It is well known that Marxism lacks a psychology. I was reading an essay in Martin Jay's newest book A Splinter in Your Eye about the neomarxist Frankfurt School's troubled engagement with Freud and psychoanalytic theory. Marcuse was the best example of Freudo-Marxism that sought to reconcile the two currents. Even Adorno saw something usefull in psychoanalysis, although he mocked it in Minima Moralia. "In psychoanalysis nothing is true except its exaggerations" pointing at the controversial dualism of Eros and Thanatos. The true mediation between society and psychology was according to Adorno to be found not in the family but in the commodity and its fetish character. Benjamin outright dismissed psychoanalysis as something for priests of bourgeois society. (Therapeutic psychoanalysis is of course nonsense) John Zerzan in his essay The Mass Psychology of Misery mentions Freud 33 times but not always so favorably. Zerzan: "On the level of treatment, by his own accounts, Freud never was able to permanently cure a single patient, and psychoanalysis has proven no more effective since." Zerzan: "Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to capital’s downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of revolt — indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance?" However, "mere" suffering is no guarantee of anything, and Zerzan acknowledges this. “Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right,” as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread.
Zerzan on the ideology of individual fault: "For instance, the advice to those besieged by work stress to “take a deep breath, laugh, walk it off,” etc. Or the moralizing exhortations to recycle, as if a personal ethics of consumption is a real answer to the global eco-crisis caused by industrial production. Or the 1990 California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem as a solution to the major social breakdown in that state. At the very center of contemporary life, this outlook legitimates alienation, loneliness, despair, and anxiety. because it cannot see the context for our malaise. It privatizes distress, and suggests that only non-social responses are attainable. This “bottomless fraud of mere inwardness,” in Adorno’s words, pervades every aspect of American life, mystifying experience and thus perpetuating oppression." The nail on the head. I have with Zerzan in common that we both like Adorno. Zerzan again: "If alienation is the essence of all psychiatric conditions, Psychology is the study of the alienated, but lacks the awareness that this is so. The effect of the total society, in which the individual can no longer recognize himself or herself, by the canons of Freud and the Psychological Society, is seen as irrelevant to diagnosis and treatment. Thus psychiatry appropriates disabling pain and frustration, redefines them as illnesses and, in some cases, is able to suppress the symptoms. Meanwhile, a morbid world continues its estranging technological rationality that excludes any continuously spontaneous, affective life: the person is subjected to a discipline designed, at the expense of the sensuous, to make him or her an instrument of production. " Full: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-the-mass-psychology-of-misery -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#2039): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/2039 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/77190753/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
