Psychoanalysis

PSYCHOANALYSIS. The Left movement in the United States never wholly welcomed psychoanalysis, although the bohemian Marxists of the Masses and early feminists were intrigued by its possibilities. Most U.S. psychoanalysts rejected leftist ideas outright, and it was only in the writings of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse that a more thorough integration of Marx and Freud was attempted.

The first lengthy popular treatments of Freudian ideas were written by leftists, the Masses editors Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. Dell, especially, continued to write of psychoanalysis in the Masses and later the Liberator, and the influence of Freud on Eastman is clearly visible in his Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution. Edmund Wilson remarked that he had first learned of psychoanalysis through Eastman’s popular treatment in Everybody’s Magazine in 1915. Dell satirized the contradictions he felt in trying to unite both Freudian and Marxist ideas in “A Psycho-Analytic Confession” in the Liberator for April 1920.

Freudian and Marxist ideas often mixed and clashed in the salon of Mabel Dodge, where a special evening was devoted to Freud’s teachings, just as another night drew Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, and others in a debate on the Industrial Workers of the World. Other participants in the bohemian Left current who were influenced by psychoanalytic ideas were Randolph Bourne, Isadora Duncan, and Rose Pastor Stokes (in the free-motherhood campaign), and Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, and Matthew Josephson. But the most outspoken and serious radical to welcome the ideas of Freud was Emma Goldman. Emma Goldman attended lectures by Freud in Vienna (1895) as well as at the famous Clark University conference (1909), and she invoked Freudian teachings for their liberating effect on female sexuality.

Still, radical Freudianism was a hybrid for which the U.S. medical establishment had only disdain and dislike, while many on the Left felt the same distaste for Freudianism. The exclusion of lay analysts from the world of psychoanalytic education, the conservatism of the medial establishment, and the specialized nature of medical education served to limit the number of new psychoanalysts who would have the same broad cultural and political backgrounds as their earlier, European counterparts.

Those aspects of psychoanalysis that could be understood as having radical significance were often obscured. Thus, the respected Freud and the Americans, by Nathan G. Hale, details the popularizations carried out by Dell and Eastman without ever mentioning that they were leftists or connected with the Masses and the Liberator. Meanwhile, early socialists like John Spargo used a superficial “Freudian” character typology to characterize the communists as “hysterics.”

Other radical voices spoke out against psychoanalysis: Upton Sinclair had never trusted psychoanalysis, and he revealed in a letter to his associate that he had never known it to work. Sidney Hook, in a debate with Max Eastman, called it “the crassest violation of scientific method,” and he insisted elsewhere that Freud could never serve Marx’s materialism, while Christopher Caudwell agreed with other U.S. and U.K. Marxists that “Freudism can attain to no psychology beyond bourgeois psychology.”

But the radical press was not entirely negative. The popularizer of psychoanalysis, Andre Tridon, had earlier written a book on the Industrial Workers of the World, while one member of the latter organization, known only by his card number, wrote about psychoanalysis in the Industrial Worker for 15 January 1921. The militant New Majority, the journal of the Chicago Federation of Labor, commented favorably on psychoanalysis with some regularity, and the Eastman/Hook debate mentioned above was carried in V. F. Calverton’s the Modern Quarterly.

Trotsky had commented favorably on Freud’s ideas; Philip Rahv and William Phillips began to read Freud seriously at the time their Partisan Review severed its connections with the Stalinist Left, and their journal was as open to “Freudo-Marxists” like Nicolas Calas (“On Revolutionary Sadism”) as it was to Trotsky’s writings. Joseph Freeman, who broke with Stalinism at approximately that time, wrote of how a single sentence of Freud’s provided the major and decisive inspiration for his life’s work as a writer, although he also noted that the psychoanalytic turn in the writings of the Left bohemians was often the opening of the door for their reentry into bourgeois society.

The desire to understand the mechanisms of the transmission and internalization of repressive institutions reached a high point in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, who arrived in the United States in 1939. While his descent into biological mysticism is well known, his studies The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis are of great interest. Reich had been a pioneer of sexual education in Europe, and he continued to petition Congress in the United States for the sexual rights of the young. He envisioned the possibility of a nonrepressive society, and he thought that psychoanalysis could lift the veil of repression that stood between humanity and sexual freedom, which he conceived of in genital and orgasmic terms.

Russell Jacoby has documented an episode in the history of the U.S. Freudian Marxism that shares the fate of Reich’s ideas, insofar as their actual propagation failed in the United States. Otto Fenichel was one of a number of European analysts who had participated in leftist movements in Europe before their forced emigration and their arrival in the United States—some associates of Fenichel ended up in England and others in other parts of Europe. Along with Edith Jacobson, Annie Reich, and others, he conducted a secret Rundbrief, or circular letter, designed to preserve the radical notions of psychoanalysis they had brought from Europe, when Wilhelm Reich and others had shared their interests. The German exile community on the West Coast maintained a spirited intellectual life, with cross-fertilization from Frankfurt School members Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and from J. Robert Oppenheimer and others, but in the end, the secrecy of the Rundbrief, the fear the analysts had of losing their immigration status, the dispersion of the original group because of Hitler’s conquests and the conservatism of the U.S. medical establishment (and its opposition to lay analysis) combined ultimately to hide the radical import of their work.

Freud himself wrote pessimistically about Marxism and materialism, but in a late letter he noted that he had just learned that Marx and Engels did not deny “the influence of ideas and super-ego factors” and that this knowledge invalidated the contrast “between Marxism and psychoanalysis which I had thought to exist.” The gap in Freud’s teachings left by this remark was filled especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse.

His Eros and Civilization may be the most influential Marxist interpretation of Freud in the United States, but it is undeniable that Reich provided a similar inspiration. Marcuse outlined the principles by which a nonrepressive society could come into being, and like Reich he emphasized the dominance of the pleasure principle. Unlike Reich, however, he opposed the latter’s idea of an uninhibited genitality with his notion of the libidinized body, which borrowed inspiration from Geza Roheim and Sandor Ferenczi. His theory of surplus repression as the psychic residue of dominance and his notion of the critical role of fantasy both played a significant part in the orientation of Left movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.

In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Juliet Mitchell has emphasized the importance of psychoanalysis as a critique of patriarchy for Marxist feminists, and in doing so, she has rehabilitated the unconscious as a dynamic principle of mental functioning, and sexuality as the axis around which this principle revolves. Further, the writings of Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and others expose the essentially sociological outlook of Neo-Freudian feminists who still trace the source of capitalism and patriarchal rule to primarily external events.

But it is precisely the ideas that society is internal and that the family is the locus for the maintenance of repressive social and psychological structures that has separated the Marxist Freudians from the Neo-Freudians who have seen society acting on the individual from the outside instead of from the inside, and who have denied the importance of unconscious mechanisms of internalization. The Marxists also take issue with the psychotherapeutic emphasis often given to Freudian teachings: “Psychoanalysis is a theory of an unfree society that necessitates psychoanalysis as a therapy,” Russell Jacoby has written, and the Marxist Freudian impulse insists that the radical import of Freudianism disappears when the theory is collapsed by the therapy.

In the 1990s, a new contradiction appeared in the episodic history of psychoanalysis and the Left. Psychoanalysis came under severe attack from numerous sources, both for its theory of repression and for its lack of therapeutic success, the latter itself a matter of much dispute. But simultaneously, its reputation with leftist academics in women’s studies, literature, and cultural studies in general rose largely due to the application of the theories of French analyst Jacques Lacan.

Frosh, Stephen. The Politics of Psychoanalysis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Hale, Nathan G. Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Jacoby, Russell. The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Robinson, Paul. The Freudian Left. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Zaretsky, Eli. Political Freud. A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Modern Quarterly/Modern Monthly; http://archives.nypl.org/mss/459