, disappeared as the Cold War escalated. The émigré socialist analysts from Europe had to go under-ground when they arrived in America, and the generation of their trainees became (with a few exceptions) studiously non-political and disinterested in social theory. The most important post-War developments in American psychoanalysis did originate among the European émigré analysts, but as they had no domestic political audience, they had to rely for influence on psychoanalytic colleagues who remained in Europe, many of them relocated in Great Britain, where psychoanalysts were far freer to ally with socialists. And it was in Great Britain that psychoanalysis, particularly child analysis, was most vigorous, and also most influential among socialists.
The post-War moment was, of course, ripe for this collaboration as the British Labour Party unexpectedly defeated Churchill and swept into leadership in 1945 with a program for comprehensive social security, as well as a vision of extensive nationalization of industries—a vision not shared on the continent. The result was the most planned post-War economy outside of the Soviet sphere of influence. The co-operation between psychoanalysts and the Labour Party was mostly in the domain of the National Health Service (NHS), which had been outlined to the British people over the BBC during the War in the1942 Beveridge Report and was one of the main reasons why the Labour Party fared so well with the British electorate. The NHS was also the part of the post-War socialist vision that lasted longest and was most important –far outlasting the nationalization initiative.
Not just in Great Britain, of course, but across Europe both psychoanalysis and socialism had post-War resurgences. Both developed in countries that had been –unlike America– materially devastated (none more so than Germany, none less so than the Scandinavian countries). Entire civilian populations (not just soldiers) were psychically traumatized by the War and by the Holocaust, which had claimed six million Jews but also large numbers of socialists and Communists. Both psychoanalysis and socialism had to respond to the needs of the traumatized populations; both were, so to speak, trauma-focused, trauma-driven. Most psychoanalysts shifted to emphasizing environmental influences on people –especially children–and their psyches. People and their unconscious minds came to be viewed less as influenced by instinctual drives (including aggression) and more as influenced by their environments and their object relations —particularly by their experiences of loss, separation, exile, abandonment, grief, and shame and guilt feelings about all of these experiences. Group Analysis flourished. Only Melanie Klein and her followers in the British Psychoanalytical Society retained Freud’s theory of the Death Instinct in its pre-War form, and this allegiance kept them from political influence until they modified it and became “modern Kleinians.”
Socialist theorists, activists, and elected representatives to the post-War governments that came to be known collectively as “social democratic” emphasized working through states and state programs to provide healing and healthy developmental contexts, particularly for children and their mothers (especially war widows). The so-called “welfare states” they sponsored were designed to serve development from cradle forward, providing especially services that parents could not give. This therapeutic emphasis had never been part of Marxism in its pre-War versions, from Democratic Socialism right on over to Leninism and Stalinism.
It is important to observe that for this therapeutic purpose, the socialists needed a theory of development, a theory of basic human needs, and psychoanalysis had such a theory. By the 1950s, the theory was being articulated as a theory for the human life course as works like Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society were published. (Childhood and Society (1950) was better known in Great Britain in the 1950s than it was in America, where Erikson was frequently criticized for his socialist European past and questioned by the House Un-American Activities committee.) So the “Marx-Freud synthesis” of the immediate post-War period was a practical synthesis especially focused on child development; not a matter of grand theory but of pragmatic theory. Europe’s reconstruction was deeply linked to psychoanalysis’ reconstructions of disrupted, traumatized childhoods.
I cannot tell here the complicated story of how different social democratic variations grew in the post-War world, in Europe, in Japan, but also in the states that emerged in collapsed European colonial empires, or struggled in the shadow of the Soviet Union. But I do want to emphasize that post-War social democrats neither embraced revolutionary violence nor subscribed to strong-state Hobbesian notions of normal aggression needing strong-state control. Many took their stand as pragmatists and reformers, but others were drawn to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophical commitment to non-violent action, which had been so effective in the Indian independence movement (although it was less effective there after Gandhi himself was assassinated in 1948). Gandhi’s theory of human nature involved, of course, renunciation of any concept of inborn human aggression –anything like the Freudian death instinct.
Nowhere in Europe did psychoanalysts participate in or theorize about the social democratic states in terms of their economic and political principles, but they did, as I implied before, try to meet, in their therapeutic terms, the acute need amongst the Europeans to rebuild, to restore, to find security, to deal with a massive –indeed, an unprecedented—social trauma. Insofar as the social democratic states were states supplying necessary services, psychoanalysts were their most influential health and education theorists, and they were operating out of what they had learned in the course of the war about what basic human developmental needs must be met by families and communities and states. In turn, psychoanalytic therapeutic work –and research—was subsidized and promoted by the social democracies as it never had been before the War except for brief periods in Budapest and Berlin. The Labour government in post-War Britain gave psychoanalysis perhaps its most important public moment when it sponsored through the BBC the parenting talks –published as The Child, the Family, and the Outside World– given by D. W. Winnicott, who had worked as a pediatrician for evacuation services during the War.
Eventually, the psychoanalysis-socialism synthesis was articulated in a basic
shared principle, which is, by this time, well known to people everywhere in the world, no matter what their situations and educations may be. That principle is that in the first years of a human being’s life, the childhood years, a foundation is laid for good physical and mental health or the lack thereof –and the remainder of life is either supported by a good foundation or undermined by a poor one. (Technically, this principle is known in psychoanalysis by the name Erik Erikson gave to it: the epigenetic principle.) This general principle now guides all national and international policy that is or aspires to be progressive. For just one example, in the 1990s, the World Health Organization prioritized maternal and child health on this principle.
However, the post-War social democracies were at their best and most therapeutic when their leaders thought not only in terms of what children and adults need for healthy development but, further, in terms of the root causes –not just the symptoms—for conditions that do not favor healthy development. The root causes of inequality and poverty, the root causes of violence and war. They were at their most therapeutic when they were also concerned with –to use Aristotle’s analytical term—hubris and the human proclivity toward prejudice and toward defeating the natural aspiration of people to combine into larger and large unities. For this side of their therapeutic work on misdevelopment (it might be called), psychoanalysis has supplied many ideas, but no theory. No theory has developed where the old death instinct theory died.
To this matter of misdevelopment, the post-War social democrats like Jean Monnet who were dedicated to a future united Europe addressed themselves without benefit of psychoanalytic theory. They were imagining a world beyond fascisms and nationalisms; beyond exclusionary ideologies and prejudices. They shared this vision with those who drafted the Charter of the United Nations, and, in 1948 , the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Over the post-War period, the number of federational and international organizations, governmental and NGO, that have worked in the Aristotlean mode to unify human beings into larger and larger entitities has grown exponentially. How to overcome the boundaries of developmental differences and prejudices is a constant topic. The most direct psychoanalytic contributions to this trend and this topic were made when the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child was issued in 1959 and then, between 1979 and 1989, when the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was drafted. The Convention’s international drafting group included several psychoanalytically trained developmentalists. But these contributions came from developmentalists, not, as it were misdevelopmentalists or theorists of prejudice.
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Those who worked pragmatically for a psychoanalysis-socialism synthesis after the War did not look to the pre-War Marxist Freudians or Freudian Marxists for their theoretical orientation. Indeed, quite the opposite. They looked to two elements of the Freudian tradition that the pre-War political Freudians had begun to develop but had not, ultimately, established theoretically. The post-War Freudians took these elements up practically, worked on them theoretically, but to this day have not –in my opinion– adequately theorized them.
Let me consider these two elements of Freudian theory by turning –or returning–first to Freud’s instinctual drive theory. In his later years, starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, Freud (as I noted before) subsumed the sexual instincts and the ego instincts under the combinatory term “life instincts.” But he gave no attention to developing this concept; he just behaved as though “life instincts” was another term for libido—particularly by using the term eros. What are the elided ego instincts? In his first instinct theory, before 1920, Freud viewed Hunger (first satisfied in the oral stage) as the paradigmatic ego instinct and spoke of individual and species survival, security, or life maintenance as the goals of the ego instincts. In his 1905 Three Essays, Freud had associated the ego instincts with what he called “the affectionate current” of human desire, as contrasted to “the sexual current.” This implies that affection –love, attachment–is essential to an individual’s survival, to preventing “failure to thrive.”
But Freud did not explore the affectionate current or the ego instincts generally as he became preoccupied with the Death Instinct. And neither did any other pre-War analyst, although you can find a very important thread in the Budapest School with Imre Hermann’s work on clinging and Michael Balint’s elaboration of it, and you can find a step in the same direction with Ian Suttie’s attention to a child’s need for tenderness, a direction suggested but never followed by Sandor Ferenczi. Rudolf Loewenstein wrote suggestively on the “somatic instincts,” but the editors of his collected papers did not even think his effort worth including in their volume! Psychoanalysis did not arrive at the importance of clinging or needing tenderness until John Bowlby got there under the name “attachment”–his translation of Imre Hermann’s clinging instinct. So, it took a long time for psychoanalysis to work with the idea that there is a basic human drive (also obvious among the mammals, who are by no means “wild animals”) for attachment and security, for relationship. Amazingly, this work has never been connected to work by linguists and neurolinguists and cultural theorists who understand that humans have an instinctual drive for language and symbolic communication and culture creation.
Bowlby was truly an Aristotlean, as Ferenczi, Hermann, Balint, and Suttie had been.
They were not arguing –in the way Freud thought naive—that “humans are born good and desirous of community,” which is a moral and even moralistic proposition, but “humans are born for and into relationships, without which they cannot live, they fail to thrive.” Unfortunately, this European strand of thought never connected up with the most influential psychoanalytic work in post-War social democratic Japan. There, Takeo Doi explicitly took his bearings from Freud’s (and Darwin’s) concept of the ego instincts, arguing that human beings have an innate drive for sociability –called amae in Japanese—that can, when frustrated, become perverted into aggression against others humans and on the national level perverted into militarism. Doi felt that most Freudians –he excepted Michael Balint—completely ignored or underestimated human dependency needs in early childhood. And thus they could not focus on the central human task of continuing to get these dependency needs fulfilled while becoming more independent in adulthood. This is the task of making communities in which the childhood dependency needs can be met and adult dependency needs can be allowed.
But, even though they lacked a concept like ego instincts, those European analysts who emphasized attachment needs were certainly aware of their centrality in the very early mother-child dyad, and aware that if they are not satisfied there or in another relationship, pathology ensues. And it became apparent during the post-War period that the pathology that ensures is not just the neurotic pathology ensuing when the sexual drive is unsatisfied or distorted, but what is now known, thanks to Anna Freud’s post-War work, as developmental pathology. Developmental pathology is most frequently caused by averse external, environmental conditions –in the family or in society—effecting one or more of what Anna Freud called “the developmental lines.” Rene Spitz had provided a classic study of developmental pathology in a miniature society –a hospital–in his 1945 article “Hosptialism.” When a hospital society does not foster development with warmth and affection, it produces “clinging depression” [anaclitic depression] in young children. Similarly, D.W.Winnicott helpfully distinguished the object mother and the environment mother in order to point up the ill-effects for a child of an environmental caretaker who is not “good enough.”
It is obviously a short trip from this elaboration of the ego instincts to the idea that human
beings cannot live well or happily in their families or communities or political arrangements unless these do not thwart their ego instincts; and to the idea that this simple truth should be the basis for social psychoanalysis and its synthesis with socialism. A socialist society should, before all else, support the ego instinctual drive, for a healthy child is the parent of the future as well as of the future children. Included in that goal is a healthy sexual development –the old Freudian Left ideal—because a healthy sexual development does not happen for an unhealthy, neglected or abused, or generally not well-parented or educated or provisioned child.
The ego instinctual element of Freudian theory has, thus, slowly received an articulation in theory, even if not a finished one. The second element, which is key to thinking about misdevelopment or developmental pathology on the social level, has been much less explored. That second element, which the pre-War political Freudians hoped would be the foundation for a social psychoanalysis, was Freud’s characterology.
Freud himself never elaborated his characterology, but kept making gestures in his late work, including Civilization and its Discontents. In a short essay called “Libidinal Types,” he outlined a three-part characterology consisting of hysterical, obsessional, and narcissistic types or Idealtypen, which are normal, universal, but which can become distorted, misdeveloped. The political Freudians all went this way, wanting to be able to arrive at what they called social or societal character types as well. Their launch was Reich’s 1931 Character Analysis –a kind of summa of the ideas that he developed while offering seminars in Vienna between 1924 and 1930 on his therapeutic technique, which was called “the analysis of character.”
Characteristically, Reich, who was himself extremely narcissistic, came to interpret his own technique narcissistically, and made it into a kind of strong state, planned economy of a technique, full of instruction. But, more generally, not just Reich but the other leftist Freudians were held back from really developing their character theory–as Freud himself had been–by their view of character distortions as distortions only of the sexual drive, to the neglect of the ego instinctual drive. Again, the Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi was an exception: after the War, he developed a characterology and a theory of social character by focusing on modes of frustration of the ego instinctual drive for affection and security, amae.
However, the analysis of character in its early-Reich formulation (to which Berta Bornstein and Anna Freud also contributed) was crucial within psychoanalysis to the later development of defense analysis into analysis of social defenses. After the War, social defenses, the key ingredients of social pathology and character diseases, went under the name prejudices.
Among the most important post-War explorations of social defenses or prejudices were the volumes in the Studies in Prejudice series, including Ernest Simmel’s edited volume Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease. In 1950, the Frankfurt School Marxists in exile produced the best-known volume in the series, called The Authoritarian Personality. These works convinced post-War pragmatic socialists that they needed to focus their attention not just on class conflict and class struggle, but on all forms of social and political exclusion and production of inequality –on all forms of prejudice considered as a social disease. Social democracy came to mean, in this sense, maximally inclusionary democracy, and the European social democrats designed programs for bringing excluded peoples into citizenship –and into the welfare states. (Later, terms like multiculturalism came into play to point to the ideal of maximal inclusion).
It is a short trip from this line of thought to the idea that some societies and political arrangements promote some kinds of character development while others promote others. And to the corollary idea that societies are shaped by the clustering in them of characters of one sort or another. Societies do as the dominating or preponderating kinds of characters in them do. There are characters who are undeveloped, immature, distorted, or in some way developmentally pathological and they come to be so in societal environments, just as they help make societal environments unhealthy when they have the power to do so. A societal diagnostics is key to societal reform or to working toward a mature society, one that supports healthy character development and does not foster character disorders or social diseases that are, basically, exclusionary. And aggressively so. Societal diagnostics is to social theory what epidemiology is to preventative public health –except that identifying social diseases and their causes is, alas, so much more complicated than finding a microbe.
The post-War social democratic societies needed a clear sense of which human needs are basic, how those basic needs develop, how society could and should be responsive to them, and they got that sense from psychoanalysis—at least practically. But they also needed a theory of prejudice in order to understand how to focus democratic socialism on equality and maximal inclusion of once excluded groups, on human rights, and on political structures moving beyond nation-states and exclusionary sovereignty. And it would have been very helpful if they had gotten this, too, from psychoanalysis, but it was not available. When the social democratic states came under attack in the late 1970s and 1980s, this lack became glaringly obvious.
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Let me turn now to what happened to the post-War social democracies in the 1970s and 1980s, when, as I said, they came under attack –from within. This is a very complicated story, so I will be stressing only particular parts of it as I look at the unraveling of the strong but never really theorized psychoanalysis-socialism synthesis –for it is that part of the story, in my opinion, that present psychoanalysts have a responsibility to address.
Let me begin by looking at the main factor that kept the ego instinctual drive from being more completely theorized and the main factor that kept the theory of prejudices from developing very far or from being in place when it was acutely needed, as it is now.
During the late 1960s, feminists came forward forcefully to criticize psychoanalysis for its theory of female psychology and development—a much-needed criticism. Many feminists wanted to jettison Freudian theory altogether, as a monument to Victorian sexism. On the other hand, there were feminists who wanted to reform psychoanalysis rather than reject it, and many of them were inspired by the pre-War “Freud-Marx synthesis” with its emphasis on sexual liberation—and not so much by the post-War work on child development or on prejudices. For the 1960s Sexual Liberation Movement, which was effectively a Women’s Liberation Movement, the 1920s “sex-po” debates and the 1920s contributions of Freud’s early critics on the topic of female psychology like Karen Horney and Clara Thompson, were key. Only later did it become clear how much
the justified feminist critique of the patriarachal family left unexplored the question of what kind of child-rearing arrangements would be best for children—girls and boys.
As the Women’s Liberation Movement grew and became influential outside of the Euro-American world, one feature of it became especially prominent that had not been addressed at all in the 1920s: more and more women realized that their own sexual developments, often from childhood, had been shaped by experiences of sexual violence or childhood sexual abuse. And many came to believe that the commonness of sexual abuse had been known by the early psychoanalysts, Freud and his followers, and then denied or attributed to unconscious fantasy. A second surge of criticism of psychoanalysis by feminists developed in the 1980s and launched what are known now as “the Freud Wars.” As these Wars went on, Freud’s theory of the instinctual drives largely disappeared, being judged by many to be part of the reason he so misunderstood or misconstrued the ubiquity of sexual violence against women. The whole of Freud’s work on instinctual drives –whether sexual, ego instinctual, or aggressive—receded from view. Eventually, this recession became characteristic of psychoanalytic theory in general while it responded to the feminist critique. The ego instinctual drives were not explored, they were forgotten about.
Feminist theorists also turned their attention away from the post-War studies in prejudice and the characterological investigations that underpinned those studies, because Freudian characterology was deemed too embedded in Freud’s instinctual drive theory. Prejudice against women –called “sexism” after 1965—did, of course, receive feminist attention, but their work was guided by the assumption that sexism was like racism, that is, that it was centrally a matter of sexual domination or “sex slavery” (as it was known among American feminists). Only among feminist psychoanalysts who emphasized male “disindentifcation with the mother” was there any properly psychoanalytic study of sexism. But this was not focused on types of character, only on an alleged universalized masculine character shaped specifically by disidentification with mother, by a type of object relation or severed relation. The assumption was that all men, and all alike, as they disidentify with their mothers, denigrate women. I think that it is obvious by now that this claim is much too general, but nothing has appeared to replace it.
On the socialism side of the psychoanalysis-socialism synthesis, the late 1960s was
a period of anti-government protests precipitated by opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, which the NATO nations did not like but did not protest themselves. In western Europe, a generation of young socialists led anti-war demonstrations which soon turned into demonstrations against one feature in particular of the European welfare states. This was that they were not at all prepared for the changed demographic of the so-called Baby Boom generation. Universities in Great Britain and on the continent were turning away for lack of space and faculties and scholarship provisions most of those who wanted a university education. Many of the protesters, further, identified not with the socialisms of the welfare states in which they had grown up and which seemed to be failing them but with the socialisms of the non-European developing world –including Vietnam, and frequently including Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba. Their psychoanalytic theorist was Franz Fanon, embraced to some degree for his analysis of prejudice in Back Skin, White Masks, which was an analysis of all prejudice as like racism, but embraced much more for his support of revolutionary violence in The Wretched of the Earth.
Remarkably, the violence-minded young socialists did not prevail and as the student revolt moved into the eastern European countries that were, so to speak, colonies of the Soviet Union and stirring then with anti-colonial movements like the Polish Solidarity Movement, debates about whether violent tactics were justified resolved in the direction of Gandhian non-violence for workers and students. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the revolutions in Eastern Europe were “velvet revolutions,” that is, they were, in effect, non-violent revolutions to establish social democracies of the sort that had emerged and flourished in western Europe from 1945 to the 1980s. Now, in the former Soviet Union and in the countries of eastern Europe, there are psychoanalytic societies and many NGOs working to improve conditions for healthy childhood development (and, importantly, to prevent child abuse, including sexual abuse) in the manner of the post-War social democracies.
But, meanwhile, in western Europe, the rebels of the 1960s and 1970s did not turn to psychoanalysis or to the psychoanalytic emphasis on healthy early childhood and on preventing prejudice in order to ground or re-ground the policies of social democracy. Instead, they became caught up in either defensively trying to stop the gradual decline of the social democracies or in contributing to that decline themselves, as the “New Labour” members of the Labour Party did in Great Britain when they abandoned the ideals of social democracy and turned away from the European Union –tragically.
The context in which the internal crisis of the western European social democracies began was the recession of 1973, the so-called “OPEC recession,” or the “oil recession,” which was the first truly global recession since the 1930s, and which became a tremendous spur to the reactive phenomenon known by the early 1980s as globalization. That is, the rise of transnational corporations and transnational banking and speculative financial markets was a reaction to a global recession. Simultaneously, the financial sustainability of the European welfare states came into question and an alluring theory of “free market” capitalism was taken up among national leaders opposed to the welfare state –chiefly, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. But, of course, Ronald Reagan in America was a critic of welfarism and a proponent of privatization of service industries, and his policies were buttressed by the University of Chicago based neo-conservative “free market” economic theorists for whom social democracy was anathema. By the mid-1990s, propelled by the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, American conservatives were asserting the world triumph of capitalism, and free market theory and privatization initiatives were, indeed, sweeping through once social democratic ranks in Europe. To one degree or another the western European social democracies influenced by the so-called “Washington Consensus” lurched away from their founding principles of social welfare and international federation. Even Sweden went under conservative leadership several times in the 1990s and suffered the consequences for years, even after it turned back to social democracy –only to lurch away again during the current economic crisis..
In sum, during the two last decades, even before the acute economic crisis of the last two years, the European social democracies have been riven with controversies and shifts to the center and the right. The same situation existed in South America, only more extremely because the South American nations were more influenced by the American empire and more damaged by very anti-psychoanalytic rightist dictatorships sponsored by the Americans. The goal of European Union has stayed in view, but it has come under enormous countervailing pressure by subscribers to strong-state nationalism and by people who welcome the idea of states strongly controlled by economic elites –elites willing to make the state work for the benefit of capitalist enterprise by privatizing and deregulating. But the most influential trend undermining the social democracies, as everyone can now see, are their conflicts over how to deal with the huge swells of immigration from countries in which gaps between the rich and the poor have opened to chasms as a consequence of the “Washington Consensus,” of globalization and of national and international policies supporting “free markets” and favoring the rich. The surge of economic refugees –and of political refugees as well—has strained the social welfare provisions of the social democracies, but, even more, it has stirred up tremendous prejudice and impulse to exclude. So the relative lack in the social democracies of a fully articulated theory of prejudice –a contribution not made by psychoanalysis, as I noted earlier—is a very urgent matter.
All the European social democracies now have political parties with explicitly anti-immigrant platforms no different in their formulations than the racist and anti-Semitic platform of the Nazi Party in 1933. Even a relatively homogenous society like Sweden with a strong welfare tradition now has a party, the Sweden Democrats, that is explicitly
anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim or Islamophobic. Outside of Europe, in the model social democracy of the Middle East, Israel, chief refuge of the Jewish diaspora, and at the time of its independence in 1948 a social democratic state with a radical psychoanalytic-educational kibbutz system, the far right parties have exclusionary anti-immigration platforms. Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism, even among the Jews.
In the face of this world-wide convulsion, psychoanalysis has been almost entirely on the defensive, under siege. The effect on psychoanalysis of the shift toward strong states governed by economic elites –not political elites in the old Hobbesian sense, but a wealthy class buoyed up by the growth of transnational corporations and international speculative banking—has been a loss of public standing, research capacities, and patients as other forms of psychiatry and psychopharmacology that are more profitable and less concerned with human development have flourished. Health care, specifically, has become more and more a matter of economic decisions influenced by economic elites in the pharmaceutical industries and in the private and state insurance industries.
The most active research that is still psychoanalytic is in the area of neuroscience, but this has been for the most part resolutely unpolitical, that is, it is not concerned descriptively or preventatively with the social contexts in which children develop in a healthy way, even though it is appealed to by educationalists committed to early childhood education or preschools for promoting youngsters’ healthy neurological development. Psychoanalytic neuroscience possesses a principle that is directly related to the epigenetic principle that grounds concern for early childhood development: it is called “neuroplacticity,” which means that the brain is not an organ that is “hard-wired” like a
machine, but an organ that is always changing at the neuronal level, and can be influenced therapeutically far more than was previously thought. But this principle has not been explored for its political or therapeutic-political importance. And it has not been used to protect children from being psychopharmacologically treated for conditions that
are obviously the result of poor up-bringing environments and familial and social trauma.
In the realm of Studies in Prejudice, there has been psychoanalytic work since the 1970s on the roots of violence and work on trauma that has importantly extended to encompass “intergenerational transmission of trauma,” which is now understood to be crucial to intergenerational transmission of prejudice. But characterological investigation of prejudices has not been extended, and thus is not available to explore the surge –world-wide—of prejudice that is accompanying the vast movements of population
Basically, psychoanalysis has not gone forward on the two fronts where it did its most important work in the post-War period. And it is, it seems to me, on these two fronts—the elaboration of ego instinctual needs and ideas of how to meet them, and the characterologically grounded theory of prejudice and how to use it for prejudice prevention—that psychoanalysis and socialism both need to focus, practically but also theoretically. This is crucial to their continued work for the therapeutic politics that was their shared Post-War vision and that was their deep connection to the vision of therapeutic politics that has continually struggled for institution in the Western tradition.
